The Transmission of Labor in the Age of the Factory

On the clock of the artisanal world, Smith formulated his ideas at the eleventh hour, when the development of a market in labor itself had become inescapably obvious but the commencement of the industrial revolution was as yet perceived only dimly.^[145] With the founding of the Ricardian school of economics at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the most widespread form of considered reflection on the economy in Britain moved to an explicitly industrial view of society.^[146] Ricardo envisioned a social order with three classes: owners of capital, owners of land, and wage earners in the owners' employ. He saw all workers as dependent laborers, and he

[142] Tribe, op. cit., p. 93.

[143] Of course, The Wealth of Nations also carried suggestions that labor devoted to cultivation of the land was especially productive. On the reception of this part of Smith, see Tribe, op. cit., pp. 110–112.

[144] What is distinctive in capitalist society is not that labor can be bought as a commodity but that labor appears in the first instance as a commodity. Marx, Kapital , op. cit., Volume II, p. 114.

[145] Hiram Canton, "The Preindustrial Economics of Adam Smith," The Journal of Economic History Volume 45 (December 1985), p. 384. On Smith's ignorance of the changes in techniques of production that would later be termed a "revolution," see Kindleberger, op. cit., pp. 6–7.

[146] Ricardo influenced trade unionists as well, although his popularity never approached that of Adam Smith. Eugenio F. Biagini, "British Trade Unions and Popular Political Economy, 1860–1880," The Historical Journal Volume 30, Number 4 (1987), p. 831 note.

took the mechanization of production for granted.^[147] If political economy moved smoothly in the wake of economic change, reflecting and generalizing upon it, would not British thinkers come to discard the notion that wage laborers sold materialized labor? Smith had already found it difficult to reduce the wage contract to the exchange of products. Would not the sale of labor in the form of a product appear increasingly anachronistic in the age of the factory? For social investigators coming after Marx, it may seem more "accurate" to encode labor in the form of "labor power." But this partiality reduces culture to a reflection of social organization. When Ricardo set out to clarify the role of labor in economic life, he did not reject but reinvigorated older suppositions about labor as a commodity.

In his Principles of Political Economy , composed more than forty years after Smith's Wealth of Nations , Ricardo identified some of the major confusions in his predecessor's work. Ricardo uncovered the surreptitious moves Smith made between two specifications of how labor determines the value of commodities: as Ricardo summarized the difference, sometimes by "the quantity of labour bestowed on the production" of the commodity, sometimes by "the quantity of labour which that commodity would purchase."^[148] To set the matter straight, Ricardo declared that only with the first definition could an invariant measure of value be obtained.^[149] He reached this conclusion by observing that the value of labor in exchange varied—that is, the quantity of labor in the goods that the worker could buy in return for selling his own labor fluctuated with market conditions.^[150] By comparison, Ricardo believed that the quantity of labor the worker bestowed on a product provided a fixed standard for comparing the value of goods in the face of apparent shifts in exchange values. Ricardo reasoned that if a commodity suddenly required a lesser quantity of labor for its production due to technological improvement, that commodity would be exchanged for a lesser quantity of embodied labor.^[151]

[147] As Marx acutely observed. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume 2, Part Two, p. 346.

[148] Op. cit., p. 5.

[149] He did not assert that embodied labor provided an absolute measure, only that it allowed for comparisons between commodities. Schumpeter, op. cit., p. 591.

[150] Ricardo, op. cit., p. 7.

[151] In this example Ricardo apparently believed that the cheapened product would hire or "command" the same amount of living labor. Op. cit., p. 8. In his first chapter, "On Value," Ricardo writes, "If the reward of the labourer were always in proportion to what he produced, the quantity of labour bestowed on a commodity, and the quantity of labour which that commodity would purchase, would be equal, and either might accurately measure the variations of other things: but they are not equal; the first is under many circumstances aninvariable standard, indicating correctly the variations of other things; the latter is subject to as many fluctuations as the commodities compared with it" (p. 5). Notice that Ricardo confuses two issues here: finding an invariant measure of value, and explaining the difference between the quantity of "living labor" a commodity "commands" in the market and the quantity of "embodied labor" it purchases. See Schumpeter, op. cit., p. 591 note. Marx says Ricardo's failure to disentangle these issues shows how insensitive he remained to the difference between living and embodied labor even after he realized that Smith's philosophical equation of the two did not apply to the real world. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume Two, Part One, pp. 113–115.

Given the initial trajectory of his thinking, Ricardo might well have arrived at the view that the owner purchased labor as if it were a potential rather than as if it were already materialized in a product. After all, the very first line of his book, by which he definitely announced his entry onto the front stage of the British intellectual drama, sent him on a straightforward path: "The value of a commodity  . . . depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or lesser compensation which is paid for that labor."^[152] He could not have chosen a more auspicious starting point for considering discrepancies between labor costs and labor quantities. His emphasis on the quantity of labor might have led him to consider how employers derive varying quantities of labor from their workers' potential. Yet he retained the idea that labor was delivered in the form of a product even under penalty of introducing inconsistency into his system.^[153]

Whereas Smith resorted to his second definition of value in exchange when he observed that with the advent of reliance upon accumulated stock in production the wage of the worker is no longer equal to the entire value of the products created, Ricardo's approach assumes that the transition to capitalist conditions of production in no way compromises Smith's first definition of value, based on the labor materialized in a product. If the relative prices of commodities are determined by the quantities of labor they contain, this remains true no matter how much of this quantity of labor is reimbursed to the workers as a wage. So Ricardo thinks only Smith's

[152] This comprises the introductory heading of Chapter One of his Principles. In his notebooks Marx commented that, as far as he could tell, Ricardo asserted here, at the outset of his investigation, that commodities traded not in proportion to the paid labor they contained (the cost of the labor) but by the total labor, paid or unpaid. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume Two, Part One, p. 113.

[153] Ricardo, unlike Smith, does not consider it his job to explain the origin of profit, only to show that profit's existence does not contradict his initial premises. If finished commodities normally sell in the market for a price higher than the cost of the labor they contain, this remains consistent with his model.  Provided that the commodities normally trade in proportion to the labor they contain, from his viewpoint nothing more need be said. Keith Tribe comments upon Ricardo's recognition of only embodied labor. Op. cit., pp. 135, 138.

first formulation of value, based on the labor bestowed on a commodity, is accurate: "If the reward of the labourer were always in proportion to what he produced, the quantity of labour bestowed on a commodity, and the quantity of labour which that commodity would purchase, would be equal, and either might accurately measure the variations of other things: but they are not equal." If we impose on this formulation a set of categories alien to Ricardo, we can say that the two quantities represent forms of the same thing, labor, but materialized versus living labor. If the difference between them is only a matter of form, why should they not be equals in exchange? With the help of Marx's tradition, we can pose the question.^[154] Ricardo could not. For him they were equal because they were the same. When he observed the inequality he saw, not two different forms of labor, but labor products delivered with the help of capital versus labor traded against labor.

Although Ricardo professes to make a theoretical choice in favor of the quantity of labor bestowed on a good as the measure of value, his analysis actually uses the cost of labor as that measure. The most obvious evidence for this slippage lies in his arithmetical examples throughout the Principles. Ricardo expects the reader to understand that if two owners pay the same amount in wages, they receive the same quantity of labor.^[155] If Ricardo identifies the cost of labor with the quantity received, he omits the employer's utilization of the labor as a step that decides how much labor the employer actually receives.^[156] Did he ignore this process as a simplifying assumption? Could he not have thought that the variations among employers in the quantity of labor actually extracted from the worker for a certain wage averages out for the economy as a whole? And then, in the aggregate, why could he not equate quantity received with cost? Ricardo's use of the famous "wages fund" theory rules out this interpretation. This doctrine starts from the assumption that capitalists in a society "advance" wages to the workers out of their total

[154] Marx himself formulated the question, but he supposed that Ricardo merely failed to inquire into the origins of surplus value. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume 2, Part 2, pp. 116, 126.

[155] As he told Malthus, "If my commodity is of equal value with yours, its cost of production must be the same." Cited in Oswald St. Clair, A Key to Ricardo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 337. See also Ricardo, op. cit., pp. 46 note, 481. Notice that Ricardo does not say that the cost of production of a single good equals an absolute value. He argues only from comparisons between goods, an important consideration in understanding his treatment of profit.

[156] As Marx points out in Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., p. 114. For a recent quantitative analysis that includes the process of utilizing labor power, see Samuel Bowles, "The Production Process in a Competitive Economy: Walrasian, Neo-Hobbesian, and Marxian Models," The American Economic Review Volume 75, Number 1 (March, 1985).

stock of capital. The capitalists decide in advance what amount of this stock to allocate for the maintenance of productive labor and what part to consume themselves, that is, their budgeting determines the amount of capital "destined" for the payment of wages.^[157] Ricardo assumes that if the amount of capital allocated for the payment of wages in a society declines, then, all else being equal, the quantity of labor purchased by employers declines in the same proportion.^[158] They cannot use the falling demand for labor to get the real unit cost of labor to decline. (As Marx pointed out, by treating the length of the workday as fixed and irrelevant, Ricardo ignored the process of using labor power itself.)^[159] Therefore the reduction of the quantity of labor to its cost does not just represent an averaging out of the use that capitalists can make of labor at the same point in time. It means that even in different circumstances the capitalists cannot make better "use" of or extract more work out of the labor they buy—they purchase it as if it were already embodied.^[160]

The second implication of Ricardo's reduction of the quantity of labor to its cost is that it can make his argument appear circular. Samuel Bailey, an early and vociferous critic of Ricardo, called attention to this in 1825:

Mr. Ricardo, ingeniously enough, avoids a difficulty, which on a first view, threatens to encumber his doctrine, that value depends on the quantity of labour employed in production. If this principle is rigidly adhered to, it follows, that the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in producing it—which is evidently absurd. By a dextrous turn, therefore, Mr. Ricardo makes the value of labour depend on the quantity of labour required to produce wages, or, to give him the benefit of his own language, he maintains, that the value of labour is to be estimated by the quantity of labour required to produce wages, by which he means, the quantity of labour required to produce the money or commodities given to the labourer. This is similar to saying, that the value of cloth is to be estimated, not by the quantity of labour bestowed on its production, but by the quantity of labour bestowed on the production of the silver, for which the cloth is exchanged.^[161]

[157] Op. cit., p. 107.

[158] At least that is how Ricardo argues in op. cit., Chapter Thirty-One, "On Machinery."

[159] Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., p. 134.

[160] This holds true in Ricardo's famous Chapter Thirty-One, where it is clear that his conclusion does not derive in any way from the notion that real wages, in the long run, tend toward subsistence.

[161] A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measures, and Causes of Value; Chiefly in Reference to the Writings of Mr. Ricardo and His Followers (London: R. Hunter, 1825), pp. 50–51.

Even if Bailey misrepresents Ricardo's argument, he insistently identifies labor with its product at moments when he might well have considered labor power itself as a ware.^[162] Read literally, Bailey appears correct in saying that "the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in producing it" is nonsensical. As a declaration in which "labor" actually refers to "labor power," however, the words follow perfect logic and anticipate Marx's conceptual shift. A habitual process of interpretation in Britain reduced "labor" to its exchangeable product and rendered a potentially insightful formulation "evidently absurd."^[163]

As is well known, Ricardo's formulation of the labor theory of value became the dominant form of economic reasoning both among specialized theorists and among popularizers of political economy.^[164] One of Ricardo's earliest followers, James Mill, imagined the factory worker as the owner of the finished product who negotiated with his employers over how much of his realized output he would yield. Mill classified the wage as a form of payment in advance because the worker received it before the product had actually been disposed of in the market. In Elements of Political Economy , Mill wrote that:

the commodity, when produced, belongs in certain proportions to both [capitalist and laborers]. It may happen, however, that one of these parties has purchased the share of the other, before production

[162] For a defense of Ricardo, see Pier Luigi Porta, editor, David Ricardo: Notes on Malthus's "Measure of Value," (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. xviii, and Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics: A Historical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 54 note 56.

[163] In the last years of his life Ricardo cogitated furiously on the difficulties that had beset his theory of value. J. H. Hollander, "The Development of Ricardo's Theory of Value," in John Cunningham Wood, editor, David Ricardo: Critical Assessments (London: Croom Helm, 1985), Volume II, pp. 33–36. Yet his final writings confirm his earlier definition of labor as a commodity. In an essay on "Absolute Value and Exchangeable Value" he described a worker's wage as a portion of a concrete product in which the worker had materialized his labor. "That part of the value of a commodity which is required to compensate the labourer for the labour he has bestowed upon it is called wages," Ricardo opined; "the remaining part of its value is retained by the master and is called profit." The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo , edited by Piero Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), Volume IV, pp. 379–380.

[164] "Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain." J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936), p. 32. Donald Winch, "The Emergence of Economics as a Science 1750–1870," in Carlo Cipolla, editor, The Industrial Revolution 1700–1914: The Fontana Economic History of Europe (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976), Volume 3, p. 541; Ronald L. Meek, Economics and Ideology and Other Essays (London: Chapman and Hall, 1967), p. 73.

is completed.  . . . In point of fact, it does happen, that the capitalist, as often as he employs labourers, by the payment of wages, purchases the share of the labourers. When the labourers receive wages for their labour, without waiting to be paid by a share of the commodity produced, it is evident that they sell their title to that share. The capitalist is then the owner, not of the capital only, but of the labour also.^[165]

Here the capitalist cannot even be said to have purchased any labor until he buys a completed product. Mill transformed the transaction between the capitalist and the worker into an ordinary exchange between commodity owners, both of whom trade labor already embodied in products—materialized labor.^[166]

The postulate that employers purchased only materialized labor became a standard assumption in British political economy. Peter Gaskell, in his celebrated book on The Manufacturing Population of England , suggested that labor had no exchange value until it entered the sphere of circulation as a finished product. "Of itself it [labor] is nothing  . . .," he said,"—it must be stamped or moulded to bring it into a state fit for useful exchange."^[167] John Stuart Mill, perhaps the most famous purveyor of the nineteenth century's common sense, supposed that wage laborers received loans from their employers, for they were paid before the finished products which they gave their employer had been disposed of in the market.^[168] Were employees

[165] James Mill, Elements of Political Economy (3d ed. London: Henry Bohn, 1844), p. 94; see also pp. 40–41. Mill described this work as a "schoolbook," a codification of accepted principles.

[166] Here I call upon Marx's commentary. Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume Three, p. 101. Mill's theory follows the logic employed at the dawn of economic speculation about labor: "The Labourer's share of the Cloth is as much in proportion to the whole Cloth as the price of Labour is in proportion to the whole price." Anonymous, Considerations on the East-India Trade , 1701, in J. R. McCulloch, editor, Early English Tracts on Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954 [1856]), p. 588.

[167] (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1833), p. 291. Robert Torrens, who pondered the effect of mechanization on the wages of dependent factory workers, still imagined the transmission of labor as the exchange of output among autonomous producers. "When the divisions of labour, and private property, are established, then each individual lives by giving the surplus produce of his own, for the surplus produce of his neighbour's industry." An Essay on the Production of Wealth (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orne, and Brown, 1821), p. 15.

[168] John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920), pp. 417–418. In a footnote Mill argues that the labor invested in helping people acquire work abilities is productive, because these skills represent a kind of durable good. The worker can "transfer" the skills, in the sense that an employer can hire or purchase them. "If the skill itself cannot be parted with to a purchaser, the use of it may." This is the closest Mill comes to seeing labor as a potential the employer uses, but he does not connect this discussion with theanalysis of profit and exchange in the employment relation (p. 47). Mill also sees that, at the level of the national economy, the ability of labor to produce more than it is paid in a certain time period represents the source of profit, but, again, he does not apply this insight to the capitalist employment relation but says it holds true in societies without the exchange of labor in any form (p. 417).

to wait for payment of a wage until their labor products were resold on the market, they would become capitalists like their employers: investment in products for resale, not authority over labor power, defines the capitalist's role in the employment relation.^[169]

The conception of the transmission of labor presented in high theory coincided with that presented in the journals of the factory workers' insurgency during the 1830s. When the factory workers' press theorized the employment relation as a kind of economic exchange, it described the purchase of labor as concretized in a ware. For example, The Poor Man's Advocate said in 1832 that the mill owner who purchased a "stipulated quantity of labor" from workers was comparable to a customer who bought finished cloth in a store.^[170]

The course of development of British political economy poses a genuine riddle when one recalls how the accepted definition of value, the quantity of labor embodied, might have caused economists to consider the actual determinants of the quantity of labor delivered. If Adam Smith confused the hiring of labor with the purchase of its product, this might be attributed to the ambiguities that often accompany the founding of a new science.^[171] But if Ricardo and his followers, conscious of the need for revision, confused labor with its product, their failure identifies the restricted ways in which the British could imagine abstract labor as an economic factor at all. Of course, British commentators were perfectly capable of describing labor not as a product but as a force. The class of workers supplies "a given quantity of power for the production of commodities," E. S. Cayley wrote in 1830.^[172] But remarks such as this define labor as a resource at large. They do not retain this formulation when they analyze the mechanisms by which labor is conveyed in a commercial transaction.

[169] Ibid., p. 417; John Stuart Mill, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (2d ed. London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1874), p. 104.

[170] The Poor Man's Advocate , January 21, 1832, p. 1. See below, Chapter Nine.

[171] Smith sensed his problems. When he sought to explain "wherein consists the real price of all commodities," he apologized that "some obscurity may remain upon a subject in its own nature extremely abstracted." Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 33.

[172] E. S. Cayley, On Commercial Economy (London: James Ridgway, 1830), p. 2.

In the analysis of the social mechanisms of capitalism, the signifier labor served two functions in classical British political economy. First, it establishes the medium for expressing prices, the framework within which prices can mean something. In its second function, labor generates the particular messages that the general medium transmits: it specifies the particular values and the movement of values among commodities. In The Principles Ricardo moves back and forth without distinction between these two symbolic functions. Thus, when he says that labor "determines" prices, this can mean either that it fixes prices or, at other places, that it lets one ascertain prices. Ricardo conflates these two functions by using the words regulate and measure interchangeably.^[173] In the end, abstract labor came into sight for the British only in the process of exchange. They could not compare labor as a capacity in production or as an activity, only via the finished goods that were traded against each other. The generalizing of labor occurred at the completion of the production process. Nassau Senior, for example, excluded economically productive actions from the category of "labour" unless people performed them for the purpose of exchange.^[174]

An emblematic contradiction between form and content runs through the Wealth of Nations: the argument makes labor the fount of value, preparatory to sale, whereas the language of analysis treats the labor activity—production—as itself a vending transaction. Smith declares, "Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased."^[175] As the German commentator Theodor Bernhardi remarked in 1847, Smith here equates the original process of production—the creation of a good through the labor activity—with the socially organized way of acquiring goods through monetary exchange.^[176] When Smith discusses the determination of the level of wages, he transforms the labor of the isolated worker into a system of trade. "The produce of labour," he

[173] This is the insight of Oswald St. Clair, op. cit., pp. 333–335, who diligently traces Ricardo's usages of the terms regulate and measure in books and correspondence. For an analysis of John Stuart Mill's recognition of this slippage but failure to resolve it, see Blaug, op. cit., pp. 173–174.

[174] Nassau William Senior, An Outline of the Science of Political Economy (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939 [1836]), p. 57.

[175] Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 35. I am indebted to the astute commentary of Louis Dumont, op. cit., p. 194.

[176] Theodor Bernhardi, Versuch einer Kritik der Gründe, die für grosses und kleines Grundeigentum angeführt werden (St. Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1849), p. 101 (written in 1847).

asserts, "constitutes the natural recompence or wages of labour."^[177] He frequently uses phrases such as the "labour commonly employed in acquiring or producing any commodity," another expression which makes production analogous to acquisition by exchange.^[178] Every person who sells his labor, Smith says, "becomes in some measure a merchant," a turn of speech that places the laborer and the tradesman (who merely deals with finished goods) in similar roles.^[179]

No wonder Smith's usage makes no distinction between commerce and industry. He assimilated the process of production to that of exchange. Spokespersons for the common people of Britain in the nineteenth century expressed the same point of view. When they criticized the capitalists' abuse of their power, they defined the capitalists not by their position in production but by their position as manipulative peddlers in the market. The holders of capital, William Heighton explained to trade union members in 1827, "effect exchanges by proxy, without working at all themselves and accumulate the wealth which other people's labour has created through the medium of profit."^[180]

The British identification of the commodity of labor in the sphere of circulation left its impression upon the English language. The British, but not the Germans, felt the need to emphasize a single word as the signifier of production undertaken for the sake of exchange. History kindly provided an Anglo-German mediator who noticed this long ago. Friedrich Engels called it to the attention of both German and British readers in translations and annotated editions of Kapital. As Engels discovered, the English language in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to rely upon work to refer to the qualitative activity of making use values; whereas labor , the only word that indicated diverse activities as serving a general productive function, became the marker for the activity considered as an abstract creator and quantitative measure of exchange value.^[181] Certainly

[177] Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 72.

[178] Ibid., pp. 53–56.

[179] Ibid., p. 26. More than a century later, people with factory experience still echoed Smith's words. A spinner, Harold Catling averred, is a "tradesman selling the fruits of his labor." Harold Catling, The Spinning Mule (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), p. 149.

[180] William Heighton, An Address to the Members of Trade Societies and to the Working-Classes Generally (London: Co-Operative Society, 1827), p. 5, cited in Noel Thompson, The Market and Its Critics (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 61. See also footnotes 31 ff. in Chapter Nine, below.

[181] See Friedrich Engels's comment in the fourth edition of Kapital he edited, cited in Kapital , op. cit., pp. 61–62. For references to the same distinction appearing in later writing in English, see Hartmut Graach, "'Labour' und 'Work,'" in Sprachwissenschaftliches Collo-quium Bonn, editor, Europäische Schlüsselwörter: Wortvergleichende und wortgeschichtliche Studien (München: Max Hueber Verlag, 1964), pp. 293, 295. Edward Aveling relied on the distinction between labor and work in The Students' Marx: An Introduction to the Study of Karl Marx' "Capital" (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1907), p. 44.

Smith testified to this usage when he argued that "there may be more labour in an hours hard work than in two hours easy business."^[182]

The difference in meanings between work and labor in economic discourse did not lie in them as a potential waiting to come to life with the historical development of wage labor; people strove to create the distinction in the course of the eighteenth century. Sir James Steuart, for example, had put forward the same conceptual distinction before Smith but had marked it with another arbitrary pairing of terms, that of simple labor , production for use, versus industry , production for exchange.^[183] Steuart's writings show that the need to mark the difference in perspectives on the work activity—the need the terms work and labor happened later to fulfill—preceded the actual semantic differentiation.^[184] Therefore we cannot attribute this differentiation to the stock of words that English, as opposed to German, fortuitously had at its disposal. The Germans had equivalent lexical options available to them.^[185] The English term work derives from the same source as the German verbs werken and wirken and, before the rise of liberal commercialism, had a parallel range of meanings.^[186] Likewise, the Germans had at their disposal the verb arbeiten to correspond to labor , inasmuch as the German term, too, was originally associated with the Latin concept of

[182] Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 35. My emphasis.

[183] "Labour which through its alienation creates a universal equivalent, I call industry. " Yet Steuart tried to further restrict industry to voluntary work in such a way that he overlaid the difference between the work activity as a creator of exchange value and as a creator of use value with other meanings. He left it to Smith to extract the difference in its pure form. Op. cit., Volume I, pp. 146 ff. See Volume II, p. 382, for a definition of labour.

[184] Authors of the seventeenth century did not treat work and labor as evident synonyms, but neither did they ascribe indubitable contrasts to them. Petty emphasized that labor was governed by the necessity of maximizing the goods available for exchange. In his table of words he defined labour as a person's devotion to the making of commodities "for so many houres as hee is naturally able to endure the same." Sir William Petty, The Petty Papers , Volume I (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1967), p. 211. Andrew Yarranton may have supposed that the terms work and labor had different connotations when he referred to those who "work or labour in Mechanik arts." Op. cit., p. 170.

[185] See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 79–80.

[186] Ortrud Reichel, "Zur Bedeutungswechsel der Worte 'Werk' und 'Wirken' in as, ahd, und mhd Zeit," diss., University of Tübingen, 1952, pp. 92–93; Klaus Grinda, "Arbeit" und "Mühe": Untersuchungen zur Bedeutungsgeschichte altenglischer Wörter (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1975), pp. 53 ff.

painful exertion or molestia.^[187] The Germans did not consecrate the words available to them to differentiate between production for use and production for exchange, although werken survived into the first half of the nineteenth century as a verb referring to productive activity.^[188] We can conclude that the divergence reflects a difference in the concepts with which people apprehended economic activity, given the original similarity in lexical resources but the final difference between German and British usage. As components of popular languages, these terms and the conceptual operations to which they corresponded were the property in common of economic agents in each country, not the preserve of speculative intellectuals.