Franklin, Carnegie, and Marx on Work, Wealth, and Society

Franklin and Carnegie: The Moral Value of Work and Wealth

For Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie, work was intrinsic to an individual's sense of self and personal worth. "God helps them that helps themselves," said Poor Richard, Franklin's pseudonym — in other words, striving to work hard was next to godliness. According to Franklin's alter ego, leisure was a waste of time, and so was luxury and excess. This meant that if someone lived beyond his or her means or fell upon hard times, that person was not simply financially imprudent but morally questionable.

Spending lavishly on knickknacks and fine clothing is sinful, according to Franklin's tract, because it means the individual may be springing a small leak in his financial ship that will lead the family to the poorhouse. A creditor can deprive an owing man or woman of freedom, and so spending on credit is an affront to human liberty. Franklin's tone, although extreme, resonates with anyone who has recently watched news coverage of the epidemic of credit card debt and mortgage foreclosures: "Poor Richard says, buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt sell thy necessaries" (Franklin 215). Poor Richard would, of course, disagree with the idea that predatory lenders or anyone else were responsible for individuals taking on too much debt; he would place the moral responsibility squarely on the head of the individual and insist that people spend no more than they have.

Poverty thus creates evil, according to Franklin, while for Andrew Carnegie, wealth fosters goodness in the heart of the individual. It creates the opportunity for philanthropy and employment, and the ability to give back to society as well as to help the wealthy person's descendants. Carnegie argues that, according to his "Gospel of Wealth," it is not a bad thing if wealth becomes overly concentrated in the hands of a few people in society, so long as the wealthy take the moral responsibility to spread the wealth they have earned back into society through philanthropic efforts. They benefit from the moral rewards of working hard, and their children benefit from their accumulated wealth; but by giving back to others, the wealthy demonstrate the essential goodness of capitalism and check its excesses.

Russell's Contrarian Defense of Leisure and Spending

A refreshing contrarian argument to Franklin's gospel of saving and Carnegie's equation of moral worth with wealth is found in the British philosopher Bertrand Russell's statement: "What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people's mouths in spending as he takes out of other people's mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves" (Russell 560). In other words, as we are instructed to do during a recession, we must spend money to fuel the economy — if everyone saved, there would be no economy at all.

Russell decries a moral system where leisure is viewed as evil, and fifteen hours a day is deemed an acceptable workday to keep idle hands from being the devil's plaything. "The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger" (Russell 560). People who work compulsively often do more harm than good and fundamentally distort the basic, wholesome human drives to enjoy life and to treat their friends with kindness.

Marx and Engels: Capitalism's Inequalities and the Proletarian Alternative

In their essay "Proletarians and Communists," Marx and Engels point out notable abuses of the capitalist system of their era (Marx & Engels 96). They propose a solution to the social inequalities of bourgeois democracy — or non-democracy, as they think of it — in the form of a dictatorship of the proletariat, where everything is owned in common and decision-making takes place collectively. The problem with Marxism in action, however, is that such a consensus is difficult to achieve on a mass scale, and Marx and Engels are proposing a mass-scale, international revolution. The result is that enforcing a proletarian dictatorship requires a strong-armed leader and bureaucracy, and the administrators of that bureaucracy become the new "haves" of the system, as existed in the politically corrupt Soviet Union.

Conclusion

Is creativity a worthy sacrifice for equality? To answer yes means to sacrifice one's freedom to challenge conventional wisdom. The stagnation of creativity that Marxism produces does not simply hurt individuals; to use Joseph Schumpeter's argument in "The Process of Creative Destruction," it also hampers historical progress, since individuals have no incentive to create new ways of doing business or to scrap old technologies in favor of better ones.