Johann von Komorzynski, Das Wesen und die beiden Hauptrichtungen des Socialismus (1893)

Delivered at Vienna’s Wissenschaftlicher Club on 16 February 1893 and published as a separate reprint, Komorzynski’s lecture distinguishes humanitarian socialism from the modern socialism grounded in labour-value theory. Its central claim is deliberately polemical: socialism properly understood protects vulnerable people through restrictions on economic freedom; the demand that workers receive the entire product of production instead substitutes class interest for humanitarian obligation. The lecture proceeds from definition and examples through an intellectual genealogy of modern socialism to a rebuttal based on Austrian value theory.

Komorzynski first rejects two identifications: socialism with communism, and socialism with an extension of liberal freedom into economic life. Socialism necessarily involves social coercion, but need not abolish private property or individual enterprise. Its defining feature is the purpose for which economic discretion is restricted:

Immer ist vielmehr mit der Vorstellung vom Socialismus der Gedanke verknüpft, dass die von Gesellschaftswegen geübte Beschränkung der individuellen wirthschaftlichen Dispositionsfreiheit die Förderung des Interesses einzelner ökonomisch schwächerer Classen bezwecke.

English translation: Rather, the conception of socialism is always associated with the thought that society’s restriction of individual freedom of economic disposition aims to advance the interests of particular economically weaker classes.

This definition excludes restrictions benefiting privileged persons, such as feudal dues and guild monopolies, but also measures serving general collective needs, including taxation for defence and legal protection. Conversely, it includes a broad spectrum of interventions: landholding limits, public relief, progressive taxation, employment provision, factory regulation, and workers’ insurance. The same instrument can therefore acquire a socialist character through its distributive purpose. Socialism is neither synonymous with state intervention nor inherently hostile to capital.

Within humanitarian socialism, Komorzynski distinguishes degrees of response to suffering. Communism treats unequal satisfaction of wants itself as an injury and pursues what he considers the permanently utopian goal of equal enjoyment. Moderate socialism confines its demand to securing life’s necessities through a right to existence. Both nevertheless share compassion as their ultimate justification. Political fear or opportunism may assist particular reforms, but cannot supply their enduring moral foundation.

The second principal direction replaces need with productive contribution. It rests, Komorzynski argues, on two disputable propositions: that labour alone creates commodity value, and that each person ought to receive the complete result of that labour. Conflating labour’s contribution with the whole product allows capital income to appear as an appropriation of value created exclusively by workers. He thus treats the right to the full proceeds of labour as a distinct distributive doctrine, not simply a more radical demand for subsistence.

His explanation of this shift assigns unusual force to economic theory. Factory overwork, insecurity, unhealthy conditions, and unemployment explain demands for protection, but do not explain why labour contribution should replace need as the measure of entitlement. That change arose, he maintains, through the labour-value teaching of Smith and especially Ricardo’s school. He traces its socialist appropriation through William Thompson, the Saint-Simonians and Proudhon, then Rodbertus, Lassalle, and Marx. Marx receives credit for drawing its consequences most consistently. Other representatives retain private enterprise or propose credit and price regulation; Komorzynski interprets these compromises as failures to pursue the doctrine’s ultimate implications.

The moral criticism turns on those whom contribution-based distribution cannot protect. Children, elderly people, and others unable to work would still require claims independent of production:

Die Idee vom Rechte auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag bedeutet an sich gerade so einen Classenegoismus wie nur irgend der starrste Capitalismus, der nichts vom Productionsertrage des Capitals abgeben wollte, und sie bedarf ebenso dringend der Correctur durch die Idee eines Rechtes auf Existenz, wie nur immer der starrste Individualismus diese Correctur erheischt.

English translation: The idea of a right to the full proceeds of labour in itself represents just as much a class egoism as the most rigid capitalism, which would surrender nothing from the productive yield of capital, and it needs correction through the idea of a right to existence just as urgently as the most rigid individualism requires this correction.

Komorzynski acknowledges that serious advocates would provide for those unable to work. His objection concerns the principle itself: such provision introduces a humanitarian correction that labour entitlement cannot generate. Natural differences in ability also weaken any straightforward identification of productive achievement with personal desert.

The theoretical conclusion invokes Karl Menger’s account of value as arising from goods’ relationship to human needs, rather than from expenditure on their production:

Der Werth selbst wird überhaupt nicht producirt, weder durch den Arbeitsaufwand, noch durch irgend welchen anderen Productionsaufwand.

English translation: Value itself is not produced at all, whether by the expenditure of labour or by any other expenditure on production.

Production creates useful goods; valuation attributes significance to them through their usefulness. This attribution extends to the labour and material productive means on which their availability depends. Komorzynski consequently assigns part of product value to capital services and regards capital owners’ receipt of income as corresponding to that contribution. This is his proposed refutation of exploitation theory, not merely an alternative account of prices.

The lecture closes by accepting humanitarian reform while denying legitimacy to anti-capitalist socialism. Securing existence is a defensible social purpose whose realization depends increasingly on available wealth and productive capacity. Measures once contested as socialist can become accepted legal obligations. The work’s significance lies in this combination: it defends social legislation while using Austrian value theory to contest labour-based entitlement, making the boundary between legitimate reform and illegitimate socialism depend on both moral purpose and economic explanation.