Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Riccardo Dalla Volta’s Le forme del Salario (1894)

Schullern’s review presents Dalla Volta’s book as a clear, carefully organized survey of wage forms, opening a projected series on the forms, theory, and development of wages. Its value lies less in new findings than in bringing existing knowledge into a coherent account of how remuneration affects wage levels and productive outcomes.

Dieselbe enthält natürlich nicht viel sachlich neues, das hat ja auch der Verfasser nicht beabsichtigt, sie gibt aber in fünf Capiteln all das was die Einleitung verspricht in einheitlicher, klarer und sorgfältiger Darstellung und wie uns scheint, damit genug, um ihr den Anspruch auf Beachtung zu sichern.

English translation: It contains, naturally, not much that is substantively new — nor indeed did the author intend this — but in five chapters it gives all that the introduction promises, in a unified, clear and careful presentation, and, as it seems to us, enough thereby to secure it a claim to attention.

The review’s central conceptual move is to connect the form of payment with the distribution and production of income. Schullern reports Dalla Volta’s developmental premise that increasingly intensive economic activity brings increasingly complex wage forms. Workers’ efforts to enlarge their share of product value must therefore take account of remuneration methods, not merely wage amounts:

Wenn die Arbeiterklasse darnach strebt, ihren Antheil am Productwerte zu erhöhen, so darf nicht übersehen werden, dass auch zwischen Lohnform und Lohnhöhe ein Zusammenhang besteht; es liegt im Interesse sowohl des Arbeiters als auch des Unternehmers, dass jene Methode der Entlohnung angewendet werde, welche im vorliegenden Productionszweige den unter normalen Verhältnissen möglichen, höchsten Ertrag entstehen lässt und daher „in logischer Folge“ die höchsten Löhne und Gewinne ermöglicht.

English translation: If the working class strives to raise its share in the value of the product, it must not be overlooked that a connection exists also between the form of wages and the level of wages; it is in the interest both of the worker and of the entrepreneur that that method of remuneration be applied which in the branch of production in question brings forth the highest yield possible under normal conditions and therefore, "in logical consequence," makes possible the highest wages and profits.

This alignment of workers’ and employers’ interests through productive efficiency leads Schullern to identify Dalla Volta’s position as opposed to socialism’s treatment of wages. The review does not develop that controversy; it instead calls for detailed consideration of Rodbertus’s doctrine in the anticipated continuation.

Schullern then traces the book’s five-chapter progression. A historical account of industry following Bücher leads to product-sharing in kind or value, particularly in agriculture, fishing, and mining. Time and piece wages introduce wages in the technical sense. Premium systems and sliding wage scales follow, the latter occupying an intermediate position between individual and collective wages. The final chapter examines collective wages through practical cases and preserves an important distinction: payment for cooperative labour remains wages, whereas the income of workers united in producer cooperatives belongs to a different category.

The closing endorsement makes the survey’s relevance precise: its historical and practical material supplies a foundation for the theoretical work still to come.

Möge bald jene Fortsetzung folgen, für die es das Thatsachenmateriale beistellt.

English translation: May that continuation soon follow, for which it supplies the factual material.

Schullern thus recommends the book both as a useful synthesis and as an empirical preparation for further inquiry into wage theory, while leaving its broader distributive claims largely untested.