IV.
Wage-labor as an economic form existed before the actual appearance of industrial capital which in fact only dates from the day when production by the aid of wage-labor became general. Capital, in fact, is not a quality with which the means of production are naturally endowed, which they have always had and which they are destined always to have. It is a character which they possess only under definite social conditions. The means of production are no more naturally capital than a negro is naturally a slave. And when socialists talk of suppressing capital and capitalists, those who do not wish to make a ridiculous confusion, ought to remember that it is simply a question of taking away from the means of production and those who hold possession of them a character which they now have, and which can be taken from them without destroying an atom of their material substance, just as in suppressing slavery, it is not necessary, in order to take away the slave-character from the negro, to kill the negro.
For a long time capital was known only under the form of merchants' capital and usurers' capital; for it was only, or almost only, under those two forms that money bred its like, and it is this possibility of money's breeding which constitutes capital. This possibility could not exist, except as an exceptional fact, for money invested in the means of production, so long as industry remained more or less domestic in character. In order for capital to spread beyond the domain of commerce in goods and money and appear in the domain of production, it was necessary for the wealth accumulated in commerce and usury to effect on a large scale the concentration of the scattered petty producers and their petty individual tools; the workshop had to be enlarged; it was necessary to bring together a large number of workers working at the same time, in the same place, under the orders of the same "captain of industry," in producing on a large scale the same kind of commodity, and to find for the disposal of the latter a sufficiently extended market.
The money advanced in production can, in fact, realize an appreciable profit by the sale of the objects produced, only when its possessor is able to realize a certain quantity of surplus-labor; now, to accomplish this he must have a certain number of laborers. For it is the surplus-labor realized, we know, that forms the excess of the value produced over that of the money laid out in production, or, in other words, the surplus-value which incessantly swells the capital and continually increases its power to dominate labor.
The capitalist mode of production, the mode of production in which the means of labor function as capital, owes to capital its specific character, which is its power of making money breed money, of giving birth to surplus-value. The capitalist purchaser of labor-power has only one object, viz., to enrich himself by making his money breed or expand, by the process of making commodities containing more labor than he pays for, and by selling which he therefore realizes a value greater than that of the sum of the advances or outlays made.
If, since the productiveness of labor has made it possible, one part of society has, under various economic forms, been forced to add to the labor-time required for its own support, a certain amount of surplus-labor-time, for which it has received no equivalent and the benefit of which has been enjoyed by another part of society, it is likewise true that so long as the aim of production was to enable the privileged class to appropriate the means of consumption and enjoyment, the surplus-labor of the immediate producers reached its limit with the full satisfaction of those needs and desires, as extensive as they might be, to gratify which was the object of this appropriation. But as soon as it becomes a question of obtaining, instead of a certain mass of products, the production at any cost of surplus-value, the incessant multiplication of money, the possessor of the means of production strives relentlessly to make those means of production absorb the greatest possible quantity of surplus-labor.
If this insatiable thirst for and headlong pursuit of surplus-value has been for the laborers and their families the cause of an exploitation of their labor-power, more burdensome than any form of exploitation previously known, it must be recognized that it has contributed to the development of the means of production. It is with capital as with slavery. Both, sources of sufferings for their victims, they have been, on the whole, sources of progress for humanity. The history of human progress is far from being an idyl. Our too forgetful and too proud civilization is the result of a long series of torments and miseries endured by the nameless and forgotten masses.
Therefore capital has had its utility, and the era of capitalist production constitutes a great step forward in the evolution of the productive powers. Beginning with the enlargement of the small guild workshop, passing through action in common, the co-operation of a large number of laborers in the enlarged workshop through the manufacturing stage, by the division of labor within the workshop, by the introduction and general adoption of the machine-tool, by the employment of steam as a motive power, capitalist production has finally developed into modern mechanical industry which has revolutionized the mode of production more radically than had any previous change. It is its continuous and radical alteration of the technical processes which distinguishes the capitalist period from all the preceding periods, and prevents it from having the relatively permanent conservative character which they had.