bestowed on raw material, for the purpose of giving rise to a certain product, confers some additional value on that material in the estimation of those who are engaged in manufacturing that product, the ratio of that accumulated value, at any stage of the process, to the value of the finished product is extremely inconstant, and often small; while, to other persons, the value of the unfinished product may be nothing, or even a minus quantity. A house-timber merchant, for example, might consider that wood which had been worked into the ribs of a ship was spoiled—that is, had less value than it had as a log.
According to "Progress and Poverty," there was, really, no advance of capital while the great St. Gothard tunnel was cut. Suppose that, as the Swiss and the Italian halves of the tunnel approached to within half a kilometre, that half-kilometre had turned out to be composed of practically impenetrable rock—would anybody have given a centime for the unfinished tunnel? And if not, how comes it that "the creation of value does not depend on the finishing of the product"?
I think it may be not too much to say that, of all the political delusions which are current in this queer world, the very stupidest are those which assume that labour and capital are necessarily antagonistic; that all capital is produced by labour and therefore, by natural right, is the property of
the labourer; that the possessor of capital is a robber who preys on the workman and appropriates to himself that which he has had no share in producing.
On the contrary, capital and labour are, necessarily, close allies; capital is never a product of human labour alone; it exists apart from human labour; it is the necessary antecedent of labour; and it furnishes the materials on which labour is employed. The only indispensable form of capital—vital capital—cannot be produced by human labour. All that man can do is to favour its formation by the real producers. There is no intrinsic relation between the amount of labour bestowed on an article and its value in exchange. The claim of labour to the total result of operations which are rendered possible only by capital is simply an a priori iniquity.