◆2 The modern employer in this respect differs from the ancient.
◆3 Wage Capital in the modern world is the means by which exceptional intellect is lent to Labour.
◆¹ What this function is must be explained very clearly and carefully. It is not to enable labourers to wait for the results of their labours. It is to enable the exceptional knowledge, ingenuity, enterprise, and productive genius of a few men so to animate, to organise, and direct the average physical exertions of the many, as to improve, to multiply, or to hasten the results of that exertion without increasing its quantity. All civilisations, ancient as well as modern, have involved, in a certain sense, the direction by the few of the many. The temples and palaces of early Egypt and Assyria, which excite the wonder of modern engineers and architects by the size of the blocks of stone used in their astounding structure, are monuments of a control, absolute and unlimited and masterly, exercised by a few human minds over millions of human bodies. But in that control, as exercised in the ancient world, one element was wanting which is the essence of modern industry. When the masters of ancient labour wished to multiply commodities, or to secure an increase of power for accomplishing some single work, the sole means known to them was to increase the number of labourers; and when one thousand slaves were insufficient, to reinforce them with (let us say) four thousand more. The masters of modern labour pursue a new and essentially opposite course. Instead of seeking in such a case to secure four thousand new labourers, they seek to endow one thousand with the industrial power of five. ◆² If Nebuchadnezzar had set himself to tunnel a mountain, he could have hastened the work only by flogging more slaves to it. The modern contractor, in co-operation with the modern inventor, instead of flogging labour, would assist it with tram-lines, trucks, and boring engines. In other words, whereas in former ages the aim of the employing class was simply to secure the service of an increasing quantity of labour, the aim of the employing class in the present age is to increase the productive power of the same quantity. The employing class in former ages merely forced the employed to exert their own industrial faculties, and appropriated what those faculties produced. The employing class of the present age not only commands the employed, but it co-operates with them by lending them faculties which they do not themselves possess. ◆³ It applies to the guidance of the muscles of the most ordinary worker the profoundest knowledge of science, all the strength of will, all the spirit of enterprise, and the exceptional aptitude for affairs, that distinguish the most gifted and the vigorous characters of the day. And it is the peculiar modern function of Capital, as spent in Wages, to enable this result to take place.
◆1 Wage Capital does this in a way which the socialistic definition of Capital altogether ignores.
◆¹ Let us consider how it does so. Socialists tell us that Capitalism in the modern world means merely the appropriation by the few of all the materials of production, so that the many must either work as the few bid them, or must starve. But this is a very small part of what modern Capitalism means, and it is not the essential part, nor does it even suggest the essential part. The majority of men must always work or starve. Nature, not modern Capitalism, is responsible for that necessity. The essential difference which modern Capitalism has introduced into the situation is this—and it is an enormous difference—that whereas in former ages the livelihood of a man was contingent on his working in the best way that the average man knew, modern Capitalism has made his livelihood contingent on his working in the best way that exceptional men know. Now this best way, as we shall see more clearly presently, does not involve the forcing of each man to work harder, or the exacting from him any more difficult effort. It involves merely the supplying him with a constant external guide for even his minutest actions—a guide for every movement of arm and hand, or a pattern of each of the objects which are the direct result of these movements; and consequently the one thing which before all others it requires is constant obedience or conformity to such guides and patterns. The entire industrial progress of the modern world has depended, and depends altogether on this constant obedience being secured; and the possession of Wage Capital by the employing class is the sole means which is possible in the modern world of securing it. In the ancient world the case would no doubt have been different. The lash of the taskmaster, the fear of prison, of death, of torture, were then available for the stimulation and organisation of Labour. But they are available no longer. The masses of civilised humanity have taken this great step—they have risen from the level on which they could be driven to industrial obedience, to the level on which they must be induced to it. Obedience of some sort is a social necessity now as ever, and always must be: but social necessity spoke merely to the fear of the slave; it speaks to the will and the reason of the free labourer. The free labourer may be, and must be, in one or other of two positions. He may work for himself, consuming or selling his own produce; or he may work for an employer, who pays him wages, and exacts in return for them not work only, but work performed in a certain prescribed way. The first position is that of the peasant proprietor or the hand-loom weaver. The second is that of the employee in a mill or factory. In both cases, the voice of social necessity, or of society, speaks to the man’s reason, informing him of the homely fact that he cannot live unless he labours: but in the first case, the voice of society cries to him out of the ground, “You will get no food unless you labour in some way”; and in the second case it cries to him from the mouths of the wisest and strongest men, “You will get no food unless you consent to labour in the best way.”[31]
◆1 Wage Capital is merely the means by which intellect impresses itself as Labour;
◆¹ In other words, Wage Capital in the modern world promotes that growth of wealth by which the modern world is distinguished, simply because Wage Capital is the vehicle by which the exceptional qualities of the few communicate themselves to the whole industrial community. The real principle of progress and production is not in the Capital, but in the qualities of the men who control it; just as the vital force which goes to make a great picture is not in the brush, but in the great painter’s hand; or as the skill which pilots a coach and four through London is not in the reins, but in the hand of the expert coachman.
◆1 As we can see by following the steps by which a company would introduce some new machine.
◆¹ This can easily be seen by turning our attention once again to machinery, and supposing that a company is floated for the improved manufacture of something by means of some new invention. The directors must of course begin with securing a site for the factory; but with this exception their entire initial expenditure will directly or indirectly consist in the payment of wages—in purchasing the services of a certain number of men by whose exertions certain masses of raw material are to be produced and fashioned into certain definite forms—that is to say, into the new machinery and a suitable building to protect it.
◆1 The whole success of such a company depends on the amount of intellect used in the expenditure of the Wage Capital.