◆¹ Now, the powers of these men resemble a mass of fluid metal which is capable of being run into any variety of mould. If the directors were bound by no articles of association, and if, at their first board meeting, before they had entered into any contract for the machinery, some other invention for the manufacture of some other commodity were suddenly brought to their notice, and happened to take their fancy, the men they were on the point of employing to produce one kind of machinery might, with equal ease, be employed to produce another. We will assume that the machinery which the men are set to produce actually is a great improvement on anything of the kind used hitherto, and ends in adding greatly to the productive powers of the nation; but, so far as the men are concerned whose exertions are paid for out of the capital of the company, the machinery might just as well have been absolutely valueless—a mere aggregation of wheels and axles, as meaningless as a madman’s dream. What makes their exertions not only useful instead of useless, but more useful than any exertion similarly applied had ever been hitherto, is, firstly, the ingenuity of the inventor of the new machine; secondly, the judgment of the promoters and directors of the company; and lastly, the confidence in their judgment felt by the subscribing public. Or, we may suppose the inventor to have himself supplied the Capital, and to unite in himself the parts of the directors and the shareholders. In that case the exertions of the men employed derive their value entirely from the talent of this one man. The men employed by him, we will say, number a thousand, and the Wage Capital he owns and administers aids and increases production only because it is the means by which the one man induces the thousand to accept him as the steersman of their exertions, and to allow him to direct their course towards new and remote results which for them lie hidden behind the horizon of contemporary habit or ignorance.
◆1 The case of Arkwright’s spinning-frame illustrates this.
◆¹ Let us take an actual case—the case of Arkwright’s spinning-frame. This invention, which was destined to influence the prosperity of so many millions, was in great danger of being altogether lost, simply on account of the difficulty experienced by the inventor in securing sufficient capital to construct and perfect his machine, and, what was equally necessary, to exhibit it in actual use. After many rebuffs and disappointments, a sum was at last advanced him by a certain firm of bankers—the Messrs. Wright of Nottingham; but before the preliminary experiments had advanced far their courage failed them, they repented of what they had done, and they passed the inventor on to two other capitalists whose insight was fortunately keener, and whose characters were more courageous. These gentlemen, Mr. Need and Mr. Strutt of Derby, took Arkwright into partnership, and by means of the Capital which they placed at his disposal, his machine, which till now had existed only in his own brain and in a few unfinished models, was before long in operation, and a new industrial era was inaugurated. Now, to the accomplishment of this result Wage Capital was essential; but it was essential only as the means of giving effect to the genius and strong character of certain specially gifted persons—Arkwright with his marvellous inventive genius, Messrs. Need and Strutt with their sagacity and spirit and enterprise. If it had not been for the qualities of these three men, the wages paid to the labourers who made the machine of Arkwright would have probably been paid indeed to the very same labourers, but their exertions would have been directed to producing some different product—some product which added nothing to the existing powers of the community.
◆1 Now machinery is necessarily Wage Capital congealed;
◆¹ Machinery, therefore, or Fixed Capital, though it differs as soon as it is made from Capital employed in wages, is the result of the use of such Capital, and is indeed but another form of it. And now comes the point on which I am concerned to insist here: that conversely Wage Capital, when employed so as to increase the productivity of labour,—in other words when employed by men with the requisite capacity,—is in its essence but another form of machinery. Machinery may be called congealed Wage Capital. Wage Capital may be called fluid machinery. For the function of both—namely, to increase wealth—is the same, and they fulfil this function by means of the same virtue residing in them. It is easy to see the truth of this. The increase of wealth means the improvement and multiplication of commodities which reward the exertions of the same number of men. The number and quality of these commodities are increased by application of Capital, because Capital enables persons who are exceptionally gifted to control and direct the exertions of the majority; and Capital, as embodied in machinery, differs from Capital continuously employed in wages, only because the former gives us machinery which is inanimate, and the latter, machinery which is living. For a thousand men so organised as to produce some given product or result, and to produce it with the greatest precision or in the least possible time, are to all intents and purposes as much an invention and a machine as a thousand wheels or rollers adjusted for a similar purpose.
◆1 And therefore all Capital, equally with Wage Capital, represents the control of Intellect over Labour—or one kind of Human Exertion over another.
◆¹ All Capital, therefore, in all its distinctively modern applications—all those applications which have caused what is called industrial progress—is virtually this, and this only: it is the exceptional capacities of one set of men applied to the average capacities of another set. We may accordingly include all Capital—fixed and circulating—under one head, and say of it as a whole what in the last chapter was said of machinery: that when by its application to the exertions of a given number of men a larger product results than resulted from them before it was applied, Capital is to be credited with producing the amount of the increase; or—to put the same thing in another way—with the amount of the decrease which would result if its application were withdrawn.
◆1 This aspect of the question will be considered further in the next chapter.
How this is the case with machinery I have already illustrated by examples. It is less easy to illustrate by examples, but equally easy to see how it is the case with Capital continuously employed as wages. It is less easy to select illustrations, because the whole of modern progress is itself one great, though infinitely complex example of it; and it will be enough here as we shall recur to the subject presently, to consider one obvious and very familiar fact. Many new commodities, and many new methods of production, depend on the invention not of new machines, but of new processes. The Capital employed in working a new process is mainly employed as wages, by the administration of which the actions of the workmen are guided, controlled, and organised. Thus if fifty men, working independently and selling their own produce, produce a hundred articles of a certain sort weekly, and another fifty men, ◆¹ working for a wage-paying employer, produce, owing to the way in which their labour is guided and organised, just double the number of such articles in the same time, we shall say that the hundred extra articles are the product of Wage Capital, just as we should say, if the increased production had been due to the introduction of a machine, that these extra hundred articles were the product of Fixed Capital. And in both cases we should mean, as I am now going to insist more particularly, that they were really the product of the capacities which each kind of Capital represents. This brings us to the heart of the whole problem.