Capitalism

“ As the State formerly played a most important part in the revolutions which abolished the old economic systems, so it must again be the State which should abolish capitalism. ”

“ What Socialists really mean by Capitalism is the modern system of Industrialism, which tends to concentrate all the means of production and distribution in the hands of individuals or groups, who, if they happen to be unscrupulous, are able by systematic sweating of the worker and bleeding of the consumer to conduct operations on so large a scale as to crush all competition by the home worker or the small tradesman. ”

“ Under capitalism, in free competition, the value of all commodities, other than those unique things which cannot be reproduced by human labor, is determined by the amount of abstract labor embodied in them ”

“ Still another institution of modern industrialism which has come or is coming under the reprobation of the present-day conscience of a rapidly growing number is private capitalism, that is, private ownership of the instruments of production, together with competition and the wage system, the necessary concomitants of this capitalistic régime. These new ethical feelings and convictions form the real motive force in the propaganda of modern socialism. ”

“ All these wonders, it was explained, had very simply come about as the results of replacing private capitalism by public capitalism, and organizing the machinery of production and distribution, like the political government, as business of general concern to be carried on for the public benefit instead of private gain. ”

“ The third and last stage of capitalism is characterized by new forms of industrial ownership, administration, and control. Concentration of industry and the elimination of competition are the distinguishing features of this stage. When, more than half a century ago, the Socialists predicted an era of industrial concentration and monopoly as the outcome of the competitive struggles of the time, their prophecies were mocked and derided. ”

“ Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of 106exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation. ”

“ For this reason the present book, which treats of the evils of the existing industrial system, is entitled "What Capitalism is."
Evils of Capitalism
For nearly two centuries men have produced and distributed the things they needed, upon what is called "the competitive system." That is to say, every individual is free to choose his particular share in this work and to make out of his work all that he can, in order with the money so made to purchase for himself the things that he individually needs. The farmer undertakes to furnish us with food, the forester with lumber, the miner with iron. ”

“ Capitalism has created a rough and ill-working mechanism of industry and a low standard of value based upon nothing but industrial considerations, and it has done its best to hand over both public and private values to be measured by this standard and to to be produced by this mechanism. ”

“ Under the system of large scale capitalism, labor is a commodity, bought and sold in the market like any other commodity. Some years ago Congress was requested to pass a law contradicting this fundamental fact of world capitalism. ”

“ On the contrary, the corporation not only makes the control of production by a few banks and industrial combines possible; it also furnishes a means by which the very smallest fortunes can be transformed into capital and thereby be made to contribute to the centralizing process on capitalism. ”

“ Affluent monopoly capitalism, meanwhile, has provided the rich, the middle class and important numbers of workers and farmers with necessaries and amenities far beyond the levels imagined by reformers and revolutionaries of a previous generation. ”

“ In protesting against an actual monopoly of control by Capital under Capitalism, and a possible monopoly of control by the State under Socialism, Guild Socialism would establish a monopoly of control by Labor under National Industrial Guilds. ”

“ Its great importance for us, however, lies in the fact that all the tyranny and wrong he witnessed and describes are but the natural outcomes of the principles of commercialism when those principles are carried to their logical conclusion, and capitalism has unchecked sway. ”

“ If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism. ”

“ It is quite impossible to cut away profit from those branches of industry, constantly diminishing in number, where capitalist production still exists, and may continue to exist for the present, before the private character of the ownership of such means of production is altered. ”

“ Every kind of social cooperation requires to be directed. But the capitalist becomes a captain of industry because he owns the means of production, and not because the workers and consumers have any confidence in his capacity or experience. ”

“ In order to win a real equality and a real democracy for the working masses, for the workers and peasants, it will be necessary first to deprive the capitalists of the possibility of hiring writers, of buying publishing plants, of bribing newspapers. And to accomplish this it will be necessary to shake off the yoke of capitalism, to dethrone the exploiters, and to break their resistance. Capitalists have always meant by "freedom" the freedom of profits for the rich and the freedom of the poor to perish of starvation. ”

“ It creates capital, i. e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of getting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. ”

“ Do you understand this, bishops and people?
The capitalists may say, "What are we to do with our means?" Go and build factories and have one, two, or three thousand spindles going. Send for fifty, a hundred, or a thousand sheep and raise wool. Some of you go to raising flax and build a factory to manufacture it, and do not take every advantage and pocket every dollar that is to be made. You are rich, and I want to turn the stream so as to do good to the whole community.
I am delighted every time I hear a company say, "We do not want your capital, we have plenty." ”

“ He has been schooled to think that capital can buy labor as it would machinery, the human equation not entering into it. He believes that it would be equivalent to confiscation for the State to say ’in regard to a corporation, labor, the State and capital are important in the order named.’ Good man that he means to be, he does not know, perhaps he can never know, that it is labor, labor of the mind and of the body, that creates, and not capital. ”

“ They are his property, his is the might. What right has capital to rob the workingclass of part of the fruit of their industry and labor? Are the wages-laborers, the mechanics, the farmhands property of the capitalist? ”

“ Values to-day permit their holders either to purchase means of production and of profit or their products. In the transformed society, when the private capital of production and exploitation shall have been made social, when the social community shall have placed the means of production at the disposition of associated laborers, the indemnity values which shall have been given the capitalists of yesterday will permit them no longer to buy the means of production, of rent, and of profit: they will permit them to buy only the products of the transformed social activity. ”

“ The pasture for consumers will be filled naturally up to the food; but when people are turned into it by laws, without the passport of talents, industry is used like a common, and grazed as close as possible. Out of these observations arises a very important distinction as to capitalists. Those who acquire capitals by material productions or moral services, are the really useful capitalist class, as consumers, as giving value to productions, as encouraging industry, and as extending comforts. ”

“ The belief that interest is the robbery of industry is, I am persuaded, in large part due to a failure to discriminate between what is really capital and what is not, and between profits which are properly interest and profits which arise from other sources than the use of capital. In the speech and literature of the day every one is styled a capitalist who possesses what, independent of his labor, will yield him a return, while whatever is thus received is spoken of as the earnings or takings of capital, and we everywhere hear of the conflict of labor and capital. ”

“ Therefore in the accumulation of wealth, so far as it arises from the saving by anyone of the products of his labour, from his bequest of this capital to another who farther adds to it by saving some of the profit which the capital yields, as employed in the payment for labour or in trade either by the capitalist himself or someone to whom he lends it, and from the continuation of this process through generations, there is nothing which tends to lessen for anyone else the possibilities of ownership. ”

“ The capitalist owns the tools he does not use; the worker uses the tools he does not own.
The principal tools of production and distribution in the United States—mammoth machines, complex social instruments, made and used co-operatively by millions of workingmen, their very lives, their wives and babes being dependent upon them—are the private property of a few hundred capitalists, and are operated purely to make profits for these capitalists, regardless of the poverty and wretchedness that ensue to the masses. ”

“ Where capitalistic acquisition is rationally pursued, the corresponding action is adjusted to calculations in terms of capital. ”

“ Industry is now conducted by speculators, who advance the stock and pay the labourer's wages, in order to make gain out of the excess of the product over the advances, and labour is a mere instrument in the hands of capital. The capitalist is one who, without being personally a producer, advances money to producers to provide them with materials and tools, in the hope of getting a larger sum of money in return, and capital is the money so advanced. ”

“ Instead of this, each capitalist has money, which he pays to his workpeople, and so enables them to supply themselves: he has also finished goods in his warehouses, by the sale of which he obtains more money, to employ in the same manner, as well as to replenish his stock of materials, to keep his buildings and machinery in repair, and to replace them when worn out. ”

“ That which we call capital here in America is usually money used in production, and we mistakenly refer to the manufacturer, the manager of work, the provider of tools and jobs—we refer to him as the "capitalist." Oh, no. He is not the capitalist in the real sense. Why, he himself must go to capitalists for the money with which to finance his plans. ”

“ The capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand, enforcing economy in each individual business, on the other hand, begets, by its anarchical system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous. ”

“ In what wiser way could our wealthy manufacturers use a portion of the money won for them by the labor which has exhausted its own interest in its task?
Such personal interest on the part of employers in their employees leads up to a clue to that other branch of the uninterestedness of labor—its lack of identification with the welfare of capital—its lack of any feeling of loyalty toward the capitalist. ”

“ His entire product belongs to the capitalist, and out of this resource he pays the wages [Pg 166] for the commodity labor, also for other commodities such as raw materials, and appropriates all of the balance and converts it into capital with which he not only continues but increases the exploitation of his workers. ”

“ Further, the peculiar financial organization of modern capitalist society enables the ruling capitalists to control and use to their own advantage the wealth of others invested in industrial and commercial corporations. Thus to the concentration of ownership must be added the concentration of control, which plays an increasingly important part in capitalist economics. ”

“ Socialists call all kind of property in this respect "capital," this expression comprising all means for production, and because one class of the people possess, by their wealth, these means, the capital—, another, and by far the larger class, have only their physical or mental strength and skill for labor, hence the capital becomes a means for enslaving workers, forcing them to give up a part of what they have produced to him, who owns the capital. ”

“ Industrial organization is not simply a case of competition between capital and labor, but capitalists are competing with capitalists as well as with laborers, and laborers with each other as well as with capitalists. ”

“ The Put-Through Clan will throw the local and national influence of twenty million consumers on to the side of spirited or team-work capital and labor, and will discourage, make ridiculous and impossible, the scared fighting capital and the scared fighting labor with which we are now being troubled.
The real line of demarcation in modern industry is not between capital and labor, but between spirited capital and labor that want to work, create and construct, on the one hand, and unspirited capital and labor, working as little and thinking as little as they can, on the other. ”