Capitalist

“ So long as capitalist exploitation is small, the watchword of capital is economy, and it seeks to introduce this into the administration of government also. The small capitalists are forced, willy-nilly, to remain true to this watchword. The big capitalists, on the contrary, as the degree of exploitation rises practice ostentation and extravagance, that finally reaches such a mad pace as finds its extreme in insane forms of competitive armament. ”

“ In virtue of the individual ownership of the social instruments of production, one capitalist may exploit the labor of a million workingmen and become a billionaire, while the million workers struggle through life in penury and want, to a bleak and barren old age, to find rest at last in the pauper asylum, the morgue and the potter’s field. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At present, all the wealth of Society goes first into the possession of the Capitalist.... He pays the landowner his rent, the labourer his wages, the tax and tithe-gatherer their claims, and keeps a large, indeed, the largest, and a constantly augmenting share of the annual produce of labour for himself. The Capitalist may now be said to be the first owner of all the wealth of the community, though no law has conferred on him the right of this property.... ”

“ The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, [14] and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible extent. ”

“ The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. ”

“ The matter takes quite another aspect, when we contemplate, not the single capitalist, and the single labourer, but the capitalist class and the labouring class, not an isolated process of production, but capitalist production in full swing, and on its actual social scale. By converting part of his capital into labour-power, the capitalist augments the value of his entire capital. ”

“ Workmen who have toiled to save a few pounds, and have lost them in a coöperative workshop, have awakened to the fact that the gains of the capitalist are not merely interest on his money, but also payment for the exercise of his judgment, foresight, and executive ability, without which his wealth, however great, would fast melt away in the strifes of business. ”

“ I have stated that society has been divided into two warring classes. The capitalist owns the tool in modern industry, but he has nothing to do with [113] its operation. By virtue of such ownership he has the economic power to appropriate to himself the wealth produced by the use of that tool. This accounts for the fact that the capitalist becomes rich. But how about the working class? In the first place they have to compete with each other for the privilege of operating the capitalist's tool of production. ”

“ This is apparent on every page—in the form and course of their reasoning, in the character of their illustrations, and even in their choice of terms. Everywhere capital is the starting point, the capitalist the central figure. ”

“ This obvious truth should certainly be taken into account in striking the balance between the capitalist and those whose labor he employs.
If, then, the secret aspiration of the laboring class, or at least of a large portion of it, is, to be protected against the competition of men of subtiler brains and stronger resolution, the question may be asked, What is the secret thought of the capitalist class, the men who have these superior resources, or whose fathers had them, and who consequently rule in the industrial world? ”

“ The State is composed of three orders of men, all equally precious, and whose rights are equally sacred; viz. the landed capitalist, the capitalist of industry, and the proprietor of money, whether he be considered as a capitalist in this last respect, or only as a dependent on either of the two former capitalists. ”

“ Men whose chief means of life are wages form the working class. Men whose most important source of livelihood is the ownership of capital (land, buildings, workshops, and raw material) form the capitalist class. It is of little moment that a worker owns a savings-bankbook, and draws interest or dividends from a co-operative [80] society, or that a capitalist personally supervises his undertaking, or organises his business, so that his profits partly consist in wages of superintendence or salary. ”

“ But the great defect which these definitions have in common is that they include what clearly cannot be accounted capital, if any distinction is to be made between laborer and capitalist. For they bring into the category of capital the food, clothing, etc., in the possession of the day laborer, which he will consume whether he works or not, as well as the stock in the hands of the capitalist, with which he proposes to pay the laborer for his work. ”

“ We could not well dispense with our cotton and woollen factories, and go back to the hand-cards, and spinning-wheel, and hand-loom which, in our own boyhood, were in every farmer’s house; but we cannot forget that the independence of the laborer—now a laborer at wages, and obliged to make cash payments for what he consumes—has gone with them to the advantage of 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As an extractor of unpaid labor, which, by means of the increasing surplus-value whose source it is, accumulates every day, more and more, in the hands of the proprietary class the instruments of its dominion, the capitalist regime surpasses in power all the antecedent regimes founded on compulsory labor. ”

“ The labor-force and the instruments of production are now brought together; they will now produce wealth, and both they and the wealth they produce are the property of the capitalist.
Our next inquiry is: Where does the capitalist look for his profit? He has bought machinery; he has bought labor-force; whence comes the gain he is seeking? The profit of the capitalist must arise from the difference between the price he pays for labor-force and the wealth produced by it ”

“ We have seen how important are the functions of the capitalist under the present system of production; under the system of private property in the means of production, large production is possible only as capitalist production. Under this system it is necessary, in order that production may be carried on smoothly, that the capitalist take the field with his capital and apply it effectively. ”

“ Then it can be easily imagined that all the returns on one side, representing profits, go to capitalists, no matter whether they are thousands in number, or only one capitalist typifying the rest, or a single corporation acting for many small capitalists. ”

“ The capitalist class is represented by the Republican, Democratic, Populist and Prohibition parties, all of which stand for private ownership of the means of production, and the triumph of any one of which will mean continued wage-slavery to the working class. ”

“ It is not then to the accumulation of capital, but to the condition, due to antecedent circumstances unconnected with that accumulation, of the men with whom the capitalist deals and whose labour he buys on the cheapest terms, that we must ascribe the multiplication in recent times of an impoverished and reckless proletariate. ”

“ Capitalist production transplants the task of organization of great masses of the community to industry. The capitalists constitute naturally the head people, the field generals of those who are under them and become prominent factors in organization. ”

“ In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist. That this credit is no mere fiction, is shown not only by the occasional loss of wages on the bankruptcy of the capitalist, [13] but also by a series of more enduring consequences. ”

“ Judged by this law of equality, the capitalist is but one man, and capital is but another name for the last year's harvest, or the buildings, tools, and manufactures which [Pg 598] the labourers themselves, or their predecessors, have produced. ”

“ Regarding, then, the development of the capitalist system from the first establishment of the capitalist-employer as a distinct industrial class, we trace the massing of capital in larger and larger competing forms, the number of which represents a pyramid growing narrower as it ascends towards an ideal apex, represented by the absolute unity or identity of interests of the capital in a given trade. ”

“ 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 capitalist character of this state of affairs is expressed by the fact that these means of production appear as capital, as c, the property of a person other than the labourer, divorced from labour, the property of those who themselves do not work. ”

“ This question may be answered by saying that the capitalist’s greed for surplus value, enhanced by competition, and the automatic effects of capitalist exploitation, lead to the production of every kind of commodity, including means of production, and also that a growing class of proletarianised workers becomes generally available for the purposes of capital. ”

“ This general tendency of present day capitalist policies determines the policies of the individual states as their supreme blindly operating law, just as the laws of economic competition determine the conditions under which the individual manufacturer shall produce. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the other hand the capitalist either starts with inherited wealth, grows richer, and bequeaths the increased wealth to his children; or he begins poor, saves a little, then makes others work for him, grows rich, and bequeaths his wealth. ”

“ The capitalist and his agents are looking for [260] the greatest amount of labor or the largest income in money from their investments, and they do not promote a dunce to a station where he will destroy raw material or slacken industry because of his name, or birth, or family connections. ”

“ But the capitalist class was even more doggedly determined upon retaining and intensifying those powers. Government was an essential requisite to its plans and development. The small capitalists bitterly fought the great; but both agreed that Government with its legislators, laws, precedents, and the habits of thought it created, must be capitalistic. Both saw in the uprising of labor a prospective overturning of conditions. ”

“ Indeed a more striking expression could not have been found! True the capitalist rulers of labor are not prevented by it from heaping capital upon capital, but heavily does the "chain of economic phenomena" press upon the laboring class. ”

“ It is because you are accustomed to regarding the social capital rather than your day-to-day specific exertions as the main source of your wealth. It is, in a word, the difference between the attitude of the capitalist and the proletarian. ”

“ Let us suppose, then, that the evolution of the capitalist system has proceeded but a little further along the present lines, concentrating the control of industry, and increasingly substituting labor-saving machinery for human beings. ”

“ True, the matter assumes an entirely different aspect when we look upon capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its reproduction, and when we consider the capitalist class as a whole and its antagonist, the working class, instead of the individual capitalist and the individual labourer. ”