Wage-labor as an economic form existed before the actual appearance of
industrial capital which in fact only dates from the day when
production by the aid of wage-labor became general. Capital, in fact,
is not a quality with which the means of production are naturally
endowed, which they have always had and which they are destined always
to have. It is a character which they possess only under definite
social conditions. The means of production are no more naturally
capital than a negro is naturally a slave. And when socialists talk of
suppressing capital and capitalists, those who do not wish to make a
ridiculous confusion, ought to remember that it is simply a question
of taking away from the means of production and those who hold
possession of them a character which they now have, and which can be
taken from them without destroying an atom of their material
substance, just as in suppressing slavery, it is not necessary, in
order to take away the slave-character from the negro, to kill the
negro.
For a long time capital was known only under the form of merchants'
capital and usurers' capital; for it was only, or almost only, under
those two forms that money bred its like, and it is this possibility
of money's breeding which constitutes capital. This possibility could
not exist, except as an exceptional fact, for money invested in the
means of production, so long as industry remained more or less
domestic in character. In order for capital to spread beyond the
domain of commerce in goods and money and appear in the domain of
production, it was necessary for the wealth accumulated in commerce
and usury to effect on a large scale the concentration of the
scattered petty producers and their petty individual tools; the
workshop had to be enlarged; it was necessary to bring together a
large number of workers working at the same time, in the same place,
under the orders of the same "captain of industry," in producing on a
large scale the same kind of commodity, and to find for the disposal
of the latter a sufficiently extended market.
The money advanced in production can, in fact, realize an appreciable
profit by the sale of the objects produced, only when its possessor is
able to realize a certain quantity of surplus-labor; now, to
accomplish this he must have a certain number of laborers. For it is
the surplus-labor realized, we know, that forms the excess of the
value produced over that of the money laid out in production, or, in
other words, the surplus-value which incessantly swells the capital
and continually increases its power to dominate labor.
The capitalist mode of production, the mode of production in which the
means of labor function as capital, owes to capital its specific
character, which is its power of making money breed money, of giving
birth to surplus-value. The capitalist purchaser of labor-power has
only one object, viz., to enrich himself by making his money breed or
expand, by the process of making commodities containing more labor
than he pays for, and by selling which he therefore realizes a value
greater than that of the sum of the advances or outlays made.
If, since the productiveness of labor has made it possible, one part
of society has, under various economic forms, been forced to add to
the labor-time required for its own support, a certain amount of
surplus-labor-time, for which it has received no equivalent and the
benefit of which has been enjoyed by another part of society, it is
likewise true that so long as the aim of production was to enable the
privileged class to appropriate the means of consumption and
enjoyment, the surplus-labor of the immediate producers reached its
limit with the full satisfaction of those needs and desires, as
extensive as they might be, to gratify which was the object of this
appropriation. But as soon as it becomes a question of obtaining,
instead of a certain mass of products, the production at any cost of
surplus-value, the incessant multiplication of money, the possessor of
the means of production strives relentlessly to make those means of
production absorb the greatest possible quantity of surplus-labor.
If this insatiable thirst for and headlong pursuit of surplus-value
has been for the laborers and their families the cause of an
exploitation of their labor-power, more burdensome than any form of
exploitation previously known, it must be recognized that it has
contributed to the development of the means of production. It is with
capital as with slavery. Both, sources of sufferings for their
victims, they have been, on the whole, sources of progress for
humanity. The history of human progress is far from being an idyl. Our
too forgetful and too proud civilization is the result of a long
series of torments and miseries endured by the nameless and forgotten
masses.
Therefore capital has had its utility, and the era of capitalist
production constitutes a great step forward in the evolution of the
productive powers. Beginning with the enlargement of the small guild
workshop, passing through action in common, the co-operation of a
large number of laborers in the enlarged workshop through the
manufacturing stage, by the division of labor within the workshop, by
the introduction and general adoption of the machine-tool, by the
employment of steam as a motive power, capitalist production has
finally developed into modern mechanical industry which has
revolutionized the mode of production more radically than had any
previous change. It is its continuous and radical alteration of the
technical processes which distinguishes the capitalist period from all
the preceding periods, and prevents it from having the relatively
permanent conservative character which they had.