Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/37

, and the more successfully the industry is carried on, the richer do the bourgeoisie become, the better does business go, the more laborers does the capitalist require, and the dearer does the laborer sell himself.

Thus the indispensable condition of the laborer’s securing a tolerable position is the

But what is the meaning of the increase of productive capital? The increase of the power of stored-up labor over living labor. The increase of the dominion of the bourgeoisie over the laboring class. As fast as wage-labor creates its own antagonist and its own master in the dominating power of capital, the means of employment, that is, of subsistence, flow back to it from its antagonist; but only on condition that it convert itself anew into a portion of capital, and thus becomes the lever whereby the increase of capital may be again hugely accelerated.

Thus the statement that the interests of capital and labor are identical comes to mean merely this: capital and wage-labor are the two sides of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other, just in the same way that the usurer and the borrower condition each other mutually.

So long as the wage-laborer remains a wage-laborer, his lot in life is dependent upon capital. That is the exact meaning of the famous community of interests between capital and labor.

The increase of capital is attended by an