Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/46

 Finally, the meaning of the most favorable condition of wage-labor, that is the quickest possible increase of productive capital, is merely this: The faster the working classes enlarge and extend the hostile power that dominates over them the better will be the conditions under which they will be allowed to labor for the further increase of bourgeois wealth and for the wider extension of the power of capital, and thus contentedly to forge for themselves the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags them in its train.

But are the increase of productive capital and the rise of wages so indissolubly connected as the bourgeois economists assert? We can hardly believe that the fatter capital becomes the more will its slave be pampered. The bourgeoisie is too enlightened, and keeps its accounts much too carefully, to care for that privilege of the feudal nobility, the ostentation of splendor among its retinue. The very conditions of bourgeois existence compel it to keep careful accounts.

We must therefore inquire more closely into the effect which the increase of productive capital has upon wages.

With the general increase of the productive capital of a bourgeois society a more manifold accumulation of labor takes place. The capitalists increase in number and size. The increase in the amount of capital increases the competition among capitalists. The increased size of individual capital gives the means of leading into the industrial battle-field mightier