Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/17

Rh does not produce a finished product, only a part of a product, sometimes only a fiftieth or a hundredth part. A single machine therefore could make no person independent. The labor process is co-operative. But as an inheritance of earlier stages, the means of production have remained individual property, and as an inheritance of this property right the products of labor have remained the property of the owner of the machine. Capitalism, therefore, is co-operative labor and individual appropriation of the products of labor.

The very nature of the machine has demanded concentration. Individual ownership was an impossibility. Even scattered ownership was against its nature. In the beginning of capitalism it was a maxim that "competition is the life of trade." But free competition, if it means anything, means success to the successful; and this in turn means sure death to competition itself. The unsuccessful would ever be crowded out and have to join the wage working class. The keener the competition the fewer were the successful ones, and the larger and more costly the means of production became, the fewer were the favored ones that could enter the "free" race at all. Capitalism, therefore, means the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands with a corresponding increase of the wage working class, the class of the people that owns no wealth in means of production but depends for a living on the sale to the owners of the means of production of its physical and mental capacity to labor. Capitalism therefore means the division of society into two classes, the owners of the means whereby to produce the necessities of life, and the actual producers of the necessities of life.

As capitalism developed, the capitalist class became gradually entirely divorced from the labor process. So far is that true that few capitalists know or care in what kind of a factory their capital is actually invested, and fewer still have