Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/18

 16 the slightest idea of the actual technical process of the factory in which their capital "works." Their "work," as far as they perform any, consists in business schemes and tricks of trade. A portion of the capitalist class has even got beyond the scheming stage. They are mere useless idlers who waste in riotous living the tremendous surplus fleeced from labor.

We have seen that under the capitalist system no one engages in production of commodities for his own use. On the contrary capitalists often manufacture things of which they never consume an iota themselves. The end in view is quite different. It is simply and ultimately to reap profits, to draw cut of an investment more capital than has been put into it.

It is a maxim that labor produces all wealth. It is utterly impossible to conceive of wealth without the labor process. As the capitalists have been divorced from the labor process, as their only "work" is non-productive, it is self-evident that they add no wealth to society. Their capital is wealth in the first place appropriated from labor. When, however, they from year to year draw dividends on their investments, when their plants are becoming ever more valuable, when their personal fortunes increase apace, then it ought to be plain to everyone that the capitalist method: of appropriating labor's products is thoroughly successful.

The workers own nothing but their power to labor. A worker must find work or he will starve and suffer. To find work means plainly the sale of one's labor-power to the owner of the machine. When a worker gets work he agrees to work for a certain wage for a certain number of hours a day. During those hours his labor belongs to the employer. It is the worker's duty to give his employer all there is in him, regardless of the wages he receives. Whatever wealth the worker creates during the hours of work belongs to the employer regardless of the wages he pays. It is plain, therefore, that the less the employer pays in wages and the more the worker