Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/90

 accumulation or saving but of concurrent production by other labourers. The labourer has indeed no stock of food and clothing, but neither has the capitalist. The capitalists do not possess one week's stock of food and clothing for the labourers they employ. These goods are being concurrently produced by other groups of labourers. Food at least cannot be stored up. In fact, the only thing which can safely be said to be stored up is the skill of the labourer. If this were not so, the various commodities could never be produced at all. Each set of labourers relies upon the due performance by the other sets of their stipulated social tasks. This is clearly true where industrial operations are not completed within the year and there can be no exchange of products. It is not capital which stores up this skilled labour, but wages and parental care. In fact, the reason why capital is able to support and employ labour is that capital implies already the command of some labour and not the accumulation of goods.

It is true that Fixed Capital does increase the productivity of labour to an immense degree. But obviously these instruments of production are themselves the produce of labour. The economists say that they are stored-up labour and as such entitled to payment. But they are not stored up but used. They derive their utility from present labour and not because they are the result of past labour. Everything depends upon the use made of these machines, and peculiar skill is required of the labourer in using them. In the creation of fixed capital three things are required: knowledge and inventive genius; manual dexterity to make the machines; skill to use them. The great services of fixed capital are due to these qualities and not to the dead machines. And when did an inventor receive the due reward of his genius?

Circulating capital does not, like fixed capital, add to the productivity of labour, but the capitalist claims the same rate of profit on both. In either case the profit is derived from the power capital gives over labour. This power is of old standing, and is derived in the first instance from the monopoly of land and the state of slavery which consequently ensued.

The position of the capitalist is as follows. One set of labourers is making food; another is making clothing. Between them steps in the capitalist and appropriates in the process of exchange the larger part of the produce of both. He separates the two groups so that both believe that they depend upon him for their subsistence. The result is that the