Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital [13]
quantity of commodities, or a greater means of nourishing and supporting men, is obtained with less capital. Although, therefore, the number of labourers must at all times depend on the quantity of circulating capital, or, as I should say, on the quantity of the products of co-existing labour, which labourers are allowed to consume, the quality of commodities they produce will depend on the efficiency of their fixed capital. Circulating capital nourishes and supports men as its quantity is increased; fixed capital as a means of nourishing and supporting men depends for its efficiency altogether on the skill of the labourer, and consequently the productive industry of a country, as far as fixed capital is concerned, is in proportion to the knowledge and skill of the people. The warmest admirers of circulating capital will not pretend that it adds in the same way as fixed capital to the productive power of the labourer. The most extraordinary visionary who ever wrote cannot suppose circulating capital adds anything to productive power. The degree and nature of the utility of both species of capital is perfectly different and distinct. The labourer subsists on what is called circulating capital; he works with fixed capital. But equal quantities or equal values of both these species of capital bring their owner precisely the same amount of profit. We may, from this single circumstance, be quite sure that the share claimed by the capitalist for the use of fixed capital is not derived from the instruments increasing the efficiency of labour, or from the utility of these instruments; and profit is derived in both cases from the power which the capitalist has over the labourer who consumes the circulating, and who uses the fixed, capital. How he obtained this power I shall not now inquire, further than to state that it is derived from the whole surface of the country, having been at one period monopolised by a few persons; and the consequent state of slavery in which the labourer formerly existed in this country, as well as throughout Europe. As the profits of the capitalist on fixed capital are not derived from the utility of these instruments, it is useless to inquire what share ought to belong to the owner of the wood and iron, and what share ought to belong to the person who uses them. He who makes the instruments is entitled, in the eye of justice, and in proportion to the labour he employs, to as great a reward as he who uses them; but he is not entitled to a greater; and he who neither makes nor uses them has no just claim to any portion of the produce. Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share. Gradually and successively has he insinuated himself betwixt them, expanding in bulk as he has been nourished by their increasingly productive labours, and separating them so widely from each other that neither can see whence that supply is drawn which each receives through the capitalist. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence. He is the middleman of all labourers; and when we compare what the skilled labour of England produces, with the produce of the untutored labour of the Irish peasantry, the middlemen of England cannot be considered as inferior in their exactions to the middlemen of Ireland. They have been more fortunate, however, and while the latter are stigmatised as oppressors, the former are honoured as benefactors. Not only do they appropriate the produce of the labourer; but they have succeeded in persuading him that they are his benefactors and employers. At least such are the doctrines of political economy; and capitalist may well be pleased with a science which both justifies their claims and holds them