The capitalists and their paid lackeys of the media insist that commodities are the joint product of capital and labour. They say that the capitalist owns the factory; that he has invested his money in these institutions and that without the use of the factory and its machinery labour would be unable to produce anything. But we have seen that labour produced the factory even the money possessed by the capitalist class. To us, it seems a very simple matter to discover who make the things human beings need and use every day. We see the farmers growing cereals and vegetables, raising cattle and pigs. And we see these foods being transported to the food processing plants by railway workers, in trucks made by vehicle-builders. We wear clothing, all produced and cleaned and spun and woven into cloth and made up into garments by men and women. We live in houses, or flats, or tenements built by labour, from the materials produced by workers. Every shop, mill, factory, warehouse, every road, railway, and runway is the product of labourers and of no one else. We believe nobody will be foolish enough to question that labour produces all the commodities necessary to the life and well-being of mankind.
The employing owning class say that capital is the product of capitalists and that therefore it belongs to the capitalists and that it is “right” and “just” that the capitalists should manage their own products (their factories, shops, or mines) as they please, on whatever terms they may determine. These men who secured the mines, the rich acres produced none of these things; did not even work the land or the mines. They were merely the piratical crews that got here first and grabbed first. And the descendants of some of these early bandits are today engaged in riotous living on the incomes of countless millions, the base of which was thus secured and handed down to them by their grandfathers. First settlers who have been powerful enough and greedy enough to seize and hold the natural resources of any nation have always been able to make that nation pay continuous tribute to them, until the people revolt. You never knew a coal baron, even though the title to “his” coal mine came to his ancestors through large early land grants, permitting people to go down into the mine and get out their own coal, did you? Or a landowner who allowed the landless farmers to work the land for nothing, merely because he, himself, had paid nothing for it? Hardly. One and all the capitalists have held out for their veritable pound of flesh.
Anyone can see that if an owner of vast farmlands, purely by the power of his monopoly of those lands, rents out his farms to tenants year after year, and reinvests these rents in other business enterprises, he will accumulate more and more money capital. But we know who produces the rents paid to him, and we know also that his capital is obtained through sheer theft, and has no foundation on “justice” whatsoever. There can be no such thing as democracy, or “justice” so long as one group of men own the land and are able to hold up all other men for the privilege of using it. Under such conditions, landless men are handicapped at birth. We do not agree with the hired intellectuals who mumble so much about “the rights” of capital, and the “rewards of capital,” etc., etc. We do not think the capitalist ought to have any share in the products of labour merely because he has appropriated the capital produced by labour. To reward the capitalist for the use of this capital means rewarding the non-producer for stealing from you and me. For the capital the boss uses today is the value produced by the workers and taken away from them last month or last year.
“Just waiting for the magic wand of Capital!” is what all capitalists think when they see rich, uncultivated soil, or water-power running to waste, or when they hear of the need of a new factory. But the need is for the hand of labour, for the tools, the machinery produced by labor. The need is not that capital be invested for private profits, but that free access is given labour to produce for the comfort and happiness of mankind. In a capitalist society, however, where all the lands and the natural resources of the earth, and all the instruments of production and distribution (railroads, mines, factories, etc.) are already privately owned and controlled, Labor, the world’s true magic-maker, is shut off from the productive processes and from the power of producing a living, or of earning a living, except upon the terms laid down by the capitalist class. This is true in spite of the fact that all the capital in all the world is incapable of producing one loaf of bread, one pair of shoes, one house, one suit of clothes. Not one wheel would ever turn productively, not one machine would ever operate, not one train would ever move without the hands and brains of labour. Capital is utterly incapable of increasing itself. Unless he is a financier and banker able to filch the swag from some other capitalist who has exploited labour, the only way a capitalist may force his capital to multiply and bear the fruit of still more capital, is by the employment of labour. Without the hands and brains of labor, capital would remain forever stationary. A million pound investment would remain one million pounds. The increase in this capital is the product of labour alone. We are not discussing a situation in which another capitalist comes along and invests another million pounds in the first capitalist’s plant. What we are trying to explain is how the first capitalist, who possessed a one million pound investment, finds himself at the end of the year, with this same one million AND twenty-five or fifty pounds additional capital (or profit). The only possible increase in capital, in this instance, comes through the exploitation of wage-labour.
A landlord may double the rents he demands of his tenants for his flats or his houses. But this merely doubles the income of the landlord. This does not increase the total commodity, money, or the total capital existing in the world. It merely transfers money from the pockets of your employer (who has to pay you. higher wages in order that you may pay increased rents) INTO the pockets of the landlord. One man will be five hundred pounds “out” and the other will be five hundred ahead in the game. You wage-workers only get a bare living (when you get that) anyway. In this transaction of rent-paying there is no increase in the total capital.
Any particular capitalist investment, of a specific sum, increases only through the employment of labour by the capitalist. For labor produces new values and gives far more than the wages or portion it receives, while the capitalist takes far more than he pays in wages. The capitalist pays wages (determined by the cost of living) for the labour-power, or strength of the workers. The workers produce commodities of three or four times the value of their wages. The capitalist appropriates the difference between the value of these commodities and the wages of his employees AS HIS SHARE IN THE TRANSACTION. It is true that he usually has to share this surplus value among other capitalists, with the wholesale, and retail men and brokers, and their employees. Nevertheless, the general capital increases just in proportion as he and these other capitalists are able to hold on to that value and add it to their own capital. The increase in capital comes through the exploitation of labour and there alone. All other transactions are the mere transfer of already existing capital from one account to another and cannot possibly increase the total capital. So-called increases in the value of unimproved real estate are fictitious and only represent the power of one capitalist to hold up another capitalist. As we said before, the power of one capitalist landlord to raise the rents of shacks inhabited by the employees of other capitalists, for example, is his arbitrary monopolistic power to levy a tribute from the employing capitalists, because the landlord is able to force these employers to pay higher wages to their workers to enable them to pay his increased rents. No value and no capital is added to the total general capital. The landlord forces the corporation capitalists to divide the surplus value they have already extracted from their own workers, with him.
Adapted and abridged from this
https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/marcy/works/industrial-autocracy.htm
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