features, not, as Marx declared it to be, a crystallisation of labour,
but a crystallisation of the ability by which labour has been directed;
but this revised explanation tells us nothing of the means by which the
direction is accomplished. Still less is any light thrown on the
question by the nature of circulating capital, as Adam Smith understands
it.

The kind of capital which alone concerns us here is a kind which
resembles circulating capital in respect of its material form, and is
often indeed in this respect identical with it; but it differs from
circulating capital in respect of the use made of it. Such capital we
may call wage-capital. Wage-capital, although in practice it disguises
itself under the form of money, is essentially a stock of goods which
are the daily necessaries of life, but which, instead of being sold to
the public, like the goods of the store-keeper, at a profit, are
distributed by their possessor among a special group of labourers on
conditions. The first of these is naturally that the labourers do work
of some sort. The second condition, and the one that concerns us here,
is that, besides doing work of some sort, each labourer shall do the
work which the distributer of the goods prescribes to him.

Here we have before us the means by which, in the modern world, the
ability of the few directs the labour of the many; and, in proportion to
the quality and intensity of the directive powers that are exercised,
adds to the value of the results which this labour would have produced
otherwise. Thus in wage-capital we have the capital of the modern world
in what dynamically is its primary and parent form--a kind of capital
which improved machinery is always tending to augment, but of whose use
the machinery itself, its renewal, and its continued improvement, are
the consequences.