That such is the case might be illustrated by any number of familiar
examples. A man invents a new machine having some useful purpose--let us
say the production of some new kind of manure, which will double the
fertility of every field in the country. In order to put this machine on
the market, and make it a fact instead of a mere conception, the first
thing necessary is, as every human being knows, that the inventor shall
possess, or acquire, the control of capital. And what is the next step?
When the capital is provided, how will it first be used? It will be used
in the form of wages, or articles of daily consumption, which will be
distributed among a certain number of mechanics and other labourers, on
condition that they set about fashioning, in certain prescribed groups,
so much metal into so many prescribed shapes--some of them shaping it
into wheels, some into knives and rollers, some into sieves, rods,
cranks, cams, and eccentrics, in accordance with patterns which have
never been followed previously; and of all these individual operations
the new machine, as a practical implement, is the result. The machine is
new, and it is an addition to the wealth-producing powers of the world,
not because it embodies so much labour, but because it embodies so much
labour directed in a new way; and it is only by means of the conditions
which the possession of wage-capital enables the inventor or his
partners to impose upon every one of the labourers that the machine, as
a practical implement, comes into existence at all.

Hence we see that Marx was at once right and wrong when he said that
modern capitalism is, in its essence, monopoly. It is monopoly; but it
is not primarily, as Marx thought, a passive monopoly of improved
instruments of production. It is primarily a monopoly of products which
are essential to the life of the labourer; and it is a monopoly of
these, not in the invidious sense that the monopolists retain them for