their own personal consumption, as they do in the case of rare wines and
fabrics, which can, from the nature of the case, be enjoyed by a few
only. It is a monopoly of them in the sense that the monopolists have
such a control over their distribution as enables them to control the
purely technical actions of those persons who ultimately own and consume
the whole of them.[2]

Modern capital, then, I repeat, is primarily wage-capital, such capital
as modern machinery being the direct result of its application; and
wage-capital is productive, not in virtue of any quality inherent in
itself, but merely because as a fact, under the modern system, it
constitutes the reins by which the exceptional ability of a few guides
the labour, skilled or unskilled, of the many. It is the means by which
the commonest labourer, who hardly knows the rule of three, is made to
work as though he were master of the abstruest branches of mathematics;
by which the artisan who only has a smattering--if he has as much as
that--of mechanics, metallurgy, chemistry, is made to work as though all
the sciences had been assimilated by his single brain.

Let any one consider, for example, one of the great steel bridges which
now throw their single spans over waters such as the Firth of Forth.
These structures are crystallised labour, doubtless, but they are, in
their distinctive features, not crystallised labour as such. They are
crystallised mechanics, crystallised chemistry, crystallised
mathematics--in short, crystallised intellect, knowledge, imagination,
and executive capacity, of kinds which hardly exist in a dozen minds out
of a million; and labour conduces to the production of such astonishing
structures only because it submits itself to the guidance of these
intellectual leaders. And the same is the case with modern production
generally. Though labour is essential to the production of wealth even