process. In order that any man may direct the labour of other men, he
must, under that system, be the possessor or controller of so much
wage-capital. Now this capital--this implement of direction--in
proportion as it is employed, disappears, and is reproduced only by a
subsequent sale of the products resulting from the labour in the
direction of which it has been expended. Thus a man, we will say,
invents a new engine for motor-cars, and devotes to the production of
twenty engines of the kind all the capital which he possesses--namely,
two thousand guineas. Apart from the raw material out of which the
engines are to be constructed, his whole expenditure will consist in
paying wages to certain labourers, on condition that they work up this
metal in a manner which he prescribes to them. For the raw metal he
pays, we will say, a hundred pounds, or the odd shillings of the
guineas. He pays to twenty labourers a hundred pounds apiece as wages;
and the result is twenty engines. If the engines are successful, and if
the public will give him a hundred and fifty guineas for each of them,
the man has got his entire capital back again, with a thousand guineas
added to it, and can continue his direction of labour by means of wages,
on the same lines, and on a much more extended scale. But if the
engines, when tried, develop some inherent defect, and he consequently
can sell none of them, he may still, perhaps, get back the price of the
raw metal--a petty sum, insufficient for his own needs--but his whole
wage-capital will be gone, and with it his power of directing any
further labour in the future. In other words, under the system of
private capitalism, if labour has been directed by any man in an
unsuccessful way, the resulting products being such that nobody cares to
buy them, or in exact proportion as this result is approached, the man's
implement of direction passes out of his hands altogether; and the
simple fact of his having directed labour ill deprives him of the means
of directing or of misdirecting it again.