But under a system of state socialism the situation would be wholly
changed. Private capitalism is, in this respect, self-acting, and acts
with absolute accuracy, because wage-capital being divided into a
multitude of independent reservoirs, its waste at any one point brings
about its own remedy. Each reservoir is like a mill-pond which
automatically begins to dry up whenever its contents are employed in
actuating a useless mill; and the man who has wasted his water is able
to waste no more. But the moment the divisions between the reservoirs
are broken down, and the separate capitals contained in them become, as
would be the case under socialism, fused together like the waters of a
single lake, the director of labour who so misused any portion of this
fluid stock that the products of labour, as directed by him, failed to
replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing
his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his
incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its
loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really
different origin. It was only in consequence of conditions resembling
these that the London County Council was enabled to continue for so long
its service of Thames steamboats, in spite of the fact that the labour
thus employed failed to reproduce, by the functions which it performed
for the public, more than a fraction of capital which was necessarily
consumed in its maintenance. Had labour been thus misdirected by any
private capitalist, his misdirection of it would have soon been checked
by his loss of the means of continuing it; but the County Council, with
the purse of the community at its back, was able, by taxing the
industrial successes of others, to refinance and prolong its own
industrial failure.

Socialists wholly overlook the importance of these considerations. Many