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 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.