ing capital in respect of its material form, and is
often indeed in this respect identical with it; but it differs from
circulating capital in respect of the use made of it. Such capital we
may call wage-capital. Wage-capital, although in practice it disguises
itself under the form of money, is essentially a stock of goods which
are the daily necessaries of life, but which, instead of being sold to
the public, like the goods of the store-keeper, at a profit, are
distributed by their possessor among a special group of labourers on
conditions. The first of these is naturally that the labourers do work
of some sort. The second condition, and the one that concerns us here,
is that, besides doing work of some sort, each labourer shall do the
work which the distributer of the goods prescribes to him.

Here we have before us the means by which, in the modern world, the
ability of the few directs the labour of the many; and, in proportion to
the quality and intensity of the directive powers that are exercised,
adds to the value of the results which this labour would have produced
otherwise. Thus in wage-capital we have the capital of the modern world
in what dynamically is its primary and parent form--a kind of capital
which improved machinery is always tending to augment, but of whose use
the machinery itself, its renewal, and its continued improvement, are
the consequences.

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