ver set foot in America, and who obviously can have no share in even
the mental labor of direction. A certificate of stock may belong to a
child, to a maniac, to an imbecile, to a prisoner behind the bars, and
it draws profit for its owner just the same. Stocks and bonds may lie
for months or years in a safe-deposit vault, while an estate is being
disputed, before their ownership is determined; but whoever is declared
to be the owner gets the dividends and interest "earned" during all that
time."[179]

It is an easy task to set up imaginary figures labeled "Marxism," and
then to demolish them by learned argument--but the occupation is as
fruitless as it is easy. It remains the one central fact of capitalism,
however, that a surplus-value is created by the working class and taken
by the exploiting class, from which develops the class struggle of our
time.

FOOTNOTES:

[163] _The People's Marx_, by Gabriel Deville, page 288.

[164] _Capital_, Vol. I, Kerr edition, page 41.

[165] Professor J. S. Nicholson, a rather pretentious critic of Marx,
has called sunshine a commodity because of its utility, _Elements of
Political Economy_, page 24. Upon the same ground, the song of the
skylark and the sound of ocean waves might be called commodities. Such
use of language serves for nothing but the obscuring of thought.

[166] William Petty, _A Treatise on Taxes and Constitutions_ (1662),
pages 31-32.

[167] _The Wealth of Nations_, Vol. I, Chapters V-VI.

[168] Benjamin Franklin, _Remarks and Facts Relative to the American
Paper Money_ (1764), page 267.

Marx thus speaks of Franklin as an economist: "The first sensible
analysis of exchange-value as labor-time, made so clear as to seem
almost commonplace, is to be found in the work of a man of the New
World, where the bourgeois relations of production, imported together
with their representatives, sprouted rapidly in a soil which made up its
lack of historical traditions with a surplus of _humus_. That man was
Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the fundamental law of modern
political economy in his first work, which he wrote when a mere youth
(_A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency_),
and published in 1721." _A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy_, by Karl Marx, English translation by N. I. Stone, 1894, page
62.

[169] David Ricardo, _Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_,
Chapter I, Sec. III.

[170] _Wealth of Nations