a standard of comfort which is very much better than the miserable and precarious subsistence which would be theirs if they were obliged to depend for a livelihood on all that they could produce without the help of capital. Surplus value is continually being produced for us by the work, management and enterprise of those who went before us. All classes share in this surplus value. A small number of rich people can live without working at all. A large number of poor people get a much better life than they could produce by their own exertions. How would the forty-seven million inhabitants of the British Isles fare if there were not a tool or a machine or a wagon or a railway in them, and not a ship to bring them goods from oversea? Most of them would be dead in a month.
Capital then is the axe or plough or store of food or of seed, and labour is the man with nothing but his hands. Capital can make nothing by itself, and the owner of it, the capitalist, can only make it productive by applying labour to it, his own or a wage-earner's. Labour by itself can only gather berries or dig up roots; in order to produce, it must fashion tools and acquire a store to keep itself during the process of production. It may be answered
