unrelenting inroads upon rent and interest. The daily and weekly Socialist bulletins should tell, not of some trivial success at a municipal election, or of some unusually flowery flow of poppy-cock in Parliament, but of wages so raised that rent-mongers and profiteers find their incomes pro tanto reduced. And there is no other way. Profits are in substance nothing but rent. Rent, whatever its form, reduced to its elements, is nothing more and nothing less than the economic power which one man exercises more or less oppressively over another man or body of men. Destroy the power to exact rent and ipso facto rent is destroyed. This is the only way of salvation, of emancipation—the only possible release from bondage." Here we find the assumption that surplus value is produced by labour and absorbed by somebody else. In fact, as we have seen in our analysis of the previous chapters, labour produces surplus value with the assistance of management, materials and tools, which are supplied to it by other people, and takes a large part of that surplus value for itself, since its own product, if it had not this assistance, would be nothing but what it could gather in the woods or scrape out of the ground with its finger-nails.
