CAPITAL IS FOSSILISED ABILITY 315 



by right to the men whose enterprise and whose Book iv 

 intellect created them. 



Capital, then, as such, is as true a producer of And indeed 



, , . , r till they saw 



wealth as the men were who in the nrst instance that thi 



j j j i_ r ^.i_ ment could be 



produced it ; and when one of them passes a turned against 

 portion of it on to his son, and with it the income ^"^^ Lt 

 that results from it, this income is nothing that is ur s ed b y the \ 



socialists. 



stolen from other men, but is simply a part of the 

 product produced by the artificial slaves, the use of 

 whom other men for their own advantage borrow, 

 and who rightly belong to the lender because he has 

 received them from his fathers, who created them. 

 And should any socialist quarrel with this reason- 

 ing, it will be sufficient to point out to him that it 

 is neither more nor less than the reasoning which, 

 till only a few years ago, the leaders of socialism 

 themselves were never weary of employing. Capital, 

 said Lassalle, is merely labour fossilised : and so 

 long as labour was held to be the only wealth- 

 producer, the socialists urged that capital belonged 

 to the labourers, because it represented the labour 

 of their fathers, whose heirs they were. But with 

 the gradual disappearance of the doctrine that 

 labour is the sole producer, it is becoming more and 

 more evident that capital is not what Lassalle 

 thought it was that it is not fossilised labour, but 

 fossilised business ability. In other words, it does 

 not, except in its earliest stages, represent on the 

 part of producers a process of exceptional saving. 

 What it does represent is a process of exceptional 

 production. Since then the labourers, as labourers, 



