Capital, also, is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois production
relation, a production relation of bourgeois society. Are not the means of
subsistence, the instruments of labour, the raw materials of which capital con-
sists, produced and accumulated under given social conditions, in definite
social relations? Are they not utilized for new production under given social conditions, in definite social relations? And is it not just this definite social
character which turns the products serving for new production into capital?

Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labour, and
raw materials, not only of material products; it consists just as much of
exchange values. All the products of which it consists are commodities. Capital
is, therefore, not only a sum of material products; it is a sum of commodities, of
exchange values, of social magnitudes.

It is only the domination of accumulated, past, materialized labour over
direct, living labour that turns accumulated labour into capital.

Capital does not consist in accumulated labour serving living labour as a
means for new production. It consists in living labour serving accumulated
labour as a means for maintaining and multiplying the exchange value of the
latter.

The indispensable condition for a tolerable situation of the worker is,
therefore, the fastest possible growth of productive capital.

But what is the growth of productive capital? Growth of the power of
accumulated labour over living labour. Growth of the domination of the bourgeoisie over the working class. If wage labour produces the wealth of others
that rules over it, the power that is hostile to it, capital, then the means of
employment, that is, the means of subsistence, flow back to it from this hostile
power, on condition that it makes itself afresh into a part of capital, into the
lever which hurls capital anew into an accelerated movement of growth.

To say that the interests of capital and those of the workers are one and
the same is only to say that capital and wage labour are two sides of one and
the same relation. The one conditions the other, just as usurer and squanderer
condition each other.

A noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive
capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid
growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the
enjoyments of the worker have risen, the social satisfaction that they give has
fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capitalist, which are
inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the state of development
of society in general. Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we
measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their
satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.

To say that the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital is only to say that the more rapidly the worker increases the wealth of others, the richer will be the crumbs that fall to him, the greater is the number of workers that can be employed and called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent on capital be increased.