from my present point of view, is that of exploitation. In the form of capital it is required by labour, and with the increase in the amount of capital required to carry on modern industry labour finds it increasingly difficult to be more than the agent of capital and to avoid being the slave of capital. Ledger balances, not moral or human considerations, assign a place to labour in the industrial system. And as labour loses its power to bargain effectively with capital,[1] it becomes more liable to be ground down in the competitive market in which it is subject to the same laws as any other commodity. Thus it has come about that the ownership of property, justified as it is by the fundamental characteristics and the most primitive requirements of human nature, becomes an instrument for depriving great masses of people of property. The private ownership of the means of production implies the private ownership, by the same class, of the products themselves, and that again implies the exploitation of the workman and his condemnation to a state of poverty. Thus the present system upholds private property in such a way as to confine private property to a comparatively small class in the community.
The present system fails to do the very thing which it proposes to do, because its lack of design means that it defeats itself in its own working. It is like a man so disorganised in his nerve centres that every time
- ↑ Cf. Chap. II., p. 50.
