(5) A class of free labourers in accordance with the Iron Law of Wages, pocket the surplus value. Property consists not in the fruit of one’s own labour, but in the appropriation of that of others. _Eigenthum ist Fremdthum geworden._[8] In this way capital has become an independent, active, and self-generating power which oppresses its producer. Money makes money. The labour of the past, appropriated and capitalised, crushes the labour of the present. ‘The dead captures the living.’ ‘The instrument of labour, which has become independent, and has exchanged _rôles_ with the workmen, which has degraded the living workmen to a dead instrument of labour, and has developed itself, the dead instrument of labour, into the living organ of production—that is capital.’[9] In such highly metaphorical language does Lassalle sum up his history of capital. We have already commented on that aspect of it, the Iron Law of Wages, which Lassalle has most emphasised. The whole subject is much more comprehensively treated in the _Kapital_ of Karl Marx; therefore we need not dwell upon it further at present. It will not be wrong, however, to say a word here about the use of the word capital, as current in the school of socialists to which Lassalle and Marx belong. It is not applied by them in its purely economic sense, as wealth utilised for further production: it is used as the name of the social and economic system in which the owners of capital are the dominant power. With them it is the economic factor as operating under the existing legal and social conditions, with all these conditions clinging to it. It would be much better to restrict the word to its proper economic use, and employ the new word capitalism as a fairly accurate name for the existing system. The function of capital under all social systems and at all historical epochs is fundamentally the same; it is simply wealth used for the production of more wealth. But the historical, legal, and political conditions under which it is utilised vary indefinitely, as do also the technical forms in which it is embodied. No real excuse can be offered for the ignorance or confusion of language of controversialists who maintain that the object of socialism is to abolish capital. So far from abolishing capital, socialists wish to make it still more effective for social well-being by placing it under social control. What they wish to abolish is the existing system, in which capital is under the control of a class. It would be a considerable gain in clearness if this system were always called capitalism. We have already remarked upon Lassalle’s theory of the State, and his treatment of the Iron Law of Wages. Our further criticism of his social-economic position can best be brought out by reference to his controversy with Schulze-Delitzsch, the economic representative of German Liberalism.