No one would put forward an argument so absurd as this. And yet the wooden darts of the savage and the manure heap and the horse of the peasant are neither more nor less than portions of fixed capital, just as a steam engine is, or a cotton mill with all its plant. Fixed capital is merely productive ability which, instead of acting directly in the production of goods for the consumer, stores itself up in externalised means of production, so that it may, with accumulated force, produce such goods indirectly; and the additional wealth which a man produces by a new machine is just as much produced by himself as is the additional crop which he raises from a patch of land by the employment of a horse which he has bought, or manure which he has himself concocted. Indeed, fixed capital may be compared to a breed of artificial horses, or if we like the simile better, to {314} a race of iron slaves. The amount of wealth which the employment of a machine adds to the amount that would be produced without it by a given number of labourers, is produced by the machine itself just as truly as it would be if the machine, instead of a structure of wheels and framework, took the form of a gang of artificial negroes, who only betrayed the fact that they were not human by the heat of their breath, an occasional unearthly whistle, and the different language in which they required to have their orders given them. The machine produces this increment, but certain men produced the machine; and therefore the increment is in reality produced by the men, just as truly as when a murdered man has been killed by a bullet from a rifle, his death has been caused by the murderer who aimed and discharged the weapon. And what is true of fixed capital is true of wage capital also; for fixed capital, such as machines, buildings, or railways, is the result of wage capital, as employed to direct labour, and is therefore wage-capital externalised in the objective results of its employment. But fixed capital, or a man’s productive power externalised, differs from his productive power when exercised by himself through wage capital. It is a part of his power which he can separate from his own personality, and which he can make over to others, just as a slave-owner might make over a body of slaves; only these are slaves whose enslavement does them no wrong, and who belong {315} by right to the men whose enterprise and whose intellect created them.