But realities must be faced. There is no good in evading the fact that while capital is essential and of incalculable benefit to humanity, it can, at the same time, like any other human possession, be used so as to cause inconvenience, injustice, distress, degradation, death. In short, the use of capital may be socially beneficent, or it may be maleficent, anti-social. The invariable example which the workman adduces of its anti-social use is “profiteering” in many of its accustomed forms. It is a great misfortune that there is no precise term in use to describe the particular function of capital as an agent in production. Aristotle distinguished on arbitrary principles which he enunciated, and derived from the conditions of his time, between the natural beneficial use of wealth, which he calls “economics,” and the unnatural abuse of wealth, which he calls “chrematistics.” His principles are out of date, the terminological distinction which he attempted was sound. This is what happens always in industrial discussion: employers, thinking of the beneficent function played by capital in production, emphasize the dependence of Labour on capital—Labour, thinking of the anti-social uses of capital, and reasoning from the particular to the general, retorts that capital is the cause of all Labour’s troubles. If both employers and workers could, by appropriate terms, get down to discussing the same thing, there would be substantial prospect of agreement; to-day there is none. The Marxian Fallacy of Value The next notion in the workman’s mind subversive of co-operation is his idea, derived from Marx, that “the value of a commodity is the amount of abstract human labour embodied in it.” If this be true, as so many workmen now fervently believe, it follows that the employer contributes nothing whatever to the value of the manufactured product, and that the only value-producing agency is labour. In truth neither workman nor employer creates value; both unite to perform services or produce things which other circumstances, e.g. demand, cause to be of value, and they do so because of that value. But the material point is that the Marxian doctrine rules out co-operation. Logically, it implies that the only possible remedy for the present lot of the worker consists in the complete demolition of the present organization of industry. The worker who accepts the Marxian theory of value, with its corollary theory of surplus value, is a weak-kneed individual and a traitor to his brethren, if he be cajoled for a moment into co-operating with his employer, or if he hesitates to fight whole-heartedly for the eradication of the employer, root and branch, from the industrial system.