at bottom, only a complaint that capital is not inexhaustible; and even those workmen who are obliged to pay most to capital would be much worse off without it. [Footnote 189-1: The Greeks very appropriately call interest τόκος, i. e., that which is born. In the loaning of capital productively invested, the creditor, in the interest received, consumes the real produce of his property. If the debtor has consumed the property unproductively, the creditor indeed lives on the debtor's other returns or supplies; which, however, without his intervention would probably have been consumed by their owner.] [Footnote 189-2: We here, for the time being, make abstraction of all entangling surrounding circumstances. However, _Diodor._, III, 15 ff., and _Strabo_, XVI, 773, describe a very similar condition of things among the Ichthyographs; also _Hildebrand_, Reise, um die Erde, III, 2, in China. In the Sudan, whole generations fetch water every day from a distant town, instead of working for a few weeks to dig a deep well nearer home. (_Barth_, Afr. Reise, III, 297.)] [Footnote 189-3: The most recent relapse into the old error of the unproductiveness of capital, viz.: that of _Karl Marx_ (Das Kapital; Kritik der polit. Oekonomie, I, 167) is a turning round and round of the author in the vicious circle of his demonstration. If the value of every commodity depends simply on the labor necessary to bring it into existence, or on the time of labor required to produce it, it is self-evident that the value of the capital consumed for the purpose of its production, can at most be only preserved in the new product, and that all the additional value (_Mehrwerth_) of the latter should be ascribed to labor. (172, and passim.) Hence, strictly speaking, the capitalist who advances capital to workmen, is still bound in duty to be grateful to the latter when the value of his advance is preserved to him undiminished, (§ 173) and all interest levied by him should be considered as a payment towards the extinguishment of the capital [debt] itself. (556.) Relying on such theories, many socialists admit private property and even the right of inheritance to means of enjoyment and use capital (_Gebrauchskapitalien_) provided only that land and productive capital should pass over into the "collective property" of society, with compensation, however, to their former owners. Considering the short duration of most goods used in enjoyment or consumed, the evil consequences of a community of goods mentioned in § 81, could not be avoided to any extent by this means.