While the means of production are thus ceasing to be in the strict sense private property, and require for their actual operation a collective body of laborers, while the product is becoming a social product, the owners of the means of production and the products, are becoming shareholders, and thus ceasing to perform any useful function, to have any real utility. The success of a business in former times depended upon the energy and skill of its proprietor, just as it sometimes does to-day in small manufacturing or mercantile establishments. Since the introduction of stock companies, the producing organism is no longer affected by the personal traits of those who own it; it does not know the shareholder, the present multiple proprietor, any more than the latter knows his property; it functions independently of him, and does not feel his influence, so that even a change of ownership has no effect upon it. The former functions of the proprietor are at the present time performed by wage-workers, trained engineers or managers, more or less well paid, but still wage-workers. In place of the managing proprietor, we have then a salaried manager, and he is a better manager because he is only a salaried employee, as M. de Molinari admits, when he writes: "All that is requisite is for him to possess the ability, knowledge and character demanded for his functions, and these are all qualities which are more easily and cheaply obtained on the market, divorced from capital than united to it."[5] Not only is the proprietary class, "the haves," losing all social utility, but, more than this, it is becoming baneful through its exclusive pre-occupation with personal profits. Baneful it is henceforth for all branches of social production which the mad and unorganized pursuit of profits subjects to disastrous perturbations, to periodical crises swamping the market and lasting amid failures and shut-downs until the outlets for goods once more open up; baneful for all the workers, worked to utter exhaustion in periods of business activity and reduced to wretched poverty in periods of industrial depression, during which they suffer from want of everything, because there is, relatively to the purchasing power of the people, too much of everything--(here we see once more the creator dominated by the creation, the producers by their products, just as in the cases formerly noticed of the human intelligence and the economic environment, of the machine and the workman); baneful for all consumers, who are victims of the adulteration of products begotten by the mad strife for gain; baneful for the petty capitalists, the small producers in constant danger of bankruptcy and ruin through the intensity of the war of competition which always results in the victory of the great capitalists or the great combinations of capital (trusts, etc.).