Much has been made of the so-called superior knowledge and abilities of those capitalists who are actively engaged in the work of their businesses. It is sometimes the case that they have considerable technical knowledge and administrative experience and it would not be possible at short notice to find workers able to step into the shoes of the men at the top, but this is not a question of superior intelligence, but is merely the result – as every worker knows from practical experience – of the fact that those in control are able to train themselves and their sons and other selected persons to carry on the particular function required of them while the ordinary workers are deprived of opportunities to acquire any specialised knowledge except when the employer permits them to do so.

We are sometimes told that the key men of modern industry are not the workers but the inventors and discoverers. The answer to this is that it is not the capitalist who provides the inventions and discoveries but rather that the inventors and discoverers have to come to the capitalist for him to make the result of the work a commercial (that is to say a profit-making) proposition. Moreover the gigantic concerns which more and more dominate modern industry no longer leave inventions and the discovery of new methods to chance, but carry on special departments, staffed of course by members of the working-class on an employee basis, to co-operate in scientific research. Invention is becoming a highly organised branch of mass-production industry.

It is, moreover, well known that wealthy concerns operating an established process profitably, sometimes acquire patent rights of a new process only for the purpose of preventing its use by rival concerns, and without utilising the process themselves until years afterwards.

Lastly it is pointed out by capitalist economists that, in any event, the worker cannot work without tools, plant, factories, etc., and that these are provided by the capitalist. This is a mere juggling with words. These necessary items in production are themselves the product of the labour of workers engaged in those branches of industry and they are “provided” by the capitalist class in the same sense that the slave-owner “provided” the land, buildings, tools, etc., by allowing (or rather compelling) the slave to produce them ; and in the same sense that the functionaries of a Municipality “provide” the municipal buildings that are often adorned with a commemorative tablet inscribed “Erected by the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors”.

The propertied class (most of whom have inherited their property or the bulk of it) provide the instruments of production only in the formal sense that they allow the working-class to produce and operate them – on condition of course that the workers agree to their own exploitation, working part of the week to produce the equivalent of their wages and the rest of the week creating surplus-value which is the source from which all the sections of the propertied class derive their profits, rent and interest.

Before leaving this question it is instructive to notice that the Labour Party and similar organisations do not accept the Marxian explanation. Instead they endorse various theories which in greater or lesser degree approve property incomes, and deny that they are the result of the exploitation of the workers.

 Such theories sometimes concede that the landlord is a parasite but not that the industrial capitalist and money-lending capitalist is in the same category.

Basing their policy on such theories, parties like the Labour Party are prepared to change the form under which industry and land are controlled and are prepared to deprive landlords and industrial capitalists of the right to have any direct control over the day-to-day administration of industry and agriculture, but are oblivious to the fact that the paramount need of our times is the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and distribution, the suppression of all forms of property income, and the achievement of the social ownership of these means of production and their democratic control by and in the interest of the whole community.

It is for this great social transformation that the Socialist Party of Great Britain exists.

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