In default of a better, I have, on former occasions, applied to it the name of Ability; and this will serve our purpose here--especially as it is a name which has been, of recent years, applied by many of the more thoughtful socialists themselves to certain activities of a mental and moral kind, which their conception of labour cannot be made to include, but which they are beginning to recognise as playing some part in production.

We must remember, however, that we are using it in a strictly technical sense, which will in some respects be narrower than the ordinary, and in some more comprehensive.

It will exclude all kinds of cleverness unapplied to economic production; and will include many powers, in so far as such production is affected by them, to the expression of whose scope and character it may sometimes appear inadequate.[1] And now when we have come thus far, a quite new question arises.

We have seen how ability is, by its direction of labour, the chief agency in that process which produces wealth to-day, and how it makes the amount produced, relatively to the number of the producers, so incomparably greater than it ever was under any previous system.

We have now to consider the means by which this faculty of direction is exercised.
In order to understand this, we must turn our attention again to capital, as something distinct and detached from the human efforts that have produced it; and we shall find that the conception of it which dominated the thought of Marx, and that which dominates the thought of the orthodox school of economists, either excludes altogether, or fails to reveal the nature of, that particular force and function of it which, in the modern world, are fundamental.
Capital is divided traditionally into two kinds, technically called "fixed" and "circulating." By fixed capital, which is what Marx had mainly in view, is meant machinery, and the works and structures connected with it; and it is called "fixed" on account of its comparative permanence.