CHAPTER VI.
REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS, CONTINUED.
THEIR RECOGNITION OF CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY.
THEIR NEW POSITION, AND THEIR NEW THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES The reader will remember how, having first elucidated the part which exceptional mental faculties, concentrated on the direction of labour, and here called ability, play in modern production, I proceeded to the question of the means by which this direction is accomplished, and showed that these were supplied by the possession of wage-capital--capitalism thus representing no mere passive monopoly, but a system of reins which are attached to innumerable horses, and are useless except as vehicles of the skill with which the coachmen handle them.

We shall find that by implication, if not always by direct admission, the intellectual socialists of to-day are in virtual but unacknowledged agreement with this further portion of the present argument also.
In order to demonstrate that such is the case, let me briefly call attention to a point on which we shall have to dwell at much greater length presently--namely, that these socialists, though they reject the theory of production on which morally and intellectually the earlier socialism based itself, persist in making promises to the labourers precisely of the same kind as those with which the earlier socialism first whetted their appetites.

In especial besides promising them indefinitely augmented wealth, they continue to promise them also some sort of _economic emancipation_; and many of these socialists, in explicit accord with their predecessors, declare that what they mean by emancipation is the entire abolition of the wage-system.
Prominent among this number are Mr.Sidney Webb and his colleagues, who are certainly the best educated group of socialistic thinkers in England.

Mr.Webb, in particular, is a man of conspicuous talent, and few writers can afford a more favourable illustration than he does of the lines along which the socialistic theory of society is compelled, by the exigencies of logical thought, to develop itself.

Now, in proposing to abolish the wage-system, Mr.Webb and his fellow-theorists do not do so without specifying a definite substitute; and when we come to consider what their substitute is, we shall find that it implies, on their part, a full recognition of the function which wage-capital, as the instrument of ability, performs in modern production.
Now, the reader must observe that, in indicating the nature of the function in question--namely, that of providing a means by which the process of direction may be accomplished--and in showing how under the existing system wage-capital is what actually performs it, I never for a moment implied that wage-capital was the only means by which the same result might be accomplished.