But if the engines, when tried, develop some inherent defect, and he consequently can sell none of them, he may still, perhaps, get back the price of the raw metal--a petty sum, insufficient for his own needs--but his whole wage-capital will be gone, and with it his power of directing any further labour in the future.

In other words, under the system of private capitalism, if labour has been directed by any man in an unsuccessful way, the resulting products being such that nobody cares to buy them, or in exact proportion as this result is approached, the man's implement of direction passes out of his hands altogether; and the simple fact of his having directed labour ill deprives him of the means of directing or of misdirecting it again.
But under a system of state socialism the situation would be wholly changed.

Private capitalism is, in this respect, self-acting, and acts with absolute accuracy, because wage-capital being divided into a multitude of independent reservoirs, its waste at any one point brings about its own remedy.

Each reservoir is like a mill-pond which automatically begins to dry up whenever its contents are employed in actuating a useless mill; and the man who has wasted his water is able to waste no more.

But the moment the divisions between the reservoirs are broken down, and the separate capitals contained in them become, as would be the case under socialism, fused together like the waters of a single lake, the director of labour who so misused any portion of this fluid stock that the products of labour, as directed by him, failed to replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really different origin.