s that great
questions can be solved only in a large way, never in a small way. As
long as the universal wage is determined by the above-considered law,
the small associations will not be able to escape the prevailing
influence of it; and what does the working class as a whole gain, or
the workingman as such, whether he works for workingmen employers or
for capitalist employers? Nothing! You have only scattered the
employers to whose profit the result of your labor falls. But labor
and the working class are not set free. What does it gain by this! It
gains only depravation, only corruption, which now takes hold of it
and sets workingman as an exploiting employer against workingman. The
employers have changed in person; but labor, the only source of
production, remains, as before, dependent upon the so-called
wage--that is, the maintenance of existence. Under the influence of
this law the perversion of conceptions is so great that, in our
instance, even those workingmen stockholders not employed in the
factory, instead of recognizing that they owe their dividends to the
labor of the workmen who are employed, and accordingly that it is
they who draw the profit from the labor of the latter, will, in
defiance of this, not allow the latter even a share in the product of
their own work, not even a share of what labor has a just claim to.
Workingmen with workingmen's means and employers' hearts--that is the
repulsive caricature into which those workingmen have been changed.

And now finally one more clear and decisive proof based on these
facts. You have seen that in that factory of the Pioneers five hundred
workmen were employed and sixteen hundred workingmen held the stock.
This much must also be clear to you--that, unless we are willing to
imagine the workmen as rich people (in which case all questions are
solved--in imagination), the capital necessary for the establishment
of a factory can never be raised from the pockets of the workmen
employed in it. They will be obliged to take in a much greater number
of other workingmen stockholders, who are not employed in their
factory. In this respect the proportion in the case of that factory of
the Pioneers--sixteen hundred stockholders to five hundred workingmen
in the factory (say a proportion of only about three to one)--may be
called astonishingly favorable and unusual--as small as is in any way
possible, and to be accounted for partly by the especially fortunate
situation o