l student who fully understands it will find
it of great assistance. Take, as an illustration, the phrase "the
abolition of capital" which frequently occurs in Socialist literature.
The reader who thinks of capital as consisting of _things_, such as
machinery, materials of production, money, and so on, finds the phrase
bewildering. He wonders how it is conceivable that production should go
on if these things were done away with. But the student who fully
understands the sociological principle outlined above comprehends at
once that it is not proposed to do away with the _things_, but with
_certain social relations expressed through them_. He understands that
the "abolition of capital" no more involves the destruction of the
physical things than the abolition of slavery involved the destruction
of the slave himself. What is aimed at is the social relation which is
established through the medium of the things commonly called capital.

II

In common with all the great economists, Socialists hold that wealth is
produced by human labor applied to appropriate natural objects. This, as
we have seen, does not mean that labor is the sole source of wealth.
Still less does it mean that the mere expenditure of labor upon natural
objects must inevitably result in the production of wealth. If a man
spends his time digging holes in the ground and filling them up again,
or dipping water from the ocean in a bucket and pouring it back again,
the labor so expended upon natural objects would not produce wealth of
any kind. Nor is the productivity of mental labor denied. In the term
"labor" is implied the totality of human energies expended in
production, regardless of whether those energies be physical or mental.
In modern society wealth consists of social use-values, commodities.

We must, therefore, begin our analysis of capitalist society with an
analysis of a commodity. "A commodity," says Marx, "is, in the first
place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies
human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether,
for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no
difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object
satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or
indirectly as means of production."[164] But a commodity must be
something more than an object satisfying human wants. Such objects are
simple use-values, but commodities are something e