how do you respond to this KM quote?

[RileyE104]

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

I was just wondering, since someone I know posted it.

[mczerone]

I was just wondering, since someone I know posted it.

Capital is stored labor. You might spend 10 seconds per day winding the spring for your clock - which then can run for the 24 hours until you wind it again. The spring represents capital, doing work with an initial investment of labor to return a desired outcome in the future.

A loom works the same way: you invest some raw materials and 50 hours building a loom, and then you can be more productive in a textile factory, quickly outpacing the hand-weavers. It may require your labor to run (as a factor of production), but this is multiplying the efforts of your earlier labor in constructing the loom.

To abstain from using capital would drain your labor far quicker to produce the same quality of products.

[emazur]

Capital is a lump of clay being used by the capitalist to create products that living labor desires. It benefits both the capitalist, who creates and profits, and laborers who use the wages earned from the capitalist to purchase products necessary to live and enjoy life, and may even use his excess wages as capital of his own, or to lend it to an aspiring capitalist in exchange for interest. Either way, the capital cycle of creation ~ buying & selling ~ earning ~ saving increasingly grows the size of the economy, allowing opportunities for both the capitalist and the laborer to enhance their individual lives.