"the useful residue of the work of past laborers"

"Yes yes.  Don't interrupt me.  Management is a real thing, a technical matter.  But it can be controlled by labor just as by capital.  Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.  There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them.  There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest we produce.  No!  The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all.  That is why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism every stronger.  In which one percent of the population owned half of the wealth, and five percent of the population owned ninety-five percent of the wealth.  History has shown which values were real in that system.  And the sad thing is that the injustice and suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the technical means have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics of life to all."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars