Nothing, therefore, is more natural or more readily explicable than the phenomenal success of Capital, a success which has rarely been paralleled in the history of intellectual productions. Translated into almost every language (recently even into Chinese); eagerly read by men of learning no less than by statesmen, by reactionaries as well as by rebels; quoted in parliaments and in meetings of the plebs, from the pulpit and from the platform, in huts and in palaces—it speedily secured a world-wide reputation for its author, making him the idol of the most irreconcilable classes and of the most contrasted stocks. Whereas, in fact, the prophetic announcement of the glorious advent of collective property led to the assembling round Marx of all the common people of the west, who hailed him as avenger, as leader, and as seer of the onward march of the proletariat; in such countries as Russia, where capitalist development was as yet in its infancy, the bourgeois classes sang the praises of the book which announced the historic mission of capitalism, and thus it was that the idol of the western pétroleurs became in the far east of Europe the fetich of bankers and manufacturers.
After the first shock of surprise, however, readers turned to the dispassionate analysis of the individual doctrines advocated in the work, and were not slow to bring to light certain gaps and sophisms. To say truth, no sovereign importance can be attributed to any of these criticisms, nor is it necessary to make much of the numerous attacks upon the statistical demonstrations of Capital.
It is undeniable that Marx's thesis of the progressive concentration of wealth into the hands of an ever-diminishing number of owners, and of the correlatively progressive impoverishment of the common people, has not been confirmed. It has indeed been confuted by the most authoritative statistics collected since the publication of the book, for these show that the greater recipients of income increase more than proportionally to the medium and lesser recipients, whereas the number of taxpayers in the lowest grades diminishes, with a proportionate increase in the number of those at a slightly higher level. Further, as far as this last fact is concerned, there can be no doubt that wages have increased of late, so that they not merely rise above the miserable level of bare subsistence specified by Lassalle, but also rise above the level (which is still miserable, though a trifle higher) expressed in the calculations of Marx.
It is, however, needful to add that the Marxist thesis merely points to a general tendency, and does not imply a denial that more or less considerable fluctuations may occur at particular periods. Moreover, the concentration of wealth does not find expression solely in the diminution of the numerical proportion between the greater and the lesser recipients of income, but in addition in a diminution of the ratio between the taxpayers and the population and in an increase in the contrast between the wealth of the recipients of income in various grades. Further, the most authoritative statistics demonstrate a growing diminution in the ratio between the owners and the general population. Again, no one can deny that the contrast between high grade and low grade incomes has of late exhibited an enormous increase; that banking concentration and the sway of the banks over industry (a source of increasing disparity in fortunes) has attained in recent years an intensity which even Marx could not have foreseen; and that, subsequently to the publication of Capital and to the death of its author, the social fauna has been enriched by an economic animal of a species previously unknown, the multimillionaire, whose existence undeniably reveals an unprecedented advance in capitalist concentration.
Nay more, after Marx's death, agrarian and industrial concentration attained preposterous proportions, such as he had never ventured to predict. In the American Union, a single landed estate will embrace territories equal to entire provinces, while industrial capital becomes amassed by milliards in the hands of a few despotic trusts, so that two-thirds of the entire working population are employed by one-twentieth of all the separate enterprises in the country. These statements concern the apex of the social pyramid; but even at the base of that structure the phenomena are far from invalidating the Marxist conception to the extent which many contend. Correlatively with the undeniable rise in wages (which, moreover, has been arrested of late, and has been replaced by a definite movement of retrogression), there has occurred an enormously greater increase in income, and therefore a deterioration in the relative condition of the workers. There has further been manifest an increasing instability of employment, so that unemployment has become more widespread and more frequent, exposing the working classes to impoverishment and incurable degradation.
Marx's other theses, however, are open to more serious objection. Retracing the thread of his demonstrations with special attention to his study of primitive accumulation, no one can deny the absolute authenticity of the facts he narrated. Nor can Marx be blamed for having restricted his historic demonstration to England; though in actual fact the expropriation of the cultivators has been carried out everywhere, openly or tacitly, and everywhere this expropriation has been an initial stage in the foundation of capitalist property. Even Russia, who flattered herself upon her independence of the universal law and upon escaping the fated expropriation of her peasants, Russia, whom Marx himself, as if in a sudden fit of mental aberration, was on the point of excluding from the sphere of his generalisations, has to submit to the invariable rule, and to witness the transformation of her independent peasant proprietors into proletarians.
The constitutional defect of this portion of Marx's book is of a very different character. Although he tells the story of the expropriation of the cultivators, he fails to explain why such expropriation must always take place, he fails to bring this great historical event beneath the sway of a universal economic theory. Now, putting aside the incongruity that a book essentially founded upon logical demonstration should all at once break off that demonstration to turn to a historical disquisition and a simple record of facts, no one has any right to construct a theoretical generalisation upon the bare narration of hard facts without referring these to the general psychological and logical causes which have produced them. It cannot be denied that in this respect Marx's demonstration presents a defect which it is impossible to make good.