(a) The most suggestive fact in this connexion is the growth of production on a large scale, resulting in the employment of machinery and in the rise of new forms of organisation such as trusts and cartels, new systems that were unknown in Marx’s day, but which have helped to confirm his suspicions. These trusts and cartels are especially important from a social point of view because they not only absorb the capital of the small independent proprietor, but swallow the medium-sized industry as well. This wonderful expansion of production on a large scale means a corresponding growth in the numbers of the proletariat, and capitalism, by increasing the number of wage-earners, helps to swell the ranks of its own enemies. “What the bourgeoisie produces, above all, therefore, are its own gravediggers.”[983]
(b) Over-production is another fruitful method. A contraction of the market results in a superabundance of workmen whose services are always available. They form a kind of industrial reserve army upon which the capitalist may draw at his pleasure—at one moment indiscriminately taking on a number of them, and throwing them back on to the streets again as soon as the demand shows signs of slackening.[984]
(c) The concentration of the rural population in towns is another contributing factor. This movement itself is the result of the disappearance of the small holder and the substitution of pastoral for arable farming, the outcome of it all being an addition to the ranks of the expropriated proletariat of an increasing number of hitherto independent proprietors and producers.
Such is the advent and growth of capitalism. It comes into the world “with bloody putrescence oozing out of every pore.” How different is the real history of capital from the idyllic presentation to which we are treated by the economists! They love to picture it as the slowly accumulated fruit of labour and abstinence, and the coexistence of the two classes, the capitalists and the workers, is supposed to date from an adventure that befell them both a few days after creation, when the good and the wise decided to follow the high road of capitalism and the idle and vicious the stony path of toil.
In reality capitalism is the outcome of class struggle—a struggle that will some day spell the ruin of the whole régime, when the expropriators will themselves be the expropriated. We are given no details as to how this is to be accomplished, and this abstention from prophecy distinguishes Marx from the Utopian socialists of the last two thousand years. His one object was to show how those very laws that led to the establishment of the régime would some day encompass its ruin.[985] The force of circumstance seemed to make self-destruction inevitable. “The capital régime,” writes one Marxian socialist, “begets its own negation, and the process is marked by that inevitability which is such a feature of all natural laws.”[986] The following facts are deduced as proofs that this process of self-destruction is already in course of being accomplished.
(a) Industrial crises, whether of over-production or under-consumption, have already become a chronic evil. The fact that to some extent they are to be regarded as the direct outcome of the capitalist system of production cannot prevent their damaging that system. The continual growth of fixed at the expense of circulating capital, involving as it does the substitution of machinery for hand labour, must also involve a continual reduction of the surplus value. In order to counteract this tendency the capitalists find themselves forced to keep ahead with production; they are driven to rely upon quantity, as they put it. The workers, on the other hand, find that it is gradually becoming impossible for them to buy the products of their labour with the wages which they get, because they never get a wage which is equal to the value of the product of their labour. Moreover, they periodically find themselves out of employment altogether and almost on the verge of starvation. Proudhon, as we have already seen, laid considerable stress upon this, and it is one of the instances in which Marx is obviously influenced by Proudhon.
The idea which underlies the Marxian theory is that every crisis involves a readjustment of the equilibrium between fixed and circulating capital. The growth of the former, though continuous, is not always uniform, and whole sections of it may occasionally be found to be without solid foundation which would warrant such expansion. But the crises which result in the destruction of these speculative accretions give a new spirit to the creation of further surplus value, which results in the creation of further fixed capital and more crises, and so the process goes on.[987]
(b) The growth of pauperism, which is the direct outcome of crises and want, is another factor. “The bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him.”[988]
(c) The rapid multiplication of joint stock companies is the final buttress with which the Marxians have strengthened their contention. Under the joint stock principle the right of property is simply reduced to the possession of a few strips of paper giving the anonymous owner the right to draw dividends in some commercial concern or other. Profit is seen in all its nakedness as a dividend which is wholly independent of all personal effort and produced entirely as the result of the workers’ drudgery. The duty of personally supervising the methods of production and of opening up new and better ways of manufacturing, which served to disguise the real character of the individual employer and to justify his existence, is no longer performed by the owner, but falls to the lot of two new functionaries, the parasitic company director on the one hand and the salaried official on the other.
Once the whole industry of a country becomes organized on a joint stock basis—or, better still, once it passes over into the hands of a trust, which is simply a manifestation of the joint-stock principle at its highest—expropriation will be a comparatively simple matter. By a mere stroke of the pen property hitherto held by private shareholders will be transferred into the custody of the State with hardly a change in the economic mechanism itself.