Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - MIA

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chpt. 3)home market."The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus- population, or industrial reserve army, to theextent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges ofVulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with theaccumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulationof misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., onthe side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital (Marx's Capital, p. 661)And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalist mode of production is the same asexpecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at thepositive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the battery.We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the anarchy of socialproduction, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always toimprove his machinery, always to increase its productive force. The bare possibility of extending thefield of production is transformed for him into a similarly compulsory law. The enormous expansiveforce of modern industry, compared with which that of gases is mere child's play, appears to us now as anecessity for expansion, both qualitative and quantative, that laughs at all resistance. Such resistance isoffered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of modern industry. But the capacityfor extension, extensive and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws thatwork much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension ofproduction. The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as itdoes not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalistproduction has begotten another "vicious circle".As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis broke out, the whole industrial andcommercial world, production and exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbarichangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every 10 years. Commerce is at a stand-still, the marketsare glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, creditvanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, becausethey have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy,execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted anddestroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or lessdepreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little, thepace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into theheadlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally,after breakneck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again. Wehave now, since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and at the present moment (1877), we aregoing through it for the sixth time. And the character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hitall of them off when he described the first "crise plethorique", a crisis from plethora.In these crises, the contradiction between socialized production and capitalist appropriation ends in aviolent explosion. The circulation of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means ofcirculation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and circulation ofcommodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached its apogee. The mode ofproduction is in rebellion against the mode of exchange.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm (6 of 13) [23/08/2000 17:41:19]