Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 3 - From Marx to Mao

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA
commodity—labour-power—capitalist society tends to keep
them down to the minimum price” (Das Kapital, II, 303). 29
portional relation of the various branches of production
and the consumer power of society. . . . But the more productiveness
develops, the more it finds itself at variance with
the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption
rest” (ibid., III, 1, 225-226). 30 “The limits within which
the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital
resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great
mass of producers can alone move—these limits come
continually into conflict with the methods of production
employed by capital for its purposes, which drive towards
unlimited extension of production, towards production as an
end in itself, towards unconditional development of the
social productivity of labour. . . . The capitalist mode of production
is, for this reason, a historical means of developing
the material forces of production and creating an appropriate
world market, and is, at the same time, a continual
conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding
relations of social production.” (III, 1, 232. Russ.
trans., p. 194). 31 “. . .The conditions of realisation are limited by the pro-
“The ultimate reason for all real crises
always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of
the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to
develop the productive forces as though only the absolute
consuming power of society constituted their outer limit”*
* It is this passage that the famous Ed. Bernstein (famous after
the fashion of Herostratos) quoted in his Premises of Socialism (Die
Voraussetzungen, etc., Stuttgart, 1899, S. 67). 32 Our opportunist,
of course, turning away from Marxism towards the old bourgeois
economics, hastened to announce that this is a contradiction in Marx’s
theory of crises, that Marx’s view “does not differ very much from
Rodbertus’s theory of crises.” Actually, however, the only “contradiction”
here is between Bernstein’s pretentious claims, on the one
hand, and his senseless eclecticism and refusal to delve into the meaning
of Marx’s theory, on the other. How far Bernstein failed to understand
the theory of realisation is evident from his truly strange
argument that the enormous increase in the aggregate surplus product
must necessarily imply an increase in the number of affluent people
(or an improvement in the living standard of the workers), for the
capitalists themselves, if you please, and their “servants” (sic! Seite
51-52) cannot “consume” the entire surplus product!! (Note to 2nd
edition.)
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