SOCIALISM FROM UTOPIA TO SCIENCE, by F. ENGELS (3)

subota, 28. ožujka 2015.

…„The capitalist mode of production moves in these two forms of antagonizm immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that 'vicious circle,' which Fourier could not, indeed, seein his time is, that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the mouvement becomes more and more spiral , and must come to an end, like mouvement of the planets, by collision with the center. It is the compelling force of anrchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turn the great majority of men into proleterians ; and it is the masses of the proleteriat again who will finaly put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compellig force of anrachy in social production tha turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery in the modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin.

But the perfecting of machinery is the making  human labor superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of million of manual by a few machine worker, improuvment in machinery means  the displacement  of more and more of the machine-worker themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complet industrial army, as I called it in 1845., available at the time when indiustry is working at high pressure, to be cast out apon the street when the evitable crash comes, a constant dead  weight upon the limbs of the working class in its strugglefor existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level  that suits the interests of capital.,. Thus it come about , to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an  instrument for his subjugation. Thus is comes about that the economizing of the instruments of labor becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labor-, and  power based upon the normal conditions under which labor functions; tha machinery,' the most powerful instrument of shortening labor-time, become the most unfailing meas of placing every moment of laborer's time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of espanding the value of his capital.' Thus it come about that over work of some becomes preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry which hunts  after new consumers ower the whole world, forces the comsuption of the masess at home down to a starvation minimun, and in doing thus destroys its own home market. ' The law that alvays equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extend and energy of accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealt at one pole is, therefor, at the same time, accumulation of misery,agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pol , i.e., on the side of the class that produce its own product in the form of capital.“