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not constitute their property. They are the property of the owners of the raw material, the machines and the articles advanced to the laborers, the possession of which enables these owners to purchase the labor-power of the working class. Out of the entire mass of produce created by the working class, it receives back but a small share.
And as we saw just now, the other share, which the capitalist class retains for itself, or at worst, has to divide with the landlord-class is becoming greater and greater with each new invention and discovery, while the share falling to the working class (calculated per head) either rises but slowly and insignificantly, or does not rise at all, and at times may even fall.
But this continuously accelerated rash of inventions and discoveries, this unprecedented daily growth of the productivity of human labor, will in the long run cause a conflict, by which our present capitalist economy must perish. On the one side unfathomable wealth and a superabundance of products which the purchasers cannot find use for. On the other side, the great mass of society, proletarized, turned into wage-workers, and thereby made unable to acquire that superabundance of products. The cleavage of society into a small, extremely rich class, and a great non-possessing class of wage-workers, causes this society to suffocate from its own superabundance, whereas the great majority of its members are hardly or not at all protected against extreme want.
Such a state becomes every day more absurd and unnecessary. It must be removed, it can be removed. A new order of society is possible in which the present class differences will be a matter of the past and where—perhaps after a short, not quite satisfactory, but morally very useful transition-period—by means of designed utilisation and further improvement of the then existing vast productive power of all members of society, with equal obligation to work will be given, in equal degree and in constantly growing abundance, the means to live
