the deep sea of wage-slavery. If this process should be permitted freely to work out its tendencies, it would result in society being sharply divided into two unequal divisions: a few enormously rich capitalists on top, and the bulk of society at the bottom. A stage would be reached when, by reason of lack of numbers, the capitalists would really cease to be a social class, as a social class presupposes a certain minimum of numbers, and the loss in quantity would turn, for the capitalists, into a loss of the quality of their position as a social class.
Will this process work out these tendencies? And what will be its effect on the future of the capitalist system? According to Marx these tendencies of the capitalist system must run their fatal course, unless the system itself breaks down before the process is at its end. For the contradictions of the law of value which are at the basis of the capitalist system of production and distribution are such that, aside from the sociological results to which they must inevitably lead, enumerated by us above, its purely economico-mechanical existence is put in jeopardy by the laws of its own development.
The purely economico-mechanical breakdown of the capitalist system will result, according to the Marxian theory, from the inherent contradictions of the law of value, unless the development of capitalism is in some way arrested (or unless the system breaks down earlier for some other reason), in the following manner:
In the fight for the market among the individual capitalists under the rules laid down by the God Competition, each capitalist in order to survive and succeed must strive to be able to sell his goods cheaper than his competitors in the market, that is, he must be able to produce more cheaply than the others so as to be able to undersell them and still make a profit. There are various ways in which the cost of production can be lowered. They all reduce themselves, however, to one proposition: to make the share of the workingman in the product produced by him as small as possible.
