This may be accomplished by directly reducing the wages of the workingman, an expedient which cannot always be resorted to, for the reason that there is a limit beyond which the wages of workingmen cannot be reduced. The more usual way, therefore, is the one which we have already noted, that is by continually substituting machinery in the place of live labor, by inventing labor-saving machinery. The result, as far as the relation of the workingman to the product produced by him, is the same in both cases: his share therein becomes smaller. In the latter case perhaps more so than in the former. An additional reason why it is more often resorted to. Hence the constant rising composition of capital which we have already observed.
There is, however, another phase of this process which is lost sight of by the individual capitalist, but which may have dire results for the capitalist class and the whole capitalist system. Besides the desired result of cheapening commodities this process has the very undesirable result of making the purchasing power of the laborer smaller in proportion. In other words, the laborer ceases to be as good a customer as he was before, and, as the capitalist must have a customer to buy his products, whether cheap or dear, and can not sell his products unless he has a customer ready and able to pay for his products, he is evidently placed in this dilemma,—either he must give his workingmen a larger share of the manufactured product in the shape of wages (or at least refrain from cutting down the share which the workingmen receive) or destroy the purchasing power of the workingmen, that is, of his future customers.
This contradiction grows and is enhanced in potentiality with the development of the capitalist system, for the reason that the development of the capitalist system consists, as we have seen, in this very cheapening of production by the supplanting of the workingman through labor-saving machinery. As the capitalist system develops, that portion
