of capital which goes to pay the workingman's wages diminishes very rapidly in comparison with the whole capital employed for the purposes of production. The result of this is, as we have seen, first, a falling rate of interest; and secondly, a growing army of unemployed, a relative over-population. But the same law which creates a relative over-population, an over-production of men, also creates an increasing over-production of goods, as the larger the army of the unemployed the smaller is the army of workingmen purchasers. This will finally result in the disproportion between that portion of the manufactured product which goes to the workingman and the whole of the yearly product of society becoming so great that the surplus-product, that is to say, that part of the manufactured product which will find no purchasers, will clog the wheels of production and bring the whole economic machinery of society to a stop.
The stock argument against this position of Marx is that while the immediate effect of the introduction of machinery is to throw out of employment the workingman employed in the branch of manufacture in which the new machines are introduced, it at the same time of itself opens up new employments. When sifted down, this amounts to the contention that the workingmen who are thrown out of employment in the old industry wherein the new machinery is introduced, are re-employed in the machinery-producing industry wherein these very machines are produced. This contention is, however, evidently untrue for the following reasons: As we have already seen, the reason for introducing a new or improved machine is a desire to cheapen the manufacture of a product. This cheapening can be effected only by saving labor, and this saving must be a very substantial one in order to make it profitable to the capitalist to introduce the new machine, because this requires a large outlay of capital. Workingmen are usually paid by the week, so that the outlay in capital for the employment of a hundred workingmen will be the weekly wage
