except that it must permit the capitalist to accumulate, it is quite possible that the wages should rise to such an extent that the rate of profit of the capitalist should fall from say 10 to 0.001 per cent. In such an event"—he concludes triumphantly what he evidently considers a great argument—"'exploitation' would, of course, be of no practical importance, and the necessity of an economic revolution would be out of the question." One only marvels how a man of ordinary intelligence, not to speak of such an undoubtedly bright man like Oppenheimer, could have written down such an absurdity. Oppenheimer seems to have been so much impressed with the "fairness" of such a profit as the infinitesimal 0.001 per cent. that he forgot the little circumstance that in order that the rate of profit should fall to such an extent, and capitalistic accumulation continue with such a rate of profit, the amount of capital which a workingman must be able to set in motion, and the surplus value produced by him, must be so enormously large, that the "exploitation," as Marx understands the term, will not only be of "practical" importance but will actually be very much greater than it is with a 10 per cent. profit! This, by the way, is an additional illustration of the oft-repeated truth that facts or figures in themselves are absolutely meaningless and get their meaning only from their relation to other things.
The second, and chief reason, however, why the level of wages received by the workingman does not determine his social condition is that the high level of his wages does not in any way carry with it the security of his employment. And by this is not merely meant the fact that the weekly wages which a laborer receives is no index to his yearly earnings, by which alone his real income can be measured. Aside from this very important fact, which must always be borne in mind, there is the still more important fact that, no matter what the yearly income of the laborer is, the fact that he does not earn it by steady employment at 1-52 part of his yearly income, but by intermittent employment at
