weaken them. He is not content to be converted into, or to remain, a beast of burden; he wants to regain his moral courage, his manhood; and he knows that this can only be gained by organizing a social power which would do away with or at least lessen the insecurity of his employment, the source of his slavery. Hence his fight for the union as such, which the good people cannot understand. But the capitalists understand it, hence their savage fight just at this point. They will pay higher wages, and work their men shorter hours, and grant a lot of other "just and reasonable demands," if necessary, but they want no union, or at least the open shop, for they want to remain "master of their own house." In other words, they are content to keep their slaves a little better, but they will fight to the last ditch against the tampering with the chains of slavery, against the installing of moral courage, the fostering of the spirit of manhood in their slaves.
This struggle between capital and labor is the other side of the shield which Marx has described. It is the growing revolt of the working class which, as Marx says, is disciplined, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. This is not an independent process working independently of the so-called "impoverishment" or, rather, increased-exploitation process which we have described before, as some Revisionists seem to think, but, on the contrary, accompanies it, and is partly its result. Nor is its effect necessarily or even usually such as to counteract the effects of the first process, as some other Revisionists, notably Rudolf Goldscheid, the latest writer on this subject, think. While the growth of the discipline, union and organization may do away with a good deal of the poverty of the working class by forcing higher wages and better conditions of labor, and would therefore have the tendency of suspending in whole or in part the "impoverishment" tendency of capitalistic accumulation, as that term is used by the Marx critics, it can have no such effect on the tendencies described by Marx. That is to say, it cannot
