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Karl Kautsky

The wastefulness of the
capitalist mode of production

(1889)

Karl Kautsky, Die Verschwendung in der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise, Die neue Zeit, 7. Jg. (1889), H. 1, S. 25–35.
https://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/neuzeit.pl?id=07.00527&dok=1889&f=1889_0025&l=1889_0035.
Translation/Transcription: Daniel Gaido.
HTML Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

Bourgeois economists are wont to extol as one of the most beneficial consequences of the free competition associated with the capitalist mode of production the fact that it compels every enterprise to achieve the greatest possible output with the least possible expenditure. It compels every enterprise to increase the productivity of labour as far as possible and to restrict to the utmost the consumption of the labour power and means of production required to manufacture a particular commodity. It compels economy in relation to every factor of production, right down to lubricating oil and seemingly worthless waste.

This effect is undisputed, and it is possible that it cannot be achieved to the same extent under a different mode of production. In any case, the capitalist mode of production proved far superior to the commodity production that prevailed before the French Revolution – and in some regions even longer – which was stifled and constrained by the decaying ruins of medieval forms of production. The ossified guild-based craft industry, large-scale agricultural enterprises run by peasants reluctantly performing manual and draught labour, and small-scale peasant farms, constrained by compulsory communal land use, the fragmentation of landholdings and other remnants of the market-based system, increasingly became, in the last century, forms of production in which the lowest possible output was achieved with the greatest possible expenditure, in which the waste of labour and means of production in every single enterprise was enormous and stood in no proportion whatsoever to the level of technology already attained.

Set against these conditions, the productivity and economy that the capitalist mode of production enforced in every enterprise represented a decisive and enormous advance. Today, however, it already seems somewhat outdated to praise these effects too highly, for they are beginning to turn from advantages into evils.

Semi-capitalist commodity production, cloaked in the feudal guise that the French Revolution tore away to usher in the era of the fully capitalist mode of production, perished due to scarcity; production, particularly of foodstuffs, was increasingly unable to meet demand. The modern mode of production is suffocating in the midst of abundance. Demand is increasingly failing to keep pace with production. Yet the greater the overproduction, the fiercer the competition, and the more intense all those incentives that spur enterprises on to maximum productivity and economy.

This peculiar contradiction inherent in the capitalist mode of production would long since have rendered it impossible, long since brought its machinery to a standstill, were it not for the fact that the tendency towards productivity and economy within each enterprise is, at least to a certain extent, counteracted or mitigated by another, opposing tendency: the more the capitalist mode of production develops, the greater the drive for productivity and economy in every individual enterprise; but the greater, too, is the waste imposed by social factors in the household of every individual and, so to speak, in the household of society.

It cannot be the task of a short article to expound this proposition systematically. Some aspects of the subject are already too well known and have been so widely discussed that one can hardly hope to gain new insights from them. Others have been so neglected that their examination requires more detailed preparatory work. We reserve the right to return to various aspects of this in more detail in separate articles. For now, we shall merely provide a few illustrations of the statement above.

Marx pointed out as early as in his Capital that, whilst the capitalist mode of production imposes economy on every capitalist enterprise, it gives rise to waste in the worker’s household. One of the main causes of this is the breakdown of the working-class family. Advocates of the prevailing mode of production are quick to complain about the wastefulness of working-class women: workers could live much more comfortably on their wages if working-class women were better at managing the household. But they do not know how to cook. With a disproportionate amount of effort, they prepare dishes that are hard to digest and taste bad [1]: they do not know how to sew, nor how to keep the family’s laundry in order, and so on. These complaints are, in part, well-founded; however, it is a strange distortion to frame them as an indictment of the working class, to conclude from them that the workers themselves are to blame for their lack of prosperity, and that they could easily improve their situation through individual effort with a reasonable degree of goodwill. Where, then, does the inefficiency of working-class women stem from? From institutions that are particularly dear to the capitalists’ hearts: the employment of women and children. To demand that the working-class woman should be a housewife in the old petty-bourgeois sense and, at the same time, an industrial wage labourer who sells her entire labour power to capital; to demand that working-class children should work all day in the factory and, at the same time, learn all the skills of housekeeping – that is either thoughtless folly or deliberate malice.

Women’s and children’s labour in industry and wastefulness in the worker’s household are two elements that go hand in hand and grow together inseparably.

Another cause of waste in the worker’s household lies in the meagre and uncertain nature of his wages. This forces him, in order to satisfy his needs, to buy not what is good or durable, but what is cheapest, even if it wears out disproportionately quickly or proves unusable in relation to its price, so that it ultimately turns out to be the most expensive. He must buy adulterated food, even though he knows it does not provide him with sufficient nourishment and undermines his health – and thus fails to fully restore his labour power; he must buy the cheapest clothes and the cheapest furniture, even though he knows that for double the price he could obtain goods ten times as durable. The more the masses of the people sink into the wage-earning proletariat, the more the motto ‘cheap, even if poor quality’ becomes the watchword of consumers and, consequently, of industry too, which today produces not for use but for sale, and is therefore happy to reduce a commodity’s usefulness if this increases its marketability, which today is based primarily on cheapness. An ever-increasing proportion of the nation’s labour force is employed in the haphazard processing of worthless raw materials – or, to put it more accurately, is wasted.

Alongside the waste in workers’ households, we find it in the households of the ruling classes. This waste increases all the more as the rate and mass of surplus value grow and the circle of its recipients narrows. This scarcely requires illustration. Let us consider here just one kind of waste which is almost entirely independent of the individual will of the individual property-owners, but is imposed upon them as a social necessity: we mean that caused by changing fashions.

Nowadays, people are fond of explaining social phenomena using scientific buzzwords. The roots of ‘free competition’ – a phenomenon so young in historical terms – were found in the ‘eternal law of nature’ of the ‘struggle for existence’, and the folly of changing clothing fashions was turned into a natural necessity by attributing it to sexual selection. In doing so, one overlooked the minor detail that the very essence of fashion is change, whereas the characteristics arising from sexual selection remain unaltered over historical periods. Within the human race itself, we find that indigenous peoples cling tenaciously to their traditional dress and architecture, passing them down unchanged from generation to generation.

It is only under certain social conditions that we find a rapid change in fashions: in revolutionary times, when the character of society changes rapidly, and in times of lavish luxury, when the ruling classes receive so much surplus value or surplus product that they must squander at least a part of it in order to rid themselves of it, and when prostitution becomes a social force.

Sexual selection in the animal kingdom produces striking characteristics in males – manes, colourful plumage, antlers, singing voices, and so on. ‘Sexual selection’, as practised by high-class and low-class prostitutes, on the other hand, produces striking female attire. It is not the males who court the females, but the other way round. Any man will do, provided he has money, but not just any woman. For the men of our time, therefore, the unassuming attire, which has remained almost unchanged for decades, is sufficient; women, on the other hand, seek to attract everyone’s attention through an alluring, surprising and striking appearance. But what is most striking is the novelty. Hence the constant change in fashions. Whatever the courtesans start, the ‘respectable’ ladies must imitate, so as not to be overlooked in their search for husbands.

But that is not the only thing that brings about changes in fashion. Always being dressed in the latest fashions is a sign of prosperity, and all the more so the more rapidly fashions change. People not only want to be constantly dressed in the latest styles, they also want to show it off; the new should not merely be new, it should also be different from the old. Nothing that was in fashion last season should be wearable the next. This, too, fuels the rapid, dramatic changes. Today it is fashionable to wear dark colours, tomorrow light; today plain colours, tomorrow bright and colourful; today dresses are so tight that they make the body’s most intimate curves stand out in relief; tomorrow the dress is stretched out shapelessly and puffed up at the back by a crinoline, until the ‘modest housewife’ appears in a form that is more reminiscent of the Hottentot Venus steatopygos than of the ancient Venus kallipygos.

But it is not merely the ladies of high society who are rapidly changing their styles of dress today. We have mentioned above how cheaply and poorly workers shop. The clothes of girls and women from the working classes wear out so quickly these days that they must soon be replaced with new ones. If new, why not modern? This is entirely in keeping with the spirit of our times, which seeks ever more to blur the outward distinctions between social classes and in which everything is in a state of constant flux, everything striving for something new. In days gone by, the changing of fashions was the prerogative of the upper ten thousand. Today, the ‘ladies’ observe with moral indignation that even amongst maids and female factory workers, the ‘addiction’ to always appearing in the latest fashions is becoming increasingly widespread. A change in fashion no longer takes place within a narrow circle; its effects extend throughout the whole of society and are clearly felt in production. In one fell swoop, it devalues a vast number of items that are half-used or not yet used at all, which then gather dust as slow-moving stock or are thrown away, unless the material from which they are made can be recycled. Such a change in fashion today represents a colossal waste of products of all kinds. Yet it is precisely through this that it helps to alleviate overproduction to some extent and generates a demand for new products. It is therefore by no means the retailers and manufacturers of the goods in question who merely encourage – and sometimes even actively bring about – these rapid and abrupt changes in fashion.

Among the lower classes, changes in fashion extend only to clothing; amongst the wealthy, they also extend to the decoration of the home. Thanks to the lack of style and character in our times, they find themselves in the pleasant position of being able to change the styles of their living spaces at will: today the German Renaissance is en vogue, tomorrow a bizarre traditional style, the day after tomorrow the insipid style of the First French Empire, until one perhaps finally ends up with a jumble of oriental trinkets. It is obvious that this constant changing of furniture, wallpaper and so on entails a significant waste of labour and materials.

However, all these and other forms of waste in the household of the individual, as generated by the capitalist mode of production, are insignificant in their effects compared with those of waste in the household of society.

One of the most colossal forms of such waste is that generated by militarism. This is generally regarded as the outgrowth of a political system that has been artificially grafted onto modern society, rather than as a necessary consequence of the capitalist mode of production. There are, however, states which have so far managed to escape the burden of large standing armies to a certain extent. These include England, Switzerland and the United States. They owe this, however, not to ‘freedom’, not to their political institutions, not to the power of popular representation, but to exceptionally favourable circumstances. The United States has no neighbour that is even remotely its equal. England, owing to its insular position, is dependent above all on maintaining its navy, whilst little Switzerland finds its best protection not in its army but in the jealousy of its neighbours. Incidentally, military expenditure is also rising rapidly in these states, even though – at least in England and Switzerland – political institutions are becoming increasingly democratic.

The capitalist mode of production has forged the modern great nations together and created the antagonisms that prevail between them, compelling each of them to be constantly prepared to stand up to any adversary: antagonisms that are partly of a directly economic nature and partly of a historical-political nature, but which, in the final analysis, can also be traced back to material antagonisms. The capitalist mode of production has, however, also produced the technical foundations which alone make modern militarism possible and, given the prevailing conditions, necessary. The development of transport creates the possibility of keeping large masses of troops together and supplying them for long periods; hence the rapid growth of the armies. Modern transport systems also make it possible to rapidly deploy large numbers of people to a specific location within a few days; hence the need for constant readiness for war in order to be safe from any attack, the need for large standing armies, and the need for a numerous cavalry.

Finally, the capitalist mode of production, through the admirable large-scale industrial technology it has developed, creates both the possibility and the necessity for the constant improvement of offensive and defensive weapons on land and at sea, and the necessity for almost uninterrupted – and indeed ever-faster – changes in the systems of firearms, fortifications, warships, and so on.

There is no need to dwell further on the immense waste of labour and wealth that militarism entails. This waste is recognised and lamented by all sides; the only point of contention is whether it is necessary or not. The supporters of militarism claim that it is an eternal natural necessity, for wars have always existed and always will, and so on; its bourgeois-democratic opponents, on the other hand, regard it merely as the result of a whim of the ruling classes, which could simply be eliminated by a parliamentary resolution, by the establishment of an international court of arbitration, and the like.

It is true that, as far as we can trace the history of the human race, there have always been conflicts between different human societies that have led to fighting; but neither have these conflicts always been the same, nor has the form in which they were carried out always remained the same. Numerous conflicts that once existed between individual societies, and numerous forms of conflict, have already become impossible today. The same is likely to be true of today’s conflicts between the great powers and modern warfare. With the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production, the economic contradictions between states – which are chiefly generated by the struggle for the world market – would vanish of their own accord; the traditional contradictions, the ‘hereditary enmities’, which drew their life from the economic ones, would gradually die out. Militarism would thus rapidly become superfluous.

But seeking to eliminate militarism whilst preserving capitalism, as bourgeois democracy endeavours to do, is a utopia. The waste caused by militarism is a necessary consequence of the capitalist mode of production.

The various forms of waste caused by the lack of planning inherent in this mode of production are well known. Today, a mountain is cleared of trees, only to be reforested tomorrow at three times the cost of the timber yield, after avalanches and torrents, rushing down from the bare slopes into the valley, have caused unspeakable damage. On the outskirts of large cities, every open space is thoughtlessly built over, whilst in the centre, at great expense, houses are demolished to make way for meagre tree plantings, and so on.

Every economic crisis destroys a quantity of goods, devaluing them, rendering them unsaleable and thus useless. But even with regard to goods that eventually find a buyer, every slump in sales constitutes a waste. For under such circumstances, the goods are generally not sold straight away. They must either be stored for a long time until a buyer is found, or travel from place to place, indeed from one part of the world to another, in search of one. The resulting significant costs of storage and transport are clearly wasted.

Let us consider here just one more form of waste peculiar to the capitalist mode of production: that brought about by the growth of large cities.

Large cities are a product of commodity trade. We find them even in antiquity. But it is only under the capitalist mode of production that commodity production becomes the general form of production, that the whole of society becomes dependent on trade, and that a general rush and scramble towards the commercial centres arises, where the population becomes congested, whilst the countryside becomes depopulated and desolate in every respect.

The crowding together of large masses of people in a confined space gives rise to ever-increasing problems and presents ever-greater challenges for public health professionals. Tasks which cause little or no difficulty in the countryside, such as the provision of drinking water or the removal and disposal of waste, give rise in the big city to colossal structures, water pipes and sewers stretching for miles, and so on. With pride and delight, the eulogists of our society point to these modern wonders of the world, which so far surpass those of antiquity: and yet these much-praised triumphs of the human spirit are merely palliatives to alleviate grievances that have become unbearable, grievances of which the man of nature is entirely unaware. It takes but a few decades, often merely years, for their effectiveness to become illusory due to the growth of the urban population, making new, even grander and more costly structures necessary if the city is to remain habitable at all. In Paris, plans are already afoot for an aqueduct from Switzerland and a sewage canal leading to the sea. Such colossal structures would be utterly superfluous in a society where the contrast between town and country had been eliminated. Their construction represents a waste, which is, however, unavoidable under the modern mode of production. The waste of fertilisers involved in this is common knowledge.

This ever-increasing demand for facilities of the kind mentioned is, of course, very favourable for the development of the construction industry. The growth in demand promotes it in yet another way. The flat countryside is becoming increasingly depopulated, as its inhabitants move to the city. There are already many a village today where almost only the elderly, the infirm and children remain; the able-bodied inhabitants have almost all moved to the city. The farmhouses stand empty, and their former occupants require new homes in the city. A major building programme is required, not because of population growth, but merely because of people’s relocation – a change not brought about by the attractions of a healthier, more pleasant or more fertile region, nor by the desire to make one’s own labour more productive, but simply by the need to be closer to the large market where every commodity, including the commodity of labour, is more likely to find a buyer than in the remote areas lying far from the flow of world trade.

However, the growth of large cities is also giving rise to a certain amount of building activity in the countryside. Despite all the sanitary precautions and facilities, large cities are becoming increasingly unhealthy, and their populations are becoming increasingly degenerate. It is becoming increasingly necessary for city-dwellers, if not to counteract this effect, then at least to mitigate it, to spend part of the year outside the city in the fresh country air, in the mountains or by the sea. What was once regarded as a particular luxury of the court nobility – owning a residence in the capital and, at the same time, one in the countryside – is now increasingly becoming a general necessity for every middle-class family, even the more modest ones. Alongside the emptying farmhouses, villas and hotels are springing up, which are overflowing with guests for a few weeks a year but stand empty for the rest of the time.

The expansion of the major cities is thus leading to a steady increase in the number of houses that are only partially utilised, the construction of which constitutes a waste.

As the city grows, constant changes are also taking place within it. All commercial life is concentrated in its centre, in a relatively small district. During the day, the population – insofar as it is involved in commercial life – flocks there, as do the vast quantities of goods that the city consumes or serves as a storage hub for; from there, people and goods flow out again to the periphery or into the channels of world trade. The constant ebb and flow of people and goods increases year on year, requiring a steady expansion of transport routes within the inner city, and from time to time the construction of major new routes, as well as new space for railway stations and the like. And whilst the space remaining for houses thus becomes ever more confined, the demand for trading posts, warehouses and shops in the inner city grows. To meet this demand, the old, low-rise buildings must be replaced by new, ever-taller ones. The consequence of all this is a constant revolutionisation of the city centre – a constant demolition and reconstruction of buildings, not necessitated by population growth, nor by technical backwardness, such as dilapidation, but solely by certain characteristics of the modern mode of production.

Here too, as in all other areas it dominates, the capitalist mode of production reveals itself as a revolutionary mode of production ‘comme il faut’, which knows nothing of permanence; today it devalues what it created yesterday, seeks to render everything unusable before it has even become so, and today, without a second thought, declares all the labour invested in yesterday to be wasted, so that it may waste new labour for tomorrow.

No less than the building industry is the transport sector excessively stimulated by the growth of large cities.

The capitalist mode of production pushes, from the outset, for the most extensive and rapid development of the transport system. Each of the small medieval communities produced almost all the goods it needed itself. We read today with astonishment that there was significant wine-growing in Saxony and Brandenburg, as well as in England, during the Middle Ages. Why did this later disappear? Many a person has racked their brains over this. Has the climate become harsher? There is nothing to suggest this. It was social, not climatic, changes that ruined viticulture in Brandenburg and England. As soon as trade brought French wines to the English, it became entirely unnecessary for them to labour to produce sour wine at home when they could easily buy excellent wine.

The development of transport makes it possible for every locality, instead of producing everything it needs, to produce only that for which it is best suited, and in return to exchange it for what others can produce more easily than they can themselves; that a geographical division of labour takes place and, in this way, the greatest possible yield is achieved everywhere at the lowest possible cost. This, as the bourgeois economists assure us, is the basis of the productivity of trade.

They forget that the increase in labour productivity made possible by the development of transport can only come about fully under a mode of production in which civilised nations systematically regulate their economic relations both internally and externally. Today, under the system of free competition, the effect of modern transport is quite different.

Bourgeois economists would have us believe that trade increasingly leads to each nation specialising in the production of certain commodities for which the natural conditions are more favourable at home than elsewhere, and which it can therefore produce most cheaply; and that, in return, it exchanges with other nations those commodities of daily necessity which they can produce more cheaply than it can itself. In this way, all parties benefit, and the result is the finest harmony.

Unfortunately, there is no question of individual nations trading amongst themselves. The capitalists of the various industrial nations have goods produced in order to sell them on the domestic and world markets. They concentrate primarily on the production of those goods that are most marketable on the world market – the major bulk commodities; rather than each nation devoting itself exclusively to a few particular specialities, we find that in every major industrial nation the same branches of industry come to the fore, that each sends more or less the same goods to the world market, and that, instead of trading peacefully with one another, they compete fiercely.

As long as transport was not sufficiently developed, however, the competitiveness of each individual nation on the world market was largely determined by the natural conditions of production to which it was subject. From a certain point onwards, however, every further development in transport serves to facilitate the overcoming of the natural obstacles to production and to level out the natural differences between the various industrialised nations. The iron and steel industry, for example, is no longer dependent on the presence of rich iron ore and coal deposits. Switzerland has developed a thriving iron and steel industry, even though it has to import both iron and coal.

The colossal progress made in transport over the last half-century has not led to the concentration of production at the most suitable production sites, but rather to making production increasingly independent of the conditions dictated by nature. It has not, for example, led to products being manufactured increasingly where the raw materials are found or produced, but rather to raw materials being channelled from ever greater distances to places where, above all, the social conditions for their processing are in place: the suitable workforce, the necessary capital, a scientifically trained staff of officials, and so on. Raw and auxiliary materials flow from all corners of the globe into the major industrial centres, only to be dispatched from there once more to every corner of the world. And if only this movement were at least always a direct one! More often than not, this is not the case. The raw products must first be taken to one of the major markets of world trade, to a large city. There they are stored until they find a buyer who needs them – God knows where. Once they reach their destination, they are processed, whereupon the finished product must once again be brought to a market and wait there for a buyer who will then transport it to the place of consumption. And often the goods must travel from one market to another, only to find a buyer too late, or not at all. The greater the overproduction and the more the markets are overflowing with goods, the more likely this is to be their fate. The more developed the transport system and the lower the transport costs, the more transport labour is wasted under the rule of the capitalist mode of production.

We have already pointed out that the concentration of trade in a few centres – the large cities – leads to a waste of transport labour. However, the growth of large cities entails a further increase in transport labour, which would cease to exist if the contrast between town and country were resolved. A large city stands in direct contrast to a self-sufficient community. The latter produced all the raw materials it required itself; the large city, not a single one. The medieval peasant had everything at hand that he consumed, whether productively or unproductively; the city-dweller must obtain everything he wishes to consume, whether processed or unprocessed, from outside. A socialist society with systematically organised production would, of course, not revert to the medieval state of affairs. On the contrary, it would develop the geographical division of labour far more than it has flourished under the capitalist mode of production. But it would do so only under circumstances where the expenditure of the transport labour thus necessitated represents a saving, not a waste. It would not have goods that can be easily produced anywhere brought to a single location from great distances. Yet this is precisely the case in the big city. As it grows, it must obtain not only water – as we have already pointed out – but also all other foodstuffs from ever greater distances: foodstuffs that any agricultural economy can easily produce, and which, were the opposition between town and country abolished, would be available almost everywhere without transport costs. For example, milk, eggs, certain varieties of vegetables and fruit. 2c. Today, to meet its demand for milk, London must rely not only on almost the whole of England, but also on n Holland; to obtain sufficient eggs, it must turn as far afield as Italy and Hungary. Even New York is said to source Hungarian eggs. What a waste of packing and transport labour!

A further waste of transport labour is caused by the physical distance between home and workplace, a distance which, on average, is becoming ever greater in the major cities. The associated labour involved in railways, buses, horse-drawn trams, etc., is largely wasted labour which would not be necessary under different conditions of production.

Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that, despite constant improvements in technology – which render more and more workers redundant in relation to the output – the transport sector, and indeed the construction sector, are showing steady growth and employing ever more workers.

A few figures may illustrate this. In England, the number of people employed in agriculture fell by 419,000, or 26 per cent, between 1851 and 1881. The number of industrial workers rose from 2,754,800 to 3,599,000, an increase of 844,200, or 30.6 per cent. During the same period, however, the total working population increased by 39 per cent. The number of industrial workers employed therefore fell in relative terms between 1851 and 1881.

Let us compare this with the transport and construction sectors in England. The number of people employed in the transport sector 

So, compared with a population increase of 39 per cent, we find an increase of almost 90 per cent in the transport sector – almost a doubling!

In the construction sector, 460,700 workers were employed in 1851 and 796,500 in 1881, representing an increase of 73 per cent. Even more striking is the difference between the transport and construction sectors and industry during the decade 1871–1881. The number of workers employed was:

Within a decade that saw the most terrible trade crisis the capitalist world had ever witnessed, the number of industrial workers in England grew by only one fourteenth, whilst the number of construction workers rose by one fifth and that of transport workers by one quarter. [3]

Indeed, building and owning houses and railways is, as a rule, still a highly profitable business today. If one confines oneself solely to activity in these sectors, one might at times genuinely believe that a return to the ‘economic boom’ lies ahead.

In addition to those mentioned, there are countless other forms of waste that are inextricably linked to the capitalist mode of production and grow alongside it. Some of these ‘false expenses’ (faux frais) of capitalism are far more profound than those mentioned above; we need only recall, for example, the colossal waste of labour caused by the sudden alternation between unemployment and overwork that characterises our mode of production; the growth of unproductive occupations at the expense of productive ones, the increase in the number of vagrants, servants, prostitutes, middlemen, etc. However, these forms of labour wastage have been discussed all too often, including in this journal, for it to be necessary to go into them here.

These hints should suffice to show just how much waste is the hallmark of the capitalist mode of production, and is becoming so more and more. Thomas More had already recognised this, but the contradictions inherent in the commodity production of his time were as underdeveloped as the system itself. It took a genius to foresee them. Today, only a blind person or someone who refuses to see can fail to recognise them. Thrift is the be-all and end-all for the advocates of the capitalist mode of production; in the name of thrift, they condemn pre-capitalist modes of production just as much as the socialist mode of production that has emerged from the modern labour movement. In the name of economy, they decry the waste of a can of oil when lubricating machinery as a plunder of the national wealth; they denounce the worker who takes a day off as a criminal against society. Yet the fact that, day in and day out, countless goods are rendered unusable and squandered by social factors of the capitalist mode of production that are independent of individual whim, and that millions of workers are left idle or wasted on useless tasks, seems to them natural, indeed beneficial, as a means of maintaining social harmony. What on earth would the poor live on if there were no luxury, no waste!

From the thrift which it imposes on the individual in every enterprise, bourgeois economists derive the justification, indeed the necessity, for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. And yet this mode of production has, for decades, sustained its existence solely thanks to the most colossal wastefulness humanity has ever seen, which is a product of capitalism, inextricably linked to it.

However, however rapidly this waste may grow, the pressure of competition forces an even more rapid rise in the productive power of labour. The waste inherent in the capitalist mode of production may help to postpone the final outcome to which chronic overproduction inevitably leads, but it cannot prevent it. And the greater this waste becomes, the more glaringly evident becomes the folly of that ‘social harmony’ which is achieved by having to squander resources into an abyss in order to be able to continue exploiting and economising in the most ruthless manner.

*

Notes

1. Apart from overwork, the fact that workers’ food is difficult to digest is a major cause of the rise in ‘schnapps fever’.

2. Sailors on the high seas are not included in this figure; only those residing in England at the time of the census are counted.

3. According to a compilation published by Mr Booth in a paper (presented on 15 May this year to the Royal Statistical Society), out of every hundred people in employment:

It cannot be overlooked that the population of England is predominantly urban; only a third live in rural areas. Otherwise, the difference between the construction and transport sectors in London and those – across the whole of England would be even greater.

 
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Last updated on 9 Septemner 2025