The method of production, however, is very different in our capitalistic era from the earlier eras. The industrial system herds the workmen into factories. Property and labor is no longer individualistic; it is social, it is corporate. Marx calls it "social production and capitalistic appropriation." Here is the eternal antagonism between the classes, the large class of laborers and the small class of the "appropriators" of their common toil. These factories, where labor is herded, spring up willy-nilly wherever there is a capitalist who desires to enter business. They flood the markets, not by mutual consent or regulation, but by individual ambitions. Each capitalist is ruled by self-interest; and self-interest impels him to make as many goods as he can and sell them at as big a profit as he can. Result, economic anarchy, called "over-production" or "under-consumption" by the economists. This leads to panics and all their attendant woes--woes that are further heaped upon the proletarian by the fact that he must compete with machinery, which, being more and more perfected, forces him out of the labor market into the street. These crises have the tendency to concentrate industry in fewer and fewer hands; the weaker capitalist must succumb to the inevitable laws of struggle and survival. The survivors fatten on the corpses of their fallen competitors. Thus the factories grow larger and larger, the number of capitalists fewer and fewer; the number of proletarian dependents multiplies; the middle class is crushed out of existence; the rich become richer and fewer, the poor more numerous and poorer. In this turmoil of social production, capitalistic appropriation, and anarchic distribution, there is discernible a reshaping of social potencies. The proletarian realizes the power of the state and sees how he may possess himself of that power and thereby gain control of the economic forces and reshape them to fit the needs of a better society. This will mean the appropriation of the means of production and distribution by society. Private capital will vanish; surplus values will belong to the people who created them; the people will be master and servant, capitalist and laborer. This is the Socialistic stage of society. It will be the result of the natural evolution of human industry. Its immediate coming will be the result of a social revolution. This revolution, this social cataclysm, is written in the nature of things. Man cannot prompt it, he cannot prevent it. He can only study the trend of things and "alleviate the birth-pangs" of the new time.