capitalist profit motive is abolished and a social organisation of labour introduced, the marginal use of the machine will suddenly be increased by the whole extent of the capitalist surplus value, so that an enormous field, not to be gauged as yet, will be open to the triumphal march of the machine. This would be tangible proof that the capitalist mode of production, alleged to spur on to the optimum technical development, in fact sets large social limits to technical progress, in form of the profit motive on which it is based. It would show that as soon as these limits are abolished, technical progress will develop such a powerful drive that the technical marvels of capitalist production will be child's play in comparison. In terms of the composition of the social product, this technical transformation can only mean that, compared to the production of consumer goods, the production of producer goods--measured in units of labour time--must increase more rapidly in a socialist society than it does even to-day. Thus the relation between the two departments of social production which the Russian Marxists took to reveal typical capitalist baseness, the neglect of man's need to consume, rather proves to be the precise manifestation of the progressive subjection of nature to social labour, which will become even more striking when production is organised solely with a view to human needs. The only objective proof for Tugan Baranovski's 'fundamental law' thus collapses as a 'fundamental' confusion. His whole construction, including his 'new theory of crises', together with the 'lack of proportion', is reduced to its foundations on paper: a slavish copy of Marx's diagram of enlarged reproduction. FOOTNOTES: [316] _Studies on the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in England_ (Jena, 1901) and _Theoretical Foundations of Marxism_ (1905). [317] _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 23. [318] Ibid., p. 34. [319] Ibid., p. 333. [320] Ibid., p. 191. [321] Ibid., p. 231, italics in the original. [322] Ibid., p. 305. [323] _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 191 [324] Ibid., p. 27. [325] _Studies on the Theory and History_ ..., p. 58. [326] V. Ilyin [Lenin] 'Studies and Essays in Economics' (_Oekonomische Studien und Artikel. Zur Charakterisierung des ökonomischen Romantizismus_, St. Petersburg, 1899), p. 20.--Incidentally, the same author is responsible for the statement that enlarged reproduction begins only with capitalism. It quite escapes him that under conditions of simple reproduction, which he takes to be the rule for all pre-capitalist modes of production, we should probably never have advanced beyond the stage of the paleolithic scraper.