"Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social
productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the
individual labourer; all means for the development of production
transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation
of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a
man, degrade him to the level of an appendage to a machine, destroy
every remnant of charm in his work, and turn it into a hated toil;
they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the
labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it
as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he
works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more
hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into
working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the
Juggernaut of Capital. But all methods for the production of surplus
value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every
extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of
those methods. It follows, therefore, that in proportion as capital
accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must
grow worse. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the
same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance,
brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side
of the class that produces its own product in the form of
capital."--("Capital" (German), Vol. I., pp. 660-1.)
The result of the capitalist social order is the unfolding of the
productive forces, the efflorescence of science, the expansion of
material civilisation, the dividing of society into antagonistic
classes, the conferring of economic power on the few, and the
enslavement and degradation of the many.
8. _Economic Contradictions. Decay of Society and its Reconstruction._
As the ripening of the capitalist social order to its highest point
proceeds, its innate contradictions develop, and announce distinctly
the fact that Capitalism has outlived its usefulness, while new life,
a higher form of society, is emerging from its womb. The most
important contradictions are:
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