Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/34

 stronger. Industry leads two great armies into the field against each other, and each of these again is engaged in a battle among its own troops in its own ranks. The army among whose troops there is less fighting carries off the victory over the opposing host.

Let us suppose that there are one hundred bales of cotton in the market and at the same time purchasers for one thousand bales of cotton. In this case the demand is ten times greater than the supply. Competition among the buyers, then, will be very strong; each of them tries to get hold of one bale, if possible of the whole hundred bales. This example is no arbitrary supposition. In the history of commerce we have experienced periods of scarcity of cotton, when some capitalists united together and sought to buy up not one hundred bales, but the whole cotton supply of the world. In the given case, then, one buyer seeks to drive the others from the field by offering a relatively higher price for the bales of cotton. The cotton sellers, who perceive the troops of the enemy in the most violent contention among themselves, and are therefore fully assured of the sale of their whole one hundred bales, will beware of falling into one another’s hair in order to force down the price of cotton at the very moment in which their opponents race with one another to screw it up high. So, all of a sudden, peace reigns in the army of sellers. They stand opposed to the buyers like one man, fold their arms in philosophic content, and their claims would find no limit, did not the offers of even the most importunate of the buyers have their very definite limit.

If, then, the supply of a commodity is less than the demand for it, competition among the sellers is very slight, or there may be none at all among them. In the same proportion in which this competition decreases, the