Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/49

 the percentage will vary by which the capitalist, who has employed the new and more productive means of production, sells above his actual cost of production.

But our capitalist does not find his privillegeprivilege [sic] very lasting. Other rival capitalists introduce, with more or less rapidity, the same machines and the same division of labor on the same or even more extended scale; and this introduction becomes general, until the price of the yard of cloth is reduced, not only below its old, but below its new cost of production.

Thus the capitalists find themselves relatively in the same position in which they stood before the introduction of the new means of production; and if they are by these means enabled to offer twice the amount of products for the same price, they now find themselves compelled to offer double the amount for less than the old price. Starting from the new scale of production the old game begins anew. There is greater subdivision of labor, more machinery, and more rapid progress in the exploitation of both. Whereupon competition brings about the same reaction against this result.

Thus we see how the mode and means of production are continually transformed and revolutionized, and production on a large scale—production on a still larger scale.

This is the law which continually drives bourgeois production out of its old track, and compels capital to intensify the productive powers of labor for the