here the urban, increased by the rural
proletariat, constitutes a center of infection.

These facts, together with what has been said touching the effects and
results of the capitalist system of production, teach us that want and
misery with the masses are not the results of insufficiency in the means
of existence, but of an unequal distribution, that furnishes some with a
superfluity and condemns others to privation. It causes the destruction
and squandering of supplies, and, along with that, negligence in
producing these. The Malthusian assertions have sense only from the
standpoint of the system of capitalist production. Whoever stands on
that principle has every reason to defend it, otherwise the ground would
slip from under him.

On the other side, however, the capitalist system itself favors the
production of children, in so far as it needs cheap "hands" in the shape
of such in its factories. The begetting of children, moreover, often
becomes a matter of calculation with the proletariat. They cost the
parents little or nothing: they soon earn their own support. In the
house industries the proletarian is even obliged to have many children:
they equip him all the better for the competitive struggle. It certainly
is an abominable system: it conceals the pauperization of the workingman
and it provokes his own rendering of himself superfluous through the
children who work for the most miserable of wages. The immorality and
harmfulness of this system are obvious, and they spread with the
extension of capitalism. It is precisely for that reason that the
bourgeois ideologists--and all bourgeois economists are that--defend the
Malthusian theories. Hence in Germany also and in particular the notion
of "over-production" ever finds support among the bourgeoisie. Capital
is the innocent defendant, the workingman is the criminal.

Unfortunately, however, for this theory Germany has "superfluity," not
of proletarians only, but also of "intellectuals." Capital brings about
not only an over-production of soil, goods, workingmen, women and
children, but also of "officials and learning"--as we shall show. There
is only one thing that is not "superfluous" in this capitalist
world--capital and its owner, the capitalist.

If the capitalist economists are Malthusians they are simply what their
capitalist interests compel them to be. Only, they should not shift
their bourgeois whims to the shoulders of Socialist society. John Stuart