nufactured products, becoming constantly
cheaper, are far less consumed by the working class than the food
products which are their chief articles of consumption, and are in no
way subject to any similar tendency of constantly increasing
cheapness! These are retrospects, finally, which could have value only
if they undertook investigations from every point of view into the
general position of workingmen at different ages--investigations of
the most difficult nature and to be carried on only with the utmost
circumspection, investigations for which those who talk to you about
them have not even the material at hand, and which they, therefore,
should all the more leave to special scholars.

(3) Let us now come back from this necessary digression to the
question: What influence can the consumers' leagues have upon the
situation of the working class according to the law of wages discussed
under No. 2? The answer will be a very easy one.

As long as only particular groups of workingmen unite in consumers'
leagues, general wages will not be affected thereby, and the
consumers' leagues will accordingly furnish, through lower prices, to
the workingmen who belong to them--as long as this condition
lasts--that minor relief for the oppressed condition discussed and
admitted under No. 1; but as soon as the consumers' leagues begin to
take in more and more the whole working class, then, in consequence of
the above-considered law, the inevitable result will follow that the
wage, because sustenance has become cheaper through the consumers'
leagues, will drop to just that extent.

The consumers' leagues can never, even in the slightest degree, help
the whole working class, and they can furnish to the single groups of
workingmen who compose them the above-considered aid only as long as
the example of these workingmen has not been generally followed.
Every day that the consumers' leagues extend and take in larger
numbers of the working class, even this slight relief is lost more and
more even for the workingmen who belong to them, until it drops to
zero at the time when the consumers' leagues have been joined by the
majority of the whole working class. Can anybody talk seriously of the
working class turning its attention to a means which gives it no aid
whatever as a class, and furnishes its individual members this
inconsequential relief only until the time when the class as such has
completely, or to a large extent, made use of it? If