sm, and is impossible of removal without
at the same time abolishing the capitalist system that produces it.
That is a fact known to any Socialist with the most elementary
knowledge of the economics of capitalism. Unemployment is caused by
the exactions of the capitalist class. The prime cause of unemployment
is the robbery of the workers by which the capitalist class
appropriate the whole of the wealth produced by the workers, returning
to them just as much on the average as will keep them physically fit
to continue working. The difference between the quantities produced
and consumed by the working class (a difference continually increasing
with every increase in the productivity of labour) represents a
surplus which all the waste and all the luxury of its owners cannot
absorb, with the result that the markets are glutted with an excess of
commodities. Thus the 'over-production,' the crisis, and the
slackening of production involving an increase of unemployment."[212]

Employers of labour profit directly from unemployment, and will
therefore presumably do all they can to bring it about. "Employers and
other well-to-do people have no interest in finding work for the
workless. They benefit from the unemployment of the poor."[213] The
foregoing statement is as malicious as it is absurd. Employers do not
desire unemployment, partly from humanitarian reasons, partly because
it is a loss to them. The father of English Socialism taught: "The
labourer perishes if capital does not employ him. Capital perishes if
it does not exploit labour."[214] In other words, unemployed labour
means unemployed capital; besides, those business men who do not
actually dismiss their workers suffer also through unemployment,
because the unemployed are supported by the rates.

The doctrines that "the existing misery can be abolished, not by
increased production but by altering the distribution of the wealth
produced," and that the "capitalist system is responsible for want,
poverty, and unemployment," are manifestly unsound. A larger
consumption of food, clothing, &c., can be effected only by a larger
production. Gluts and crises, with consequent unemployment, occur, not
through general over-production, which would benefit all, but by
ill-balanced production, as the following example will prove: Imagine
an island off the African coast on which there are two villages, the
inhabitants of which require only two commodities, loin-cloths and
mealies.