riods where
the condition of the masses was exceptionally prosperous, as in
England in the fifteenth century, there was underconsumption; men were
very far from having their entire yearly product at their own
disposal. Although underconsumption has been a constant historical
phenomenon for a thousand years, the general break down in trade, due
to overproduction, has appeared, for the first time, within the last
fifteen years. Yet the vulgar political economy of Herr Duehring
attempts to explain the new phenomenon, not by means of the new factor
of overproduction, but by means of the exceedingly old factor of
underconsumption. It is just as if one were to try and explain a
change in the relation of two mathematical quantities, one of which is
constant and the other variable, not from the fact that the variable
quantity has varied, but that the constant has remained constant. The
underconsumption of the masses is a necessary condition of all forms
of society in which robbers and robbed exist, and therefore of the
capitalist system. But it is the capitalist system which first brings
about the economic crisis. Underconsumption is a prerequisite of
crises and plays a very conspicuous role in them, but it has no more
to do with the economic crisis of the present day than it had with the
former absence of such crises.

* * * * *

In every society in which production has developed naturally, to which
class that of to-day belongs, the producers do not master the means of
production but the means of production dominate the producers.

In such a society every new leverage of production is converted into a
new means of subduing the producers beneath the means of production.
This was the cause of that instrument of production, the mightiest up
to the time of the introduction of the greater industry, the division
of labor. The first great division of labor, the separation of the
city and country, doomed the inhabitants of the rural districts to a
thousand years of stupidity and the people of the towns to be the
slaves of their own handiwork. It denied the chance of intellectual
development to the one and of physical development to the other. If
the peasant had his land and the town dweller his handiwork, it is
just as true to say that the land had the peasant and the handiwork
the townsman. As far as there was a division of labor there was also a
division of man. The rise of one single fact slaughter