m molecular
movement into mass movement in order to fulfill technical needs, it
has, in the same measure, freed industrial production from local
limits. Water power was local, steam power is free. If water power
belongs to the country, steam power is by no means limited to the
town. It is capitalistic practice which causes concentration into
cities and which makes manufacturing towns of manufacturing villages.
But thereby at the same time it undermines the essentials of its own
motive force. The first requisite of the steam engine and a prime
requisite of all branches of motive power is a sufficient quantity of
pure water. The factory town transforms all water into evil smelling
sewage. Therefore, in proportion as the concentration into cities is
the foundation of capitalistic production, each individual capitalist
tries to get away from the towns which have been necessarily produced
to the motive forces of the country. This process may be individually
observed in the textile districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The
greater industry creates new towns in the course of its progress from
the town to the country. The same phenomenon was to be observed in the
districts of the metal industry where somewhat different causes
produce identical results.

The capitalistic character of the greater industry is responsible for
this aimless blundering and these new contradictions. Only a society
which organizes its industrial forces according to a single great
harmonious plan, can permit industry to settle itself in such a manner
throughout the land as to secure its own development and the retention
and development of the most important elements of production.

The abolition of the antagonism between town and country is now not
only possible, it has become an absolute necessity for industrial
production itself. It has also become a necessity for agricultural
production, and is, above all, essential to the maintenance of the
public health. Only through the amalgamation of city and country can
the present poisoning of air, water, and localities, be put at an end
and the waste filth of the cities be used for the cultivation of
vegetation rather than the spreading of disease.

The capitalistic industry has made itself relatively independent of
local limitations for its raw materials. The textile industry works
with imported raw materials for the most part. Spanish iron ores are
worked up in England and Germany, and South American cop