The foundation for this creed is contained in one of the concluding chapters of Marx’s Kapitall (the last but one), in which the author spoke of the concentration of capital and saw in it the “fatality of a natural law.” In the “forties,” this idea of “concentration of capital,” originated from what was going on in the textile industries, was continually recurring in the writings of all the French socialists, especially Considérant, and their German followers, and it was used by them as an argument in favour of the necessity of a social revolution. But Marx was too much of a thinker that he should not have taken notice of the subsequent developments of industrial life, which were not foreseen in 1848; if he had lived now, he surely would not have shut his eyes to the formidable growth of the numbers of small capitalists and to the middle-class fortunes which are made in a thousand ways under the shadow of the modern “millionaires.” Very likely he would have noticed also the extreme slowness with which the wrecking of small industries goes on — a slowness which could not be predicted fifty or forty years ago, because no one could foresee at that time the facilities which have been offered since for transport, the growing variety of demand, nor the cheap means which are now in use for the supply of motive power in small quantities.
Being a thinker, lie would have studied these facts, and very probably he would have mitigated the absoluteness of his earlier formulae, as in fact he did once with regard to the village community in Russia. It would be most desirable that his followers should rely less upon abstract forinulae — easy as they may be as watchwords in political struggles — and try to imitate their teacher in his analysis of concrete economical phenomena.
The Economic Interpretation of History.
Les Progrès de la Science économique depuis Adam Smith, Paris, 1890, t. i., pp. 460,461.