time to time, compelled, that is to say, to become wage workers in the service of the capitalists, and to create by their labour the income of the higher classes of society.[§6-13.]
“The domain of capitalist productive relationships continually extends in proportion to the continued improvement of technique, which increases the economic importance of large-scale enterprises, and leads to the crushing out of petty independent producers, converting some of them into proletarians, restricting the role of the remainder in social and economic life, and in many places making them more or less completely, more or less obviously, more or less miserably — the dependents of capital.[§14.]
“Moreover, this technical progress enables the entrepreneurs, to an increasing extent, to apply the labour of women and children to the process of producing and distributing commodities. In like measure, on the other hand, it leads to a comparative restriction of the demand on the part of the entrepreneurs for the living labour of the workers, so that the demand for labour power is necessarily inferior to the supply. Hence arise, first, an increase in the dependence of wage labour upon capital, and, secondly, a rise in the rate of exploitation.[§15.]
“This state of affairs in capitalist countries, and the continued intensification of their competition in the world market, give rise to more and more difficulty in disposing of the commodities which are produced in continually increasing quantities. Over-production, manifesting itself in more or less acute crises of production which are followed by more or less prolonged periods of stagnation, is the inevitable outcome of the development of productive strength in bourgeois society. Crises, and periods in which production is stagnant, lead, in their turn, to the more and more widespread ruin of the small producers, increase the dependence of wage labour upon capital, and give rise all the more speedily to a comparative or absolute worsening of the position of the working class.[§16.]