The Changes Communism Will Create

What were the further consequences of the industrial revolution?

Big industry created in the steam engine, and other machines, the means of endlessly expanding industrial production, speeding it up, and cutting its costs.

With production thus facilitated, the free competition, which is necessarily bound up with big industry, assumed the most extreme forms; a multitude of capitalists invaded industry, and, in a short while, more was produced than was needed.

As a consequence, finished commodities could not be sold, and a so-called commercial crisis broke out. Factories had to be closed, their owners went bankrupt, and the workers were without bread. Deepest misery reigned everywhere.

After a time, the superfluous products were sold, the factories began to operate again, wages rose, and gradually business got better than ever.

But it was not long before too many commodities were again produced and a new crisis broke out, only to follow the same course as its predecessor.

Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by general revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things.

What follows from these periodic commercial crises?

1. Big industry in its earliest stage created free competition, it has now outgrown free competition.

For big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter.

So long as big industry remains on its present footing, it can be maintained only at the cost of general chaos every seven years, each time threatening the whole of civilization and not only plunging the proletarians into misery but also ruining large sections of the bourgeoisie;

hence, either that big industry must itself be given up, which is an absolute impossibility, or that it makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all.

2. The limitless expansion of production allows big industry.

This expanded production makes feasibile a social order where so much is produced that everyone can exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom.

Thus, the very qualities of big industry which currently produce misery and crises will abolish this misery and catastrophic depressions in a different form of society.

We see with the greatest clarity:

• that all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and
• that it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether.

What will this new social order have to be like?

Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and all production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals.

It will instead institute a system where all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole for the common account.

• This is according to a common plan with the participation of all members of society.

It will abolish competition and replace it with association.

The management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property.

Competition is merely how the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself.

It follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry.

Therefore, private property must be abolished and replaced by the communal ownership of goods, as:

• the common utilization of all instruments of production
• the distribution of all products according to common agreement

The abolition of private property is the shortest and most significant route to the revolution in the social order developed by industry.

This is why it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.