considerable extension. It cannot be extended by the employment of a larger number of workmen, for, under ordinary circumstances, it employs all the members of a community that are at its disposal. It can be extended only by making heavier the burden of toil borne by the worker—lengthening his hours of work, depriving him of holidays, etc.; but in the good old days the independent mechanic and farmer, who were not yet crowded by the competition of large production, had no inclination for this. Finally, even if they submitted to such imposition, it made little difference to production, for the productivity of labor was comparatively small.
This changes with the rise of capitalist large production. This system not only develops all the means that enable commerce to swamp any market with goods to a degree never dreamt of before, it not only expands the separate markets into a world-market that embraces the whole globe, it not only multiplies the number of the middlemen between the producer and the consumer, it also enables production to respond to every call of trade and to extend by leaps and bounds.
At present, the very fact that the workmen are wholly subject to the capitalist—that he can, virtually at will, lengthen their hours of work, suspend their Sundays, limit their night rest—enables him to increase production at a more rapid pace than was formerly possible. Furthermore, today one single hour of overwork means, with the present productivity of labor, an increase of production immensely larger than in the days of
