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very reason that it has already intensified them—the law that allows it no rest, but for ever whispers in its ear the words “Quick march!”
This is no other law than that which, cancelling the periodical fluctuations of business, necessarily identifies the price of a commodity with its cost of production.
However powerful the means of production which a particular capitalist may bring into the field, competition will make their adoption general; and the moment it becomes general the sole result of the greater fruitfulness of his capital is that he must now, for the same price, offer ten, twenty, a hundred times as much as before. But as he must dispose of, perhaps, a thousand times as much in order to outweigh the decrease in the selling price by the larger amount of the products sold, since a larger sale has now become necessary, not only to gain a larger profit, but also to replace the cost of production,—and the implements of production, as we have seen, always get more expensive,—and since this larger sale has become a vita) question, not only for him, but also for his rivals, the old strife continues, with all the greater violence, the more fruitful the previously discovered means of production are. Thus the subdivision of labor and the employment of new machinery take a fresh start, and proceed with still greater rapidity
And thus, whatever the power of the means of production employed, competition does its best to rob capital of the golden fruit which it produces by
