of what they produce to keep them in working order, while a few capitalists become fabulously rich. "The dissolution of the primitive union of the worker with his means of production," says a follower of De Leon, "compels the productive power of the workers to assume a commodity status and flow 1

to the capitalist class. Under the capitalist system of production the division between the ruling class and the ruled class is thus based upon the ownership of the means of production.

Furthermore, it is often to the interests of the employer to substitute machinery for men. The mechanization of industrial production has reached a stage in America beyond anything realized in other countries. As one illustration of this, between 1899 and 1900, a period of tremendous growth in the meat-packing industry, the number of workers increased by 25.8 per cent, horse-power used increased 129.3 per cent, materials 75 per cent, and capital invested 97 per cent. Every new invention, every new discovery of natural forces, helped to enrich the propertied class, while human labor was, as a consequence, being more and more displaced. Machines took the jobs of men.

2

The superfluous workers had to live, and therefore had to sell their labor-power for whatever they could get. Wages fell accordingly.

Not only did the invention of machinery keep dumping unemployed skilled workers upon the country, but "the 1. Mervyn Smith in Industrial Union News, Oct. 11, 1919. 2. Carleton H. Parker, The Labor Policy of the American Trusts," Atlantic, Vol. 125, p. 230. (February, 1920)

pressure of the workers for ever higher wages and more tolerable conditions was in itself an inducement (to the capitalist) to displace the workers by machines. Repeated strikes and

labor troubles gave the most powerful impetus to the development of machinery, at the same time that they aided the process of eliminating puny capital from production and pushed on the development of combinations and trusts..Telegraphs and railroads made all of the unemployed easily accessible to the employer. Finally, it became more and more easy for the unskilled to take the places of the skilled. The introduction of modern machinery and acute specialization obliterated old craft demarcations. To such an extent has the machine eliminated skill that the jobs of those at work in one trade are endangered by the unemployed of virtually all trades.

The net result is to place the workman on as absolute a par with a machine as possible, and to organize the human element out of consideration. "Trade lines have been swal

lowed up in a common servitude of all workers to the machines which they tend," said the summons to the convention of Industrial Unionists which met in Chicago in July, 1905. "The worker, wholly separated from the land and the tools, with his skill of craftsmanship rendered useless, is sunk in the uniform mass of wage slaves."

Capitalist power, on the contrary, is being organized and concentrated to an ever increasing degree. The trend of modern industry is toward the concentration of the management of all industries into fewer and fewer hands.

1. Editorial in Industrial Union News, November 29, 1919.