CAPITAL AND INDUSTRY

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21229, 27 September 1940, Page 9

CAPITAL AND INDUSTRY

(To the Editor) Sir, —Having given Mr Warburton a simple, homely example of the lesolving of a conflict in his kitchen garden, an example satisfactory to the veracity of a Scotch court, he reverts to ridicule. A little humour is quite permissable if it be not overdone, but this column is too valuable to deliberately cast ridicule on a truth which can be traced throughout the golden line of philosophy from ancient Greece down to our own time.

Nevertheless, the writer will endeavour to broaden the principle that ‘development arises out of contradiction” in its application to capitalist production. We have seen how the perfectiblity of modem machinery through the medium of the anarchy of production in society is transformed into a compulsory commandment for the individual industrial capitalist constantly to improve his machinery, constantly to increase its productive force. The enormous expanding power of large-scale industry, compared with which the expansion of gases is mere child’s play, appears as a necessity for expansion that laughs at all resistance. Such counteracting pressure comes from consumption, demand, markets for the products of large-scale industry. But the capacity for the market to expand is controlled by other and far less effective laws. The expansion of the market cannot keep pace with the expansion of production; a collision becomes inevitable, culminating in slump and, worst of all, war. In these crises the contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation comes to a violent collision. The fact that the social organisation of production within the factory has developed to the point at which it has become incompatible with the planless nature of production in society which exists side by side and above it—this fact is made palpable to the capitalists themselves bv the violent concentration of capital which takes place during such crises througn the ruin of many big and even more smal' capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces—its own creation. Un the one hand the capitalist mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity any longer to control these productive forces. On the other hand these social productive forces themselves press forward with increasing though unequal force to put an end to the contradiction (and rid themselves ol their cnaractcr as exploitable capital, to the actual recognition of their character as social productive forces, culminating in social ownership and control on a planned basis). Now where does Mr Warburton stand towards the future of social development? Back to Herbert Spencer’s swan-song of individualism as given in his “Man Versus the State, ’’ or where?—-I am, etc., T. HARRIS, Frankton, September 26.