one hand, and a mass of miserable ragamuffins who provided all the
millions on the other, having for themselves only enough food and
clothing to enable them to move their muscles and protect their
nakedness from the frost. Then, said Marx, when this contrast has
completed itself, the situation will be no longer tolerable. "Then the
knell of the capitalistic system will have sounded." The producers will
assert themselves under the pressure of an irresistible impulse; they
will repossess themselves of the implements of production of which they
have been so long deprived. "The expropriators will in their turn be
expropriated," and the labourers thenceforth owning the implements of
production collectively, all the wealth of the world will forever
afterwards be theirs.

This concluding portion of the gospel of Marx--its prophecies--has been
in many of its details so completely falsified by events that even his
most ardent disciples no longer insist on it. I have only mentioned it
here because of the further light which it throws on what alone, in
this discussion, concerns us--namely, the Marxian theory of labour as
the sole producer of wealth, and the absolute nullity, so far as
production goes, of every form of activity associated with the
possession of capital, or with any class but the labouring.

This theory of production, then, which has been the foundation of
socialism as a party--or, as Gronlünd, a disciple of Marx, calls it,
"its _idée mère_"--and which is still its foundation for the great
majority of socialists, we will now examine in detail, and, considering
how complex are the processes of production in the modern world, ask how
far it gives us, or fails to give us, even an approximately complete
account of them.