According to Marx, capitalistic production results in the creation of an industrial reserve army of unemployed laborers. This reserve army of men who are constantly looking for employment places the workers who are employed at a disadvantage in bargaining with their employers. The result of this competition is that wages are continually lowered and the condition of the workers becomes worse and worse. Their misery increases. At the same time new methods of production and the extensive use of machinery result in the concentration of industry. The many small capitalists give way to the few large capitalists. The opposition between capitalists and laboring class grows ever more intense as the numbers of the former become smaller and their wealth increases while the numbers of the latter class increase and their condition grows worse. The rich are becoming richer and fewer and the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous according to this theory. The inevitable result of these tendencies is, that when the situation becomes ultimately unendurable the workers will rise in their wrath and throttle capitalism. The expropriators will be expropriated. Socialism will be at hand.

The objection to this Marxian demonstration of the inevitability of socialism is that the facts are incorrect. The capitalist class is not becoming smaller, but on the contrary, more numerous. The number of stockholders in our great industrial enterprises is constantly growing larger and as time goes on there are ever more persons interested in the preservation of capitalism and willing to resist any threatened industrial revolution which would deprive them of their capital. On the other hand, the condition of the working class, as a whole, is very materially better than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and there is every indication that it will continue to improve. Under these conditions it is not at all true that a fatal necessity is hurrying socialism to us, whether we will or no.