f escape from the very pertinent
question of surplus population and surplus proletariat in its relation
to labor organization and unemployment. It is true that elsewhere (2) he
goes so far as to admit that "even Malthus recognized over-population
as a necessity of modern industry, though, after his narrow fashion, he
explains it by the absolute over-growth of the laboring population, not
by their becoming relatively supernumerary." A few pages later, however,
Marx comes back again to the question of over-population, failing
to realize that it is to the capitalists' advantage that the working
classes are unceasingly prolific. "The folly is now patent," writes the
unsuspecting Marx, "of the economic wisdom that preaches to the laborers
the accommodation of their numbers to the requirements of capital. The
mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly affects
this adjustment. The first work of this adaptation is the creation of a
relatively surplus population or industrial reserve army. Its last work
is the misery of constantly extending strata of the army of labor, and
the dead weight of pauperism." A little later he ventures again in the
direction of Malthusianism so far as to admit that "the accumulation
of wealth at one pole is... at the same time the accumulation of misery,
agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation
at the opposite pole." Nevertheless, there is no indication that Marx
permitted himself to see that the proletariat accommodates its numbers
to the "requirements of capital" precisely by breeding a large, docile,
submissive and easily exploitable population.

Had the purpose of Marx been impartial and scientific, this trifling
difference might easily have been overcome and the dangers of reckless
breeding insisted upon. But beneath all this wordy pretension and
economic jargon, we detect another aim. That is the unconscious
dramatization of human society into the "class conflict." Nothing was
overlooked that might sharpen and accentuate this "conflict." Marx
depicted a great melodramatic conflict, in which all the virtues were
embodied in the proletariat and all the villainies in the capitalist.
In the end, as always in such dramas, virtue was to be rewarded and
villainy punished. The working class was the temporary victim of a
subtle but thorough conspiracy of tyranny and repression. Capitalists,
intellectuals and the BOURGEOISIE were all "in on" this diabolic
con