“You tell me that I dream.  Very good.  I’ll give you the mathematics of my dream; and here, in advance, I challenge you to show that my mathematics are wrong.  I shall develop the inevitability of the breakdown of the capitalist system, and I shall demonstrate mathematically why it must break down.  Here goes, and bear with me if at first I seem irrelevant.

“Let us, first of all, investigate a particular industrial process, and whenever I state something with which you disagree, please interrupt me.  Here is a shoe factory.  This factory takes leather and makes it into shoes.  Here is one hundred dollars’ worth of leather.  It goes through the factory and comes out in the form of shoes, worth, let us say, two hundred dollars.  What has happened?  One hundred dollars has been added to the value of the leather.  How was it added?  Let us see.

“Capital and labor added this value of one hundred dollars.  Capital furnished the factory, the machines, and paid all the expenses.  Labor furnished labor.  By the joint effort of capital and labor one hundred dollars of value was added.  Are you all agreed so far?”

Heads nodded around the table in affirmation.

“Labor and capital having produced this one hundred dollars, now proceed to divide it.  The statistics of this division are fractional; so let us, for the sake of convenience, make them roughly approximate.  Capital takes fifty dollars as its share, and labor gets in wages fifty dollars as its share.  We will not enter into the squabbling over the division.* No matter how much squabbling takes place, in one percentage or another the division is arranged.  And take notice here, that what is true of this particular industrial process is true of all industrial processes.  Am I right?”

* Everhard here clearly develops the cause of all the labor troubles of that time.  In the division of the joint-product, capital wanted all it could get, and labor wanted all it could get.  This quarrel over the division was irreconcilable.  So long as the system of capitalistic production existed, labor and capital continued to quarrel over the division of the joint-product.  It is a ludicrous spectacle to us, but we must not forget that we have seven centuries’ advantage over those that lived in that time.

Again the whole table agreed with Ernest.

“Now, suppose labor, having received its fifty dollars, wanted to buy back shoes.  It could only buy back fifty dollars’ worth.  That’s clear, isn’t it?

“And now we shift from this particular process to the sum total of all industrial processes in the United States, which includes the leather itself, raw material, transportation, selling, everything.  We will say, for the sake of round figures, that the total production of wealth in the United States is one year is four billion dollars.  Then labor has received in wages, during the same period, two billion dollars.  Four billion dollars has been produced.  How much of this can labor buy back?  Two billions.  There is no discussion of this, I am sure.  For that matter, my percentages are mild.  Because of a thousand capitalistic devices, labor cannot buy back even half of the total product.