and economists, using this method of 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 conspiracy, all thoroughly familiar with the plot, which Marx was so sure he had uncovered.  In the last act was to occur that catastrophic revolution, with the final transformation scene of the Socialist millenium.  Presented in “scientific” phraseology, with all the authority of economic terms, “Capital” appeared at the psychological moment.  The heaven of the traditional theology had been shattered by Darwinian science, and here, dressed up in all the authority of the new science, appeared a new theology, the promise of a new heaven, an earthly paradise, with an impressive scale of rewards for the faithful and ignominious punishments for the capitalists.