MARXIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY 49 This long text was deliberately quoted in order to avoid misunderstanding the law. What Marx is saying here in essence is that the inherent laws of capitalist accumulation lead to the result that capitalism is less and less capable of employing workers productively. This is one basic aspect of the contradiction between the developing productive forces and capitalist relations of production. In elaborating on the consequences of the law, Marx says: "It establishes on accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole, that is, on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital."17 Bourgeois critics of Marx as well as some vulgar ^Marxists' have misinterpreted this statement to claim that Marx hypothesizes *or asserts a declining trend of real wages under capitalism. Obviously, Marx does nothing of the kind. From Marx's analysis of relative surplus value it is possible, with a sufficient increase in the productivity of labour, for both the rate of surplus value and real wages (standard of living) of workers to rise. When he refers to ^accumulation of misery" in the above passage, he is certainly not talking in a purely economistic fashion about the real wages of employed workers. The sentences preceding the quote above make it abundantly clear that he is talking of the alienation of workers from the labour process, of the intensification between mental and manual labour, of the increasing power of capital and increasing inequality between labour and capital, of the insecure and tenuous nature of existence of the active and the reserve labour armies and of the creation and extension of a class of people who are rendered increasingly unfit for any productive work. In particular, he says: ^all methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment hi^h or low, must grow worse.5918 (Emphasis added.) To emphasize, Marx's general law of capitalist accumulation states in essence that the reserve army of labour grows with accumulation; and that while the non-producing class (the capitalist class) enjoys greater and greater concentration of wealth and power, the working class faces increasing insecurity of employment and instability of existence, this last being especially the product of recurring capitalist crises. Accumulation and Crises This article has highlighted certain basic features of the process of capitalist accumulation, specifically the tendency for (a) continual increase in the organic composition of capital, (b) centralization of capital promoted by competition and the credit sytsem, and (c) an expanding