4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST motion of history. Ricardo, in the very preface of his magnum opus. defines the central problem of economics as that of division of the national prouduct among the three contending classes—landlords, capitalists and workers—and then proceeds to enunciate economic laws fully taking into account class conflicts arising therefrom. Ever since the Great French Revolution, European history has revealed what actually lies at the bottom of events— the struggle of classes. The Restoration period in France had already produced a number of historians (Thicrry, Guizot, Mignet and Thicrs) who, in summing up what was taking place, were obliged to admit that the class struggle was the key to all French history.4 Marx himself says: "No credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois econo' mists the economic anatomy of the classes."6 Marx also laid bare the anatomy of class struggles which were endemic to capitalism from its earliest beginnings. This task was carried through in the third and fourth parts of the first volume of Capital and especially in the incomparable chapter 15 on Machinery and Modern Industry. The Accumulation Process As capitalism crosses the early manufacturing period (from the mid-16th to the last third of the 18th century in England) and enters the next stage, namely, that of modern industry, the strife between workman and machine comes into prominence; women and children arc pressed into the shop-floor; older forms of handicrafts and manufacture are ousted, and a new international division of labour (a division suited to the requirements of the chief centres of modern industry) springs up, so as to convert "one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying the other part which remains a chiefly industrial field". Marx then goes on to analyse the accumulation process, showing among other things: a) how the mechanism for adjusting the rate of wages to the value of labour power is radically different from that which adjusts the price of any other commodity to its value, with the reserve army of labour playing a key role of pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works; b) how the normal outcome of capitalist accumulation must be a polarization between riches and poverty; c) why the form of the accumulation process must be one of cyclical ups andjdowns rather than a linear progression; and d) the manner in which competition of capitals