[lbo-talk] Marx on competition

[Doug Henwood]

Offlist, someone pointed me to the source of the Marx quote on 
competition. I was thinking of it the other day in responding to 
Jonathan Tasini's claim in the Nation/Economist Wal-Mart debate, and 
amplified on his blog, that there's no such thing as a free market. 
That struck me as seriously underestimating the force of competition 
in capitalism, a point that a labor activist should take very 
seriously.

Here's the passage 
<http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm>, 
from Wage-Labour & Capital:

Effect of Capitalist Competition on the Capitalist Class, the Middle 
Class and the Working Class

We thus see how the method of production and the means of production 
are constantly enlarged, revolutionized, how division of labor 
necessarily draws after it greater division of labor, the employment 
of machinery greater employment of machinery, work upon a large scale 
work upon a still greater scale. This is the law that continually 
throws capitalist production out of its old ruts and compels capital 
to strain ever more the productive forces of labor for the very 
reason that it has already strained them - the law that grants it no 
respite, and constantly shouts in its ear: March! march! This is no 
other law than that which, within the periodical fluctuations of 
commerce, necessarily adjusts the price of a commodity to its cost of 
production.

No matter how powerful the means of production which a capitalist may 
bring into the field, competition will make their adoption general; 
and from the moment that they have been generally adopted, the sole 
result of the greater productiveness of his capital will be that he 
must furnish at the same price, 10, 20, 100 times as much as before. 
But since he must find a market for, perhaps, 1,000 times as much, in 
order to outweigh the lower selling price by the greater quantity of 
the sale; since now a more extensive sale is necessary not only to 
gain a greater profit, but also in order to replace the cost of 
production (the instrument of production itself grows always more 
costly, as we have seen), and since this more extensive sale has 
become a question of life and death not only for him, but also for 
his rivals, the old struggle must begin again, and it is all the more 
violent the more powerful the means of production already invented 
are. The division of labor and the application of machinery will 
therefore take a fresh start, and upon an even greater scale.

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