Go with the flow

 With the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The anarchy of social production became apparent and grew to greater and greater heights. 

But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialized production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organization of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. Wherever this organization of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. 

The field of labour became a battle-ground. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begot in their turn national conflicts... modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries.

 It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organization of production in the individual workshop, and the anarchy of production in society generally.

It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin.