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standards of living in the teeth of the economic tendencies of the
system." In other words, Marx's prediction as to the increasing pauperi–
zation of the working class turned out to be a "suicidal prediction":
the self-conscious organization of the working class which in many
respects was due to the labors of Marx and other socialist and trade
union leaders so altered the political and economic situation within
the capitalist nations that the original prediction failed to be borne
out. One of the unanticipated consequences of Marx's work was the
fact that the labor movement which he helped create exerted so heavy
a pressure on the workings of the capitalist system, so drastically inter–
fered with its earlier
modus operandi
that the share of the underlying
population in the national income not only failed to drop but in fact
slightly increased, so that their standard of living could rise with the
rise in productivity.
In other words it is Strachey's contention, backed up by some
ingenious statistical material, that capitalism has an innate tendency
to extreme and growing inequality, as Marx claimed, but that the
pressure of working class and social reform movements in the past
century has in fact prevented the development of this tendency. In a
curiously paradoxical way democratic anticapitalist movements can
thus be said to have preserved capitalism. Had its inherent tendencies
been left to work themselves out undisturbed, the revolutionary ex–
plosion that Marx foresaw would have occurred. There was nothing
wrong then with Marx's economic insights, but his judgment of the
political effect of mass democracy proved defective. He failed to appre–
ciate the extent to which political organization can affect economic fact.
Up to now, Strachey believes, the democratic forces that helped
modify the natural development of capitalism only succeeded in holding
their own. Democratic pressure has raised the standard of living, but
we now face a situation in which the trend toward the concentration
of economic power is so far advanced that "economic power threatens
to submerge political power unless political power can at the critical
moment obtain control of economic power." A measure of diffusion
of political power has been successfully achieved in the past, but in
the contemporary oligopolist stage economic power has been so con–
centrated that it will of necessity reach out for political power also.
Having lost whatever self-regulating characteristics it may have pos–
sessed, the economy now requires a central regulating authority.
But which interest or class is to do the regulating? Only if the
democratic forces which have in the past succeeded in neutralizing
the natural development of capitalism do in fact overreach their im-
