However successful a firm may have been in the past, it lives in fear of a rival firm investing profits in newer and more modern plant and machinery. No capitalist dare stand still for any length of time, for that would mean falling behind the competitors. And to fall behind is eventually to go bust. It is this which explains the dynamism of capitalism. The pressure on each capitalist to keep ahead of every other leads to the continual upgrading of plant and machinery.
So it is that capitalism becomes not merely a system of exploiting "free" wage workers, but also a system of compulsive accumulation. The Communist Manifesto, which Marx wrote with Engels early in 1 848, insisted:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than all the preceding generations put together.
It emphasised the continual transformation of industry under capitalism:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the means of production . . . Constant revolutionising of production . . . distinguishes the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
In Capital Marx sees the continual drive to build up ever bigger industry as the characteristic feature of capitalism:
Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he [the capitalist] ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake . . . Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for production's sake!31
The work's first volume begins with analysing production for the market ( "commodity production"), then looks at what happens when wage labour arises and labour power becomes a commodity, and finally culminates in showing how production using wage labour brings about a process of compulsive accumulation that ignores human need and individual desires.
36
Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond