V. I.

Lenin

Capitalist production develops spasmodically, in fits and
starts. At times there is “brilliant” prosperity in industry and then
comes collapse, crisis and unemployment. It cannot be otherwise under a
system of economy in which individual, isolated proprietors, independent of
each other, “work” for an unknown market and have the joint labour of
thousands and thousands of workers in big enterprises at their disposal as
private property.

An example of a “fashionable” industry that is now developing with
particular rapidity and rushing full steam ahead toward a crash is the
automobile industry. In Germany, for instance, the number of motor vehicles
of all kinds, including motor cycles, was 27,000 in 1907 and 70,000 in
1912.

In France and Britain motor vehicles are still more wide spread. Here
are the figures for comparison: Germany, 70,000, France, 88,000 and
Britain, 175,000.

In proportion to the population, therefore, Germany has only one-quarter the number of motor vehicles that Britain has, while
Russia is lagging behind to an immeasurably greater extent.

Under the capitalist organisation of economy, motor-cars are available
only to an extremely narrow circle of rich people. Industry could
produce hundreds of thousands of motor vehicles but the poverty of the
masses hampers development and brings about crashes after a few
years of “brilliant” growth.

In passing. Motor vehicles, provided they were in the service of the
majority of the population, would be of great significance because an
association of united workers could use them instead of a large number of
draught animals in farming and in carting. Such a replacement would enable millions of dessiatines now used to produce fodder for horses to be used to
produce grain, meat and milk and improve the population’s food supply.

Bourgeois economists are only trying to frighten people when they say
that agriculture cannot produce sufficient grain!

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