Capitalist production develops in leaps and bounds. Now a "brilliant" industrial boom, now a crash, crisis, unemployment. It cannot be otherwise under such a system of economy, when individual, fragmented, and independent proprietors "labor" for an unknown market, disposing at the rights of private property of the combined labor of thousands upon thousands of workers in large enterprises.

An example of a "fashionable" industry, which is now developing especially rapidly, proceeding at full steam toward a crash, is the automobile industry. In Germany, for example, the number of automobiles of all types, including motorcycles, was 27,000 in 1907 and already 70,000 in 1912.

In France and England automobiles are far more widespread. Here are the comparative figures: Germany – 70 thousand, France – 88 thousand, England – 175 thousand.

Thus, in relation to the number of inhabitants, Germany is almost four times poorer in automobiles than England, and Russia, of course, has fallen behind immeasurably more.

Under capitalist organization of the national economy, automobiles are the possession of only the narrowest circle of wealthy people. The industry could supply hundreds of thousands of automobiles, but the poverty of the masses delays development and causes crashes after several years of "brilliant" growth.

Incidentally. The automobile business, provided it served the majority of the population, has enormous significance, for a society of united workers would replace automobiles for a very large quantity of working livestock in agriculture and in the transport industry. Such a replacement would make it possible to convert millions of desiatins now occupied by the production of fodder for horses into the production of grain, meat, and milk for the improvement of popular nutrition.

Bourgeois economists simply frighten people when they say that agriculture cannot provide sufficient grain!

*Rabochaya Pravda* No. 8, July 21, 1913. Signature: N.

Printed from the text of the newspaper *Rabochaya Pravda*