An element in the population theory was that it is supposed to 
lessen the competition among workers. The associations, by contrast, 
have the purpose of removing it and replacing it by union of 
workers. 

The economists are right when they remark against the associa- 
tions: 

1. The costs which they cause the workers are mostly greater than 
the rise in the gains they want to get. In the long run they cannot 
withstand the laws of competition. These combinations bring about 
new machines, a new division of labour, removal from one place of 
production to another. In consequence of all this a reduction of 
wages. 

2. If the combinations were to succeed in keeping the price of 
labour so high in one country that profits fell significantly in relation 
to the average profit in other countries, or so that capital was held up 
in its growth, stagnation and recession of industry would be the 
consequence, and the workers would be ruined together with their 
masters. For that, as we have seen, is the condition of the worker. His 
condition deteriorates by leaps and bounds when productive capital 
grows, and he is ruined from the start when it declines or remains 
stationary. 

3. All these objections of the bourgeois economists are, as we have 
said, correct, but only correct from their point of view.231 If in the 
associations it really were a matter only of what it appears to be, 
namely the fixing of wages, if the relationship between labour and 
capital were eternal, these combinations would be wrecked on the 
necessity of things. But they are the means of uniting the working 
class, of preparing for the overthrow of the entire old society with its 
class contradictions. And from this standpoint the workers are right 
to laugh at the clever bourgeois schoolmasters who reckon up to 
them what this civil war is costing them in fallen, injured, and 
financial sacrifices. He who wants to beat his adversary will not 
discuss with him the costs of the war. And how far the workers are 
from such mean-spiritedness is proved to the economists by the very 
fact that the best-paid workers form the most combinations and that 
the workers spend all they can scrape from their wages on forming 

political and industrial associations and meeting [the costs] of this 
movement. And if in their moments of philanthropy Messrs the 
bourgeois and their economists are so gracious as to allow in the 
minimum wage, that is, in the minimum life, a little tea, or rum, or 
sugar and meat, it must by contrast appear to them as shameful as 
incomprehensible that the workers reckon in this minimum a little of 
the costs of war against the bourgeoisie and that out of their 
revolutionary activity they even make the maximum of their 
enjoyment of life.