32 MARXISM AND DARWINISM. 



one who has a smaller capital at his disposal, although 

 the latter may be more skillful. It is not the personal 

 qualities, but the possession of money that decides who 

 the victor shall be in the stfiiggle. When the small 

 capitalists perish, they do not perisli as men but as 

 capitalists; they are not weeded out from among the 

 living, but from the bourgeoisie. They still exist, but 

 no longer as capitalists. The competition existing in 

 the capitalist system is therefore something different 

 in requisites and results from the animal struggle for 

 existence. • > ' 



Those people that perish as people are members of 

 an entirely different class, a class that does not take 

 part in the competitive struggle. The workers do not 

 compete with the capitalists, they only sell their labor 

 power to them. Owing to their being propertyless, 

 they have not even the opportunity to measure their 

 great qualities and enter a race with the capitalists. 

 Their poverty and misery cannot be attributed to the 

 fact that they fell in the competitive struggle on ac- 

 count of weakness, but because they were paid very 

 little for their labor power, it is for this very reason 

 that, although their children are born strong and 

 healthy, they perish in great mass, while the children 

 born to rich parents, although born sick, remain alive 

 by means of the nourishment and great care that is 

 bestowed on them. These children of the poor do not 

 die because they are sick or weak, but because of ex- 

 ternal cause. It is capitalism which creates all those 

 unfavorable conditions by means of exploitation, re- 

 duction of wages, unemployment, crises, bad dwell- 

 ings, and long hours of employment. It is the capital- 

 ist system that causes so many strong and healthy 

 ones to succumb. 



