AFTER THE REVOLUTION by Diego Abad de Santillan
Published 1937 by Greenberg Publisher Facsimile edition
published 1996 by Jura Media, Sydney, Australia

A GENERAL SURVEY

The Essential Factors of Production / Index

THE principle of all economy consists in obtaining the relative maximum result from the least relative effort.

This economic law should be sufficient in itself to combat and reject the present order of capitalism because, quite contrary to obtaining the maximum result from a minimum effort, the waste is enormous, the utilisation of natural resources and technical facilities and science is negligible. We do not live as we could live -- as we should live!

What are the factors of production?

First: Nature, which furnishes man with raw material and certain natural forces.

Second: Human Labor, manual and intellectual, which elaborates and utilises the raw material.

Third: the Machinery which multiplies the power and the intensity of human labour. (Some economists call this Capital.)

Capitalism does not avail itself even of the possible resources of the first factor (Nature), as is manifest in the great extensions of uncultivated land, idle water power and unutilized raw material. As far as human labour is concerned, intellectual or manual, it is unnecessary to demonstrate that not even 50% of its capacity is utilised by the existing economic regime. There are in the world today tens of millions of workers without jobs. Professional men and scientists are vegetating and wandering about in the midst of privation, without means of realising their studies and their experiments. Only a very minor number of professional men and scientists succeed in selling their services to the potentates of the capitalist regime.

It is also quite evident that the third factor, machinery, is working very much below its capacity. There have been prodigious inventions even greater ones will appear -- but they are employed hardly more than a few hours a day or several days during the week. It has been calculated that industry in the U.S.A. working full force would be able to supply the industrial products required by the whole world. The capitalist economists, the men of State, the conferences of experts all the forces of social and political conservatism have been trying to find a way out of this without success. On the contrary, the situation has become more and more aggravated.

The only thing that can be prophesied without fear of error, is that the industrial paralysation will be still greater in the years to come and the situation of the workers from year to year will become more and more intolerable. For this reason the capitalistic system is no longer workable since it is no longer capable of extracting the maximum yield out of the three factors of production. If for purely economic reasons there is no defence of the present order, what possible justification can be made for it on the basis of human and social prin...

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