Wages, meanwhile, were regulated by an iron law.

Under the system of capitalism it was an absolute impossibility that they could rise.

As he put it, in language which has since become proverbial, "The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle class is being crushed out," and the time, he continued, was in sight already--it would arrive, according to him, before the end of the nineteenth century--when nothing would be left but a handful of idle and preposterous millionaires on the one hand, and a mass of miserable ragamuffins who provided all the millions on the other, having for themselves only enough food and clothing to enable them to move their muscles and protect their nakedness from the frost.

Then, said Marx, when this contrast has completed itself, the situation will be no longer tolerable.

"Then the knell of the capitalistic system will have sounded." The producers will assert themselves under the pressure of an irresistible impulse; they will repossess themselves of the implements of production of which they have been so long deprived.