While the proletarians suffer, the bourgeois exploit, feast and revel. Now one has only to look around in order to detect that something must be entirely wrong with this description of capitalism's economic functioning. The great innovation brought about by the transformation of the precapitalistic mode of production into the capitalistic system, the historical event that is called the Industrial Revolution, was precisely the inauguration of a new principle of marketing. But what characterizes capitalism as such is that it is mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. The much greater part of all the products turned out by the factories is consumed, directly or indirectly, by the same people who are working in the factories.
Big business is big precisely because it produces the goods asked for, and bought by, the masses.
If you go into the household of the average common man of a capitalistic country, you will find products manufactured in the plants of big business. It is fantastic nonsense to assert that all the wage earner gets are the bare necessities to sustain himself and to rear enough children to fill the jobs in the factories. While businesses that produce for the masses grow big, those that are turning out luxury goods for the few never grow above the size of medium, or even small, businesses. In all non-human living beings the urge is inwrought to proliferate up to the limits drawn by the available supply of the means of subsistence. Nothing but the quantity of attainable nourishment checks the boundless multiplication of elephants and rodents, of bugs and germs.