Modern industry never looks upon and treats the existing form
 of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore
 revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative.
 [225] By means of machinery, chemical processes and
 other methods, it is continually causing changes not only in the technical
 basis of production, but also in the functions of the labourer, and in
 the social combinations of the labour-process. At the same time, it thereby
 also revolutionises the division of labour within the society, and incessantly
 launches masses of capital and of workpeople from one branch of production
 to another. But if modern industry, by its very nature, therefore necessitates
 variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer,
 on the other hand, in its capitalistic form, it reproduces the old division
 of labour with its ossified particularisations. We have seen how this absolute
 contradiction between the technical necessities of modern industry, and
 the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity
 and security in the situation of the labourer; how it constantly threatens,
 by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his
 means of subsistence, [226] and, by suppressing his
 detail-function, to make him superfluous, we have seen, too, how this antagonism
 vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve
 army, kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital;
 in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working-class, in the
 most reckless squandering of labour-power and in the devastation caused
 by a social anarchy which turns every 458economic progress into
 a social calamity. This is the negative side. But if, on the one hand,
 variation of work at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering
 natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that
 meets with resistance [227] at all points, modern industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising,
 as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness
 of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development
 of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society
 to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law.
 Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace
 the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and
 the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a
 man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready
 to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions
 he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural
 and acquired powers.