The Mathematics of Collapse — The Iron Heel

In the consternation after his first revelation, Ernest starts again. A dozen men at the table have called socialism impossible. He offers the opposite: the tide of evolution does not run backward. It runs from competition to combination, from little combination to large, from large to colossal, and from colossal combination into the one combination that would include them all. The small capitalists in the room are not a stable class. They are a stage. He tells them they will pass, and that the large capitalists and the trusts will pass after them.

He does the arithmetic they can follow. Workers can buy back only part of what they produce. Capital cannot consume the rest. The unused surplus has to be sold. For a while foreign markets take it. Then every developed nation has the same unused heap and no one left who needs to buy. He reminds them of men in their own Senate who already admit that the country produces far more wealth than it consumes. Mr Kowalt suggests dumping the surplus on countries with undeveloped resources. Ernest lets him carry the next step, then closes it: when those countries develop, the outlet closes too. If labour ever took the machines, there would be no leftover profit heap to dump.

If the trusts win the fight for the machines, he says, labour and the small owners will be crushed under a despotism as terrible as any in the history books. He gives it a name at that table for the first time: the Iron Heel. The men sit longer than dinner-talk usually allows. He adds that a handful of groups already work in near unison, and that even the railroad combinations are folding into one another. Calvin calls the socialism a dream. Others would rather break the machines and go backward than be eaten from above and below. Ernest tells them neither the trusts nor the workers will permit that return.

They shake hands anyway. They will not follow him. He says, almost wistfully, that a little evolution and sociology would have saved them trouble. The mathematics stay on the table after they leave. The name stays too.