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In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier

epochs, would have seemed an absurdity-the epidemic of

over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a

state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a

universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every

means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed;

and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means

of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The

productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to

further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property;

on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these

conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they

overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of

bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.

The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise

the wealth created by them.