At the same time that this increasing concentration of capital was taking place, the misery of the proletariat grew constantly worse. In his famous "doctrine of increasing misery" (immiserization), Marx argued that the conditions of labor would worsen relative to the affluence of the capitalists until the laborers could stand no more-and revolution became inevitable. Because Marx's doctrine of immiserization is very often misrepresented. we quote his own writings on this point:
Within the capitalist system - all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into hated toil, they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life time into working time, and drag his wife and children beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation-, and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality [and] mental degradation at the opposite pole. (Ibid., p. 646)
It should be noted that Marx asserted that laborers would become worse off even if their wages increased. There were two reasons for this. First, Marx believed that even if workers' wages increased, they would not increase by as much as capitalists' profits increased. The worker would therefore become continuously worse off relative to the capitalist. Second, Marx, correctly foresaw that as the capitalist system progressed, there was to be an increasingly minute division of labor.
A finer division of labor makes the worker's activities less varied, and the job becomes more repetitious and tedious. Marx agreed with Adam Smith, who had stated that "the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become" (Smith, p. 80). Forced into a condition of stupor and increasingly severely alienated, "the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse" (Marx, 1961, vol. 1, p. 645).