Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/64

 talists—the dead may bury their dead. This consolation seems to be intended more for the comfort of the capitalists themselves than of their laborers. If the whole class of the wage-laborers were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital,

But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment:—are we to believe that this new employment would pay as high wages as the one they have lost? If it did, We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?

An exception to the law has been adduced, namely, the workers who are employed in the manufacture of machinery itself. As soon as there is in industry a greater demand for and a greater consumption of machinery, it is said that the number of machines must necessarily increase; consequently, also, the manufacture of machines; consequently, also, the employment of workers in machine manufacture;—and the workers employed in this branch of industry are skilled, even educated, workers.

Since the year 1840 this assertion, which even before that date was only half true, has lost all semblance of truth; for the most diverse machines are now applied to the manufacture of the machines themselves on quite as extensive a scale as in the manufacture of cotton yarn,