Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/53

 against his fellow workmen, and thus compellscompels [sic] them to compete against him, and to offer their labor on as wretched conditions as he does; and that he thus, in the last result, competes against himself as a member of the working class.

Machinery has the same effect, but on a much larger scale. It supplants skilled laborers by unskilled, men by women, adults by children; where it is newly introduced it throws the hand-laborers upon the streets in crowds; and where it is perfected, improved or replaced by more powerful machines, discards them in slightly smaller numbers. We have sketched above, in hasty outlines, the industrial war of capitalists with one another; and the war has this peculiarity, that its battles are won less by means of enlisting than ofby [sic] discharging its industrial recruits.

The economists repeatedly assure us that the laborers who are rendered superfluous by the machine find new branches of employment.

They have not the hardihood directly to assert that the laborers who are discharged enter upon the new branches of labor. The facts cry out too loud against such a lie as this. They only declare that, for other divisions of the laboring class, as, for instance, for the rising generation of laborers who were just ready to enter upon the defunct branch of industry, new means of employment will open up. Of course that is a great satisfaction for the dismissed laborers. The worshipful capitalists will not find