Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/54

 their fresh supply of exploitable flesh and blood running short and will let the dead bury their dead. This is indeed a consolation with which the bourgeois comfort themselves rather than the laborers. If the whole class of wage-laborers were annihilated by the machines, how shocking that would be for capital, which, without wage-labor, ceases to act as capital at all.

But let us suppose that those who are directly driven out of their employment by machinery, and also all those of the rising generation who were expecting employment in the same line, find some new employment. Does anyone imagine that this will be as highly paid as that which they have lost? Such an idea would be We have already seen that the modern form of industry always tends to the displacement of the more complex and the higher kinds of employment by those which are more simple and subordinate.

How, then, could a crowd of laborers, who are thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery, find refuge in another without having to content themselves with a

Tho laborers who are employed in the manufacture of machinery itself have been instanced as an exception. As soon as more machinery is demanded and used in industry it is said that there must necessarily be an increase in the number of machines, therefore in the manufacture of machines. and therefore also in the employment of laborers in this