Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/55

 ; and the laborers who are employed in this branch of industry will be skilled, and, indeed, even educated laborers.

Ever since the year 1840 this contention, which even before that time was only half true, has lost all its specious color. For the machines which are employed in the manufacture of machinery have been quite as numerous as those used in the manufacture of cotton; and the laborers who are employed in producing machines in the face of the extremely artful machinery used in this industry, have at best been able to play, the part of highly artless machines.

But in the place of the man who has been discharged by the machine perhaps three children and one woman are employed to work it. And was it not necessary before that the man’s wages should suffice for the support of his wife and children? Was not the minimum of wages necessarily sufficient for the maintenance and propagation of the race of laborers? What else does then the pet bourgeois argument prove, but that now the lives of four times as many laborers as before are used up in order to secure the support of one laborer’s family.

To sum up:

And, besides, the laboring class is recruited