Page:Olive Malmberg Johnson - Woman and the Socialist Movement (1908).djvu/19

 Rh produces the greater is the surplus wealth that flows to the capitalist. For example, if a man can produce $5 worth of wealth in a day and he receives $2.50 in wages, $2.50 goes to the capitalist. But 1f his wages are only one dollar, $4 goes to the capitalist. Or, if by improving the labor process or other means the $2.50 man can produce $10 instead of $5 worth of wealth, then the capitalist gets $7.50. To arrange all manners of ways so that the worker can be skinned of as much as possible belongs to the schemes and tricks of the successful capitalist and his mental hirelings. It is this "work" that keeps them busy at all hours and earns for them the titles of "industrious," "smart," "thrifty," etc.

The capitalist system is a refined method by which the ruling class robs the producing class out of the product of its toil without the workers realizing it. Even when they see stupendous fortunes amassed in the hands of a few men they have no idea how it all happens. Capital is unpaid labor. Profits, interests and dividends are unpaid labor. All the wealth and luxury squandered by the capitalist idlers represents unpaid labor. Capitalism appropriates for a few all the inventions and discoveries of past ages. It claims for its favorites the fruits of the toil and experience of past generations. By so doing it holds the power over the present generation and robs it from day to day of the fruits of its toil.

Wage labor is the modern and refined method of slavery by which the worker is forced to carry himself to the market from day to day and sell himself piece-meal in order to live.

It is perhaps a peculiar trick of fate that the first machine to play any part in the revolutionizing of industry should go down the ages with a woman's name—the spinning "Jenny." Should we perhaps take it as a token of woman's worse enslavement by the machine? Or does it forebode the dawn of her freedom? Certainly, it is the first for the factory girl of to-day! But evolution points to the machine as the emancipator of the woman of the future!