Page:Onward Sweep of the Machine Process (ca 1917).pdf/17

Rh minders, that is to say, men who operate a few self-actors, who had earned 8/11 ($2.14) after fourteen days of full employment, and their house-rent was deducted from this sum. The manufacturer returned one-half of this rent to them as a gift." Marx parenthetically remarks, "how generous!" Thousands were obliged to accept employment on relief work at "a bare ordinary charity sum," those being lucky enough to obtain such work getting the magnificent wages of from 5 to 12 shillings ($1.20 to $2.88) per week, this last mentioned amount only being given to men with families of eight!

"It was," says Marx, "in a way, a golden age for the manufacturers, for the laborers had either to starve or work at any price profitable for the bourgeois. The Assistance Committee acted as watch-dogs. At the same time the manufacturers, in secret agreement with the Government, hindered emigration as much as possible, either for the purpose of having their capital, invested in the flesh and blood of the laborers, ready at hand, or of safe-guarding the squeezing of rent out of the laborers."

To what does all this point? Unmistakably to the fact that every minute worked by the cotton operatives, over and above the time actually required to reproduce their wages, every time a worker hastened across the floor of the factory when he might have walked more leisurely, every time a machine was oiled, when it ought to be allowed to run hot, every device of the capitalist for improving efficiency, but hastened the coming of the time when the workers should find themselves on the street corner, the unpitied wretches of a system that rewards them for their industry by starving them.

"But," someone will say, "this was in the sixties." Capitalism has not changed its nature since. Whatever restraint may have been placed on the Beast since those days—and it does not amount to much—his natural tendency is still to run amuck, and the advocates of "efficiency" are just the gentlemen who desire the workers