A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end.
An industrial worker would sooner have a »5 note but a countryman must have praise.
The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.
The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in powerand extent.The worker becomes anevercheaper commodity the more good he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things. Labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods.
Political economy thus does not recognize the unoccupied worker, the working man so far as he is outside this work relationship. Swindlers, thieves, beggars, the unemployed, the starving, poverty- stricken and criminal working man, are figures which do not exist for political economy, but only for other eyes; fordoctors, judges,grave-diggers,beadles,etc.Theyare ghostly figures outsidethe domain of political economy.
If capital isgrowing rapidly, wages may rise; the profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist has widened.
In manufacture and in handicrafts, the worker uses a tool; in the factory, he serves a machine.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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