n Rochdale alone, there are
more power than hand-looms in flannel and other wool-weaving branches.
The bourgeoisie usually replies to this, that improvements in machinery,
by decreasing the cost of production, supply finished goods at lower
prices, and that these reduced prices cause such an increase in
consumption that the unemployed operatives soon find full employment in
newly-founded factories. {136} The bourgeoisie is so far correct that
under certain conditions favourable for the general development of
manufacture, every reduction in price of goods _in which the raw material
is cheap_, greatly increases consumption, and gives rise to the building
of new factories; but every further word of the assertion is a lie. The
bourgeoisie ignores the fact that it takes years for these results of the
decrease in price to follow and for new factories to be built; it is
silent upon the point that every improvement in machinery throws the real
work, the expenditure of force, more and more upon the machine, and so
transforms the work of full-grown men into mere supervision, which a
feeble woman or even a child can do quite as well, and does for half or
two-thirds wages; that, therefore, grown men are constantly more and more
supplanted and _not re-employed_ by the increase in manufacture; it
conceals the fact that whole branches of industry fall away, or are so
changed that they must be learned afresh; and it takes good care not to
confess what it usually harps upon, whenever the question of forbidding
the work of children is broached, that factory-work must be learned in
earliest youth in order to be learned properly. It does not mention the
fact that the process of improvement goes steadily on, and that as soon
as the operative has succeeded in making himself at home in a new branch,
if he actually does succeed in so doing, this, too, is taken from him,
and with it the last remnant of security which remained to him for
winning his bread. But the bourgeoisie gets the benefit of the
improvements in machinery; it has a capital opportunity for piling up
money during the first years while many old machines are still in use,
and the improvement not yet universally introduced; and it would be too
much to ask that it should have an open eye for the disadvantages
inseparable from these improvements.

The fact that improved machinery reduces wages has also been as violently
disputed by the bourgeoisie, as it is constantly reiterated