n Political Economy. He who at
other times swears by Malthus, cries out in his anxiety before the
workers: "Where could the millions by which the population of England has
increased find work, without the improvements in machinery?" {138} As
though the bourgeois did not know well enough that without machinery and
the expansion of industry which it produced, these "millions" would never
have been brought into the world and grown up! The service which
machinery has rendered the workers is simply this: that it has brought
home to their minds the necessity of a social reform by means of which
machinery shall no longer work against but for them. Let the wise
bourgeois ask the people who sweep the streets in Manchester and
elsewhere (though even this is past now, since machines for the purpose
have been invented and introduced), or sell salt, matches, oranges, and
shoe-strings on the streets, or even beg, what they were formerly, and he
will see how many will answer: "Mill-hands thrown out of work by
machinery." The consequences of improvement in machinery under our
present social conditions are, for the working-man, solely injurious, and
often in the highest degree oppressive. Every new advance brings with it
loss of employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like England
where, without that, there is usually a "surplus population," to be
discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative. And
what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his position
in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery, must
exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without it! To
escape despair, there are but two ways open to him; either inward and
outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and general
demoralisation. And the English operatives are accustomed to take refuge
in both. The history of the English proletariat relates hundreds of
uprisings against machinery and the bourgeoisie; we have already spoken
of the moral dissolution which, in itself, is only another form of
despair.

The worst situation is that of those workers who have to compete against
a machine that is making its way. The price of the goods which they
produce adapts itself to the price of the kindred product of the machine,
and as the latter works more cheaply, its human competitor has but the
lowest wages. The same thing happens to every operative employed upon an
old machine in competi