bs from the table of
privileged persons.

We understand that under these conditions manual labour is considered a
curse of fate.

We understand that all men have but one dream--that of emerging from, or
enabling their children to emerge from this inferior state; to create
for themselves an "independent" position, which means what?--To also
live by other men's work!

As long as there will be a class of manual workers and a class of
"brain" workers, black hands and white hands, it will be thus.

What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker,
when he knows that the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave
will be to live in mediocrity, poverty, and insecurity of the morrow?
Therefore, when we see the immense majority of men take up their
wretched task every morning, we feel surprised at their perseverance, at
their zeal for work, at the habit that enables them, like machines
blindly obeying an impetus given, to lead this life of misery without
hope for the morrow; without foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day
they, or at least their children, will be part of a humanity rich in all
the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the enjoyments of knowledge,
scientific and artistic creation, reserved to-day to a few privileged
favourites.

It is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and
brain work that we want to abolish wagedom, that we want the Social
Revolution. Then work will no longer appear a curse of fate: it will
become what it should be--the free exercise of _all_ the faculties of
man.

Moreover, it is time to submit to a serious analysis this legend about
superior work, supposed to be obtained under the lash of wagedom.

It would be sufficient to visit, not the model factory and workshop that
we find now and again, but a number of the ordinary factories, to
conceive the immense waste of human energy that characterizes modern
industry. For one factory more or less rationally organized, there are a
hundred or more which waste man's labour, without any more substantial
motive than that of perhaps bringing in a few pounds more per day to the
employer.

Here you see youths from twenty to twenty-five years of age, sitting all
day long on a bench, their chests sunken in, feverishly shaking their
heads and bodies, to tie, with the speed of conjurers, the two ends of
worthless scraps of cotton, the refuse of the lace-looms. What progeny
will these trembling and rick