John Stuart Mill, in his Principles of Political Economy, says: “Hitherto [1848] it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being” (Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ch. 6).[2] This was not their purpose. Like every other development of the productive force of labor, capitalist use of machinery does not tend to lower the price of commodities, to shorten the part of the day, in which the worker labors for himself, in relation to lengthening the other, in which he works only for the capitalist. It is a particular method for making relative surplus value.

But who is it that ever thinks of the worker? If the capitalist looks after him, it is only to study a better way of exploiting him. The worker sells his labor power, and the capitalist buys it, as the only commodity that, with its surplus value, can enable him to give birth to and grow capital. The capitalist, therefore, is only concerned with making more surplus value. After having exhausted the resources of absolute surplus value, he found relative surplus value. He now sees that with machinery one can obtain in the same time a product two times, four times, ten times, etc. bigger than before; and he begins to use machinery. Cooperation, manufacturing, thus transform into modern industry and his workshop into a factory. That capitalist, after having mutilated and crippled the worker with the division of labor, after having limited him to only one partial task, makes us watch a sadder show yet. He rips from the hands of the worker that special tool, which still reminds him of his art, his old status of a whole man, and entrusts him to the machine. From now on the capitalist has no more need for the worker, as he does a servant of his machinery. With the introduction of machinery, the capitalist realizes an enormous profit at first, one easily understands how, remembering how much we said about relative surplus value. However with the propagation of the mechanical system of production, the extraordinary profit ceases, and only the growth of production remains that, made general by the generalization of machinery, begins to lower the value of the things necessary to the worker, the necessary labor time, and salaries, and to increase overwork and surplus value.

Capital is divided into constant and variable. Constant capital is that which is represented by raw materials and the means of production. The building, the heaters, the tools, the auxiliary materials, like tallow, coal, oil, etc., the means of production, like iron, cotton, silk, silver, wood, etc., are all things that make up parts of constant capital.

Variable capital is that which is represented by salary, by the price that is of labor power. The first is called constant, because its value remains constant in the value of the commodity, of which it is a portion; while the second is called variable, exactly because its value grows coming in to make a portion of the value of the commodity. It is only variable capital that creates surplus value; and the machine only makes up a portion of constant capital.

The capitalist aims, in modern industry, to profit from an enormous mass of past labor, in the same way that he would profit from a mass of natural forces, ie for free. To be able to reach his goal, however, he needs to have a complete mechanism, which will be composed of more or less expensive materials, and will always absorb a certain amount of work. He certainly does not have to buy steam power, or the driving property of water or of air; he certainly does not have to buy mechanical breakthroughs and applications; nor the inventions and improvements of the tools of a trade. He can avail himself of all of this, always as he wishes, without expense; but he just needs to procure all of a mechanism adapted to this. The machine enters therefore, as a means of production, making up a portion of constant capital; and the proportion, in which it comes in to compose the value of the commodity, is in direct proportion with its consumption and with its auxiliary materials, coal, tallow, etc., and in inverse proportion with the value of the commodity. That is to say that the more one wears out a machine with its auxiliary materials in producing a commodity, the more it tells them of its value; while the value of the commodity is larger, for which the machine works, the portion of value that comes from the consumption of the machine is smaller.

“Since [the steam-hammer’s] daily wear and tear, its coal-consumption, &c., are spread over the stupendous masses of iron hammered by it in a day, only a small value is added to a hundred weight of iron; but that value would be very great, if the cyclopean instrument were employed in driving in nails” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 15, sec. 2).

When, for the generalization of the system of modern industry, the machine ceases to be a direct source of extraordinary wealth for the capitalist, he succeeds in finding many other ways, with which he can continue to get very large amounts of relative surplus value from this new way of production.

“In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means of employing laborers of slight muscular strength, and those whose bodily development is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labor of women and children was, therefore, the first thing sought for by capitalists who used machinery. That mighty substitute for labor and laborers was forthwith changed into a means for increasing the number of wage-laborers by enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every member of the workman’s family, without distinction of age or sex. Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children’s play, but also of free labor at home within moderate limits for the support of the family.

“The value of labor-power was determined, not only by the labor-time necessary to maintain the individual adult laborer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of that family on to the labor-market, spreads the value of the man’s labor-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labor-power. To purchase the labor-power of a family of four workers may, perhaps, cost more than it formerly did to purchase the labor-power of the head of the family, but, in return, four days’ labor takes the place of one, and their price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus-labor of four over the surplus-labor of one. In order that the family may live, four people must now, not only labor, but expend surplus-labor for the capitalist. Thus we see, that machinery, while augmenting the human material that forms the principal object of capital’s exploiting power, at the same time raises the degree of exploitation.

“Machinery also revolutionizes out and out the contract between the laborer and the capitalist, which formally fixes their mutual relations. Taking the exchange of commodities as our basis, our first assumption was that capitalist and laborer met as free persons, as independent owners of commodities; the one possessing money and means of production, the other labor-power. But now the capitalist buys children and young persons under age. Previously, the workman sold his own labor-power, which he disposed of nominally as a free agent. Now he sells wife and child. He has become a slave-dealer” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 15, sec. 3A).

“If machinery be the most powerful means for increasing the productiveness of labor — i.e., for shortening the working-time required in the production of a commodity, it becomes in the hands of capital the most powerful means, in those industries first invaded by it, for lengthening the working-day beyond all bounds set by human nature …

“In the first place, in the form of machinery, the implements of labor become automatic, things moving and working independent of the workman. The automaton, as capital, and because it is capital, is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with intelligence and will; it is therefore animated by the longing to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by that repellent yet elastic natural barrier, man. This resistance is moreover lessened by the apparent lightness of machine work, and by the more pliant and docile character of the women and children employed on it …

“The material wear and tear of a machine is of two kinds. The one arises from use, as coins wear away by circulating, the other from nonuse, as a sword rusts when left in its scabbard. The latter kind is due to the elements. The former is more or less directly proportional, the latter to a certain extent inversely proportional, to the use of the machine.

“But in addition to the material wear and tear, a machine also undergoes, what we may call a moral depreciation. It loses exchange-value, either by machines of the same sort being produced cheaper than it, or by better machines entering into competition with it” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 15, sec. 3B).

To repair this damage, the capitalist feels the need to make the machine work as much as possible, and most importantly begins to prolong daily labor, introducing night shifts and the relays system. As the word itself indicates, used to indicate the changing of postal horses, the relays system consists of making two teams of workers carry out labor, that switch off every twelve hours, or three that switch off every eight hours; in a way that labor always proceeds without the slightest interruption for all 24 hours. This system, so advantageous for capital, is also begun to be used in the first moment of the appearance of machinery, when the capitalist is in a great rush to be able to amass the greatest quantity possible of extraordinary profit, that soon must stop for the generalization of the machinery itself. The capitalist, therefore, breaks down all obstacles of time with the machinery, all of the limits of the day that were imposed on labor in manufacturing. And when he is joined with the natural limit of the day, to absorb that is all of the 24 hours of the day, he finds the way to make of only one day two, three, four or more days, intensifying labor two, three, four or more times. In fact, if in one workday one finds a way of making a worker carry out two times, three times, four times, etc. more labor than before, it’s clear that the old workday will correspond to two, three, four or more workdays. And the capitalist finds the way to do this, rendering, as we have already said, labor more intense, squeezing, in other words, into only one day the labor of two, three, four or more days. It is with machinery that he is able to achieve this goal.

“The improvements in the steam-engine have increased the piston speed, and at the same time have made it possible, by means of a greater economy of power, to drive with the same or even a smaller consumption of coal more machinery with the same engine. The improvements in the transmitting mechanism have lessened friction, and, what so strikingly distinguishes modern from the older machinery, have reduced the diameter and weight of the shafting to a constantly decreasing minimum. Finally, the improvements in the operative machines have, while reducing their size, increased their speed and efficiency, as in the modern power-loom; or, while increasing the size of their framework, have also increased the extent and number of their working parts, as in spinning-mules, or have added to the speed of these working parts by imperceptible alterations of detail, such as those which ten years ago increased the speed of the spindles in self-acting mules by one-fifth.

“The reduction of the working-day to 12 hours dates in England from 1832. In 1836 a manufacturer stated: ‘The labor now undergone in the factories is much greater than it used to be ... compared with thirty or forty years ago ... owing to the greater attention and activity required by the greatly increased speed which is given to the machinery.’

“In the year 1844, Lord Ashley, now Lord Shaftesbury, made in the House of Commons the following statements, supported by documentary evidence: ‘The labor performed by those engaged in the processes of manufacture, is three times as great as in the beginning of such operations. Machinery has executed, no doubt, the work that would demand the sinews of millions of men; but it has also prodigiously multiplied the labor of those who are governed by its fearful movements’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 15, sec. 3C).

“So far as division of labor re-appears in the factory, it is primarily a distribution of the workmen among the specialized machines; and of masses of workmen, not however organized into groups, among the various departments of the factory, in each of which they work at a number of similar machines placed together; their cooperation, therefore, is only simple. The organized group, peculiar to manufacture, is replaced by the connection between the head workman and his few assistants. The essential division is, into workmen who are actually employed on the machines (among whom are included a few who look after the engine), and into mere attendants (almost exclusively children) of these workmen. Among the attendants are reckoned more or less all ‘Feeders’ who supply the machines with the material to be worked. In addition to these two principal classes, there is a numerically unimportant class of persons, whose occupation it is to look after the whole of the machinery and repair it from time to time; such as engineers, mechanics, joiners, &c. This is a superior class of workmen, some of them scientifically educated, others brought up to a trade; it is distinct from the factory operative class, and merely aggregated to it. This division of labor is purely technical.

“To work at a machine, the workman should be taught from childhood, in order that he may learn to adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton. When the machinery, as a whole, forms a system of manifold machines, working simultaneously and in concert, the cooperation based upon it, requires the distribution of various groups of workmen among the different kinds of machines. But the employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallizing this distribution after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation of a particular man to a particular function. Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work. The most striking proof of this is afforded by the relays system, put into operation by the manufacturers during their revolt from 1848–1850. Lastly, the quickness with which machine work is learned by young people, does away with the necessity of bringing up for exclusive employment by machinery, a special class of operatives. With regard to the work of the mere attendants, it can, to some extent, be replaced in the mill by machines, and owing to its extreme simplicity, it allows of a rapid and constant change of the individuals burdened with this drudgery.

“Although then, technically speaking, the old system of division of labor is thrown overboard by machinery, it hangs on in the factory, as a traditional habit handed down from Manufacture, and is afterwards systematically re-molded and established in a more hideous form by capital, as a means of exploiting labor-power. The life-long specialty of handling one and the same tool, now becomes the life-long specialty of serving one and the same machine. Machinery is put to a wrong use, with the object of transforming the workman, from his very childhood, into a part of a detail-machine. In this way, not only are the expenses of his reproduction considerably lessened, but at the same time his helpless dependence upon the factory as a whole, and therefore upon the capitalist, is rendered complete. Here as everywhere else, we must distinguish between the increased productiveness due to the development of the social process of production, and that due to the capitalist exploitation of that process. In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labor proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.

“‘The miserable routine of endless drudgery and toil in which the same mechanical process is gone through over and over again, is like the labor of Sisyphus. The burden of labor, like the rock, keeps ever falling back on the worn-out laborer’ (Friedrich Engels).

“At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity. The lightening of the labor, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the laborer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labor-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labor, but the instruments of labor that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labor confronts the laborer, during the labor-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labor, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labor-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labor, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labor, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labor that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the ‘master.’ This ‘master,’ therefore, in whose brain the machinery and his monopoly of it are inseparably united, whenever he falls out with his ‘hands,’ contemptuously tells them:

“‘The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the fact that theirs is really a low species of skilled labor; and that there is none which is more easily acquired, or of its quality more amply remunerated, or which by a short training of the least expert can be more quickly, as well as abundantly, acquired.... The master’s machinery really plays a far more important part in the business of production than the labor and the skill of the operative, which six months’ education can teach, and a common laborer can learn’ (‘The Master Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Defense Fund. Report of the Committee’, 1854).

“The technical subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of the instruments of labor, and the peculiar composition of the body of workpeople, consisting as it does of individuals of both sexes and of all ages, give rise to a barrack discipline, which is elaborated into a complete system in the factory, and which fully develops the before mentioned labor of overlooking, thereby dividing the workpeople into operatives and overlookers, into private soldiers and sergeants of an industrial army. ‘The main difficulty [in the automatic factory] ... lay ... above all in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton. To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright! Even at the present day, when the system is perfectly organized and its labor lightened to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, into useful factory hands’ (Andrew Ure). The factory code in which capital formulates, like a private legislator, and at his own good will, his autocracy over his workpeople, unaccompanied by that division of responsibility, in other matters so much approved of by the bourgeoisie, and unaccompanied by the still more approved representative system, this code is but the capitalistic caricature of that social regulation of the labor-process which becomes requisite in cooperation on a great scale, and in the employment in common, of instruments of labor and especially of machinery. The place of the slave-driver’s lash is taken by the overlooker’s book of penalties. All punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages, and the law-giving talent of the factory Lycurgus so arranges matters, that a violation of his laws is, if possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 15, sec. 4).

“‘The slavery in which the bourgeoisie has bound the proletariat, comes nowhere more plainly into daylight than in the factory system. In it all freedom comes to an end both at law and in fact. The workman must be in the factory at half past five. If he come a few minutes late, he is punished; if he come 10 minutes late, he is not allowed to enter until after breakfast, and thus loses a quarter of a day’s wage. He must eat, drink and sleep at word of command.... The despotic bell calls him from his bed, calls him from breakfast and dinner. And how does he fare in the mill? There the master is the absolute law-giver. He makes what regulations he pleases; he alters and makes additions to his code at pleasure; and if he insert the veriest nonsense, the courts say to the workman: Since you have entered into this contract voluntarily, you must now carry it out .... These workmen are condemned to live, from their ninth year till their death, under this mental and bodily torture’ (Friedrich Engels). What, ‘the courts say,’ I will illustrate by two examples. One occurs at Sheffield at the end of 1866. In that town a workman had engaged himself for 2 years in a steelworks. In consequence of a quarrel with his employer he left the works, and declared that under no circumstances would he work for that master any more. He was prosecuted for breach of contract, and condemned to two months’ imprisonment. (If the master break the contract, he can be proceeded against only in a civil action, and risks nothing but money damages.) After the workman has served his two months, the master invites him to return to the works, pursuant to the contract. Workman says: No, he has already been punished for the breach. The master prosecutes again, the court condemns again, although one of the judges, Mr. Shee, publicly denounces this as a legal monstrosity, by which a man can periodically, as long as he lives, be punished over and over again for the same offense or crime. This judgment was given not by the ‘Great Unpaid,’ the provincial Dogberries, but by one of the highest courts of justice in London. — [Added in the 4^th German edition. — This has now been done away with. With few exceptions, e.g., when public gas-works are involved, the worker in England is now put on an equal footing with the employer in case of breach of contract and can be sued only civilly. — F. E.] The second case occurs in Wiltshire at the end of November 1863. About 30 power-loom weavers, in the employment of one Harrup, a cloth manufacturer at Leower’s Mill, Westbury Leigh, struck work because master Harrup indulged in the agreeable habit of making deductions from their wages for being late in the morning; 6d. for 2 minutes; 1s. for 3 minutes, and 1s. 6d. for ten minutes. This is at the rate of 9s. per hour, and £4 10s. 0d. per diem; while the wages of the weavers on the average of a year, never exceeded 10s. to 12s. weekly. Harrup also appointed a boy to announce the starting time by a whistle, which he often did before six o’clock in the morning: and if the hands were not all there at the moment the whistle ceased, the doors were closed, and those hands who were outside were fined: and as there was no clock on the premises, the unfortunate hands were at the mercy of the young Harrup-inspired time-keeper. The hands on strike, mothers of families as well as girls, offered to resume work if the timekeeper were replaced by a clock, and a more reasonable scale of fines were introduced. Harrup summoned I9 women and girls before the magistrates for breach of contract. To the utter indignation of all present, they were each mulcted in a fine of 6d. and 2s. 6d. for costs. Harrup was followed from the court by a crowd of people who hissed him” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 15, fn. 108).

“The contest between the capitalist and the wage-laborer dates back to the very origin of capital. It raged on throughout the whole manufacturing period. But only since the introduction of machinery has the workman fought against the instrument of labor itself, the material embodiment of capital. He revolts against this particular form of the means of production, as being the material basis of the capitalist mode of production.

“In the 17^th century nearly all Europe experienced revolts of the workpeople against the ribbon-loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and trimmings, called in Germany Bandmühle, Schnurmühle, and Mühlenstuhl. These machines were invented in Germany. Abbé Lancellotti, in a work that appeared in Venice in 1636, but which was written in 1579, says as follows:

“‘Anthony Müller of Danzig saw about 50 years ago in that town, a very ingenious machine, which weaves 4 to 6 pieces at once. But the Mayor being apprehensive that this invention might throw a large number of workmen on the streets, caused the inventor to be secretly strangled or drowned.’

“In Leyden, this machine was not used till 1629; there the riots of the ribbon-weavers at length compelled the Town Council to prohibit it.

“‘In this town,” says Boxhorn (Inst. Pol., 1663), referring to the introduction of this machine into Leyden, “about twenty years ago certain people invented an instrument for weaving, with which a single person could weave more cloth, and more easily, than many others in the same length of time. As a result there arose disturbances and complaints from the weavers, until the Town Council finally prohibited the use of this instrument.’

“After making various decrees more or less prohibitive against this loom in 1632, 1639, &c., the States General of Holland at length permitted it to be used, under certain conditions, by the decree of the 15^th December, 1661. It was also prohibited in Cologne in 1676, at the same time that its introduction into England was causing disturbances among the workpeople. By an imperial Edict of 19^th Feb., 1685, its use was forbidden throughout all Germany. In Hamburg it was burnt in public by order of the Senate. The Emperor Charles VI., on 9^th Feb., 1719, renewed the edict of 1685, and not till 1765 was its use openly allowed in the Electorate of Saxony. This machine, which shook Europe to its foundations, was in fact the precursor of the mule and the power-loom, and of the industrial revolution of the 18^th century. It enabled a totally inexperienced boy, to set the whole loom with all its shuttles in motion, by simply moving a rod backwards and forwards, and in its improved form produced from 40 to 50 pieces at once.

“About 1630, a wind-sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman, succumbed to the excesses of the populace. Even as late as the beginning of the 18^th century, sawmills driven by water overcame the opposition of the people, supported as it was by Parliament, only with great difficulty. No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work. Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament against Arkwright’s scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 1, sec. 5).

Here, therefore, are the results of machinery and modern industry for the workers. These are, foremost, driven in large part by factories, in which the machine has taken its place. The few people who remain must suffer the humiliation of seeing the last instrument of labor snatched from their hand and being reduced to the condition of servants of machinery; they must bear the burden of an extraordinarily grown workday; the must renounce their wives and children, having become the slaves of capital; and they must suffer, finally, the indescribable spasms, products of the torture of labor progressively intensified by the mad lust, by which the capitalist is taken in the period of modern industry, for surplus value. But the theologians of the god of capital aren’t lacking, who explain all, and justify all with their eternal laws. To the desperate cry of the workers hungered by machinery, they respond with the announcement of a farfetched law of compensation.

“James Mill, MacCulloch, Torrens, Senior, John Stuart Mill, and a whole series besides, of bourgeois political economists, insist that all machinery that displaces workmen, simultaneously and necessarily sets free an amount of capital adequate to employ the same identical workmen.

“Suppose a capitalist to employ 100 workmen, at £30 a year each, in a carpet factory. The variable capital annually laid out amounts, therefore, to £3,000. Suppose, also, that he discharges 50 of his workmen, and employs the remaining 50 with machinery that costs him £1,500. To simplify matters, we take no account of buildings, coal, &c. Further suppose that the raw material annually consumed costs £3,000, both before and after the change. Is any capital set free by this metamorphosis? Before the change, the total sum of £6,000 consisted half of constant, and half of variable capital. After the change it consists of £4,500 constant ( £3,000 raw material and £1,500 machinery), and £1,500 variable capital. The variable capital, instead of being one half, is only one quarter, of the total capital. Instead of being set free, a part of the capital is here locked up in such a way as to cease to be exchanged against labor-power: variable has been changed into constant capital. Other things remaining unchanged, the capital of £6,000, can, in future, employ no more than 50 men. With each improvement in the machinery, it will employ fewer. If the newly introduced machinery had cost less than did the labor-power and implements displaced by it, if, for instance, instead of costing £1,500, it had cost only £1,000, a variable capital of £1,000 would have been converted into constant capital, and locked up; and a capital of £500 would have been set free. The latter sum, supposing wages unchanged, would form a fund sufficient to employ about 16 out of the 50 men discharged; nay, less than 16, for, in order to be employed as capital, a part of this £500 must now become constant capital, thus leaving only the remainder to be laid out in labor-power.

“But, suppose, besides, that the making of the new machinery affords employment to a greater number of mechanics, can that be called compensation to the carpet-makers, thrown on the streets? At the best, its construction employs fewer men than its employment displaces. The sum of £1,500 that formerly represented the wages of the discharged carpet-makers, now represents in the shape of machinery: (1) the value of the means of production used in the construction of that machinery, (2) the wages of the mechanics employed in its construction, and (3) the surplus-value falling to the share of their “master.” Further, the machinery need not be renewed till it is worn out. Hence, in order to keep the increased number of mechanics in constant employment, one carpet manufacturer after another must displace workmen by machines.

“As a matter of fact the apologists do not mean this sort of setting free.

“They have in their minds the means of subsistence of the liberated work-people. It cannot be denied, in the above instance, that the machinery not only liberates 50 men, thus placing them at others’ disposal, but, at the same time, it withdraws from their consumption, and sets free, means of subsistence to the value of £1,500. The simple fact, by no means a new one, that machinery cuts off the workmen from their means of subsistence is, therefore, in economic parlance tantamount to this, that machinery liberates means of subsistence for the workman, or converts those means into capital for his employment. The mode of expression, you see, is everything. Nominibus mollire licet mala (It’s lawful to hide evil with words)” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 15, sec. 6).