as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour
increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves
piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of
commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of
competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of
labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual
character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He
becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most
simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is
required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is
restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he
requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his
race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of
labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion
therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage
decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and
division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden
of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working
hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by
increased speed of the machinery, etc.

Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the
patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial
capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are
organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they
are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers
and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class,
and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by