Key Arguments

• If the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and catastrophic (mass starvation)
• If the transition is gradual, it produces chronic misery for decades
• Machinery continually seizes new fields, making the 'temporary' displacement a permanent condition of the working class

Source Quotes

It is supposed to be a great consolation to the pauperized workers that, firstly, their sufferings are only temporary (‘a temporary inconvenience’) and, secondly, machinery only gradually seizes control of the whole of a given field of production, so that the extent and the intensity of its destructive effect is diminished. The first consolation cancels out the second. When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the workers who compete with it.

The first consolation cancels out the second. When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the workers who compete with it. Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and is felt by great masses of people.

Of course, in turning the weavers out of this ‘temporal’ world, the machinery caused them a ‘temporary inconvenience’. But in any case, since machinery is continually seizing on new fields of production, its ‘temporary’ effect is really permanent. Hence the character of independence from and estrangement towards the worker, which the capitalist mode of production gives to the conditions of labour and the product of labour, develops into a complete and total antagonism with the advent of machinery.

Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and is felt by great masses of people. World history offers no spectacle more frightful than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers; this tragedy dragged on for decades, finally coming to an end in 1838. Many of the weavers died of starvation, many vegetated with their families for a long period on 2½d. a day.

Key Concepts

• The first consolation cancels out the second
• produces chronic misery among the workers who compete with it
• machinery is continually seizing on new fields of production, its ‘temporary’ effect is really permanent
• World history offers no spectacle more frightful than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers

Context

Refuting the apologetics of bourgeois economists regarding the displacement of workers