Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”Ĭapital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. “within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.
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