System of Economical Contradictions; Or, The Philosophy of MiseryProudhon, P.-J. (Pierre-Joseph)
Philosophy
System of Economical Contradictions; Or, The Philosophy of Misery
Proudhon, P.-J. (Pierre-Joseph)
Economics
These facts are taken from the "Revue Economique" of 1842; and
there is nobody who cannot point to similar ones. I have
witnessed the introduction of printing machines, and I can say
that I have seen with my own eyes the evil which printers have
suffered thereby. During the fifteen or twenty years that the
machines have been in use a portion of the workmen have gone back
to composition, others have abandoned their trade, and some have
died of misery: thus laborers are continually crowded back in
consequence of industrial innovations. Twenty years ago eighty
canal-boats furnished the navigation service between Beaucaire
and Lyons; a score of steam-packets has displaced them all.
Certainly commerce is the gainer; but what has become of the
boating-population? Has it been transferred from the boats to
the packets? No: it has gone where all superseded industries
go,--it has vanished.
For the rest, the following documents, which I take from the same
source, will give a more positive idea of the influence of
industrial improvements upon the condition of the workers.
The average weekly wages, at Manchester, is ten shillings. Out
of four hundred and fifty workers there are not forty who earn
twenty shillings.
The author of the article is careful to remark that an Englishman
consumes five times as much as a Frenchman; this, then, is as if
a French workingman had to live on two francs and a half a week.
"Edinburgh Review," 1835: "To a combination of workmen (who did
not want to see their wages reduced) we owe the mule of Sharpe
and Roberts of Manchester; and this invention has severely
punished the imprudent unionists."
PUNISHED should merit punishment. The invention of Sharpe and
Roberts of Manchester was bound to result from the situation; the
refusal of the workmen to submit to the reduction asked of them
was only its determining occasion. Might not one infer, from the
air of vengeance affected by the "Edinburgh Review," that
machines have a retroactive effect?
An English manufacturer: "The insubordination of our workmen has
given us the idea of DISPENSING WITH THEM. We have made and
stimulated every imaginable effort of the mind to replace the
service of men by tools more docile, and we have achieved our
object. Machinery has delivered capital from the oppression of
labor. Wherever we still employ a man, we do so only
temporarily, pending the invention for us of some means of
accomplishing his work without him."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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