THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 153
The organised factory marked its appearance by acts which were nothing short of philanthropic. Chrildren were kept to work by blows of the whip; they were made objects of traffic, and were contracted for with orphanages and workhouses. All the laws on the apprenticeship of workpeople were abolished, because, to make use of the phrases of M. Proudhon synthesised workers were no longer needed. In fine, from 1825 all the new inventions were the result of conflicts between the worker and the capitalist, who sought at all costs to depreciate the speciality of the workman. After each strike, however unimportant, a new machine appeared. The workman was so far from seeing in the machines a kind of re- habilitation, of restoration, as M. Proudhon calls it, that, in the eighteenth century, he for a long time resisted the nascent empire of the automaton.
“Wyatt,” says Doctor Ure, “invented the series of fluted rollers, the spinning fingers usually ascribed to Arkwright.”.... “The main difficulty did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of a proper self-acting mechanism .... as in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton. But to devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise. The whole achievement of Arkwright.”
In short, by the introduction of machinery the division of labor within society has been developed, the task of the workman within the factory has been simplified, capital has been accumulated, and man has been further dismembered.
If M. Proudhon would be an economist, and leave for
