POL 315
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF MARXISM
found them forced into the factories, mills, and mines. The resulting
depersonalisation of labor was increased by the new machinery, which
tended to make old skills obsolete. Workers were put behind machines
to perform monotonous and menial tasks requiring no skills beyond
those needed to keep the machines functioning properly, even as wages
were suppressed because skilled jobs disappeared.
The factory system brought with it a whole new way of life. People were
herded into the cities, where housing was cramped and squalid.
Sanitation facilities were so woefully inadequate that people were forced
to live in filth. The factories themselves were dark, damp, and
unventilated. Having isolated the workers from anything that might
reduce their productivity, the owners sealed them in stuffy, dimly lit
workrooms. Thousands died of asthma and tuberculosis because the air
they breathed were contaminated by smoke, steam, dust, and filth. Many
people toiled as long as sixteen hours a day in the summer and thirteen
and a half hours in the winter, sometimes seven days a week. At times
workers could not even leave the factories and were forced to sleep
beneath the machines to which they were enslaved.
Women and children were the most desirable laborers because they
could be paid less and were least likely to resist the harsh discipline,
beatings, and other cruelties imposed on them. The family unit
disintegrated. A working mother might seldom see her children unless
they also worked in the factory. Small children were left completely
unattended for long periods. Men, usually the first to be fired,
sometimes had to depend on the earnings of their wives and children for
subsistence. The disgrace and humiliation of these circumstances often
drove men to leave home, to dissipate in drunkenness, to perpetrate
cruelties on their families, or even to commit suicide. The owners were
often indifferent to the suffering in their factories. Some capitalists
rationalised the wretched conditions of the laborers by claiming that
industry saved these people from idleness, the greatest sin of all.
Others used Social Darwinist arguments, claiming that the laborers were
obviously inferior to the owners and should be made to work harder.
They resolved that eventually the inferiors would die out, leaving only
the strong. The owners imposed heavy fines and even corporal
punishment for whistling or talking at work, for working too slowly, or
for being late. The law gave the workers no protection and demanded a
heavy penalty for theft. The political oppression and economic
exploitation, together with the social evils that accompanied them, were
decried by reformers. They demanded that they be replaced by a system
that treated people justly and humanely.
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