\'Capital, Volume 1\' by Karl Marx is a foundational theoretical text of historical and dialectical materialism, political economy, and politics. It is divided into four parts: Commodities and money, Transformation of money into capital, The production of absolute surplus-value, and Production of relative surplus-value. The book provides a rigorous explanation of the economic patterns underlying the capitalist mode of production, contrasting with the works of other economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill.
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By the excessive addition of women and children to the ranks of the workers, machinery at last breaks down the resistance which the male operatives in the manufacturing period continued to oppose to the despotism of capital.60
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B. Prolongation of the Working day If machinery be the most powerful means for increasing the productiveness of labour i.e., for shortening the working-time required in the production of a commodity, it becomes in the hands of capital the most powerful means, in those industries first invaded by it, for lengthening the working day beyond all bounds set by human nature. It creates, on the one hand, new conditions by which capital is enabled to give free scope to this its constant tendency, and on the other hand, new motives with which to whet capitals appetite for the labour of others. In the first place, in the form of machinery, the implements of labour become automatic, things moving and working independent of the workman. They are thenceforth an industrial perpetuum mobile, that would go on producing forever, did it not meet with certain natural obstructions in the weak bodies and the strong wills of its human attendants. The automaton, as capital, and because it is capital, is end
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61 This resistance is moreover lessened by the apparent lightness of machine work, and by the more pliant and docile character of the women and children employed on it.62 The productiveness of machinery is, as we saw, inversely proportional to the value transferred by it to the product. The longer the life of the machine, the greater is the mass of the products over which the value transmitted by the machine is spread, and the less is the portion of that value added to each single commodity. The active lifetime of a machine is, however, clearly dependent on the length of the working day, or on the duration of the daily labour-process multiplied by the number of days for which the process is carried on. The wear and tear of a machine is not exactly proportional to its working-time. And
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