Monday, December 6, 2010

Excerpts from "The Communist Manifesto"

... A class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.

These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.

He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.

Excerpts from "The Communist Manifesto", 1848

162 years later, the Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels, finds a new meaning in the online world of Amazon Mechanical Turk.