Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 75

Sweating Labour in Order to Increase Profits

Sweating Labour in Order to Increase Profits.

We have come to that phase where capitalism rules our markets, rules our politics, controls our legislation, and uses every man, woman, and child for its own purposes and for its own aggrandisement. (Applause.) The last phase is the most formidable, and it is the one that requires the most scientific fighting. We in the Old Country are endeavouring to teach our people the lines on which the battle should be fought. But you in this country may not know that in England and on the Continent the manufacturer is beginning to see that he is, after all, only a superior kind of workman. The man who owns the machinery—or who imagines he owns the machinery—is beginning to realise that he is only working for the benefit of a "corner" of capitalists, and in the Old Country the Socialist movement is being built up, not so much by the labouring classes so called, as by the middle class, by the manufacturer, by the superior workman, who are fast realising that they are only puppets being exploited for the purposes of the capitalist. The aristocracy have patted the manufacturer on the back, and, like the fool he was, he put on airs. If he succeeded in life, and made a fortune, his cherished object was to get his daughter married into an aristocratic family, or in some way connected with one of their houses, and so they fooled him to the page 8 highest degree: until now he begins to realise that all these financial panics, all these