The industrial reserve army gives examples of complete brutalisation, destitution, starvation, death, and even crime. Those who are out of work for years, gradually take to drink, become loafers, tramps, beggars, etc. In great cities — London, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris — there are whole quarters inhabited by these out-of-works. As far as Moscow is concerned, Hitrof Market furnishes a similar example. Here, we no longer find the proletariat, but a new stratum, consisting of those who have forgotten how to work. This product of capitalist society is known as the lumpenproletariat (loafer-proletariat).
The introduction of machinery also led to the employment of women’s labour and child labour, which are cheaper, and are therefore more profitable to the capitalist. In earlier days, before the introduction of machinery, special skill was requisite for the work of production, and sometimes a long term of apprenticeship was indispensable. Some machines can be managed by children; all that is necessary is to move the arm or the leg until fatigue becomes overpowering. This is why, after the invention of machinery, the labour of women and children came to be more widely used. Women and children offer less resistance than male workers to capitalist oppression. They are more submissive, more easily intimidated; they are more ready to believe the priest and to accept everything they are told by persons in authority. Hence the factory owner often replaces male workers by females, and compels little children to transmute their blood for him into the golden coins of profit.
In the year 1918, the number of women workers of all kinds (i.e.not manual workers alone) was as follows: France, 6,800,000; Germany,