Das Kapital Justice and Judgment Quotes

In this connection, nothing is more characteristic than the designation of the workers who work full time as 'full-timers', and the children under 13 who are only allowed to work six hours as 'half-timers'. The worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time. All individual distinctions are obliterated in that between 'full-timers' and 'half-timers'. (10.2.16)

By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production, which is essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus labour, not only produces a deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself. It extends the worker's production-time within a given period by shortening his life. (10.5.2)

Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our pleasure (profit)? But looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him. (10.5.8)