"Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers"
About this Quote
Marx lands the punch by flipping the usual hymn to progress into a class indictment. Machinery, in the industrial imagination, is supposed to liberate: it multiplies output, lowers prices, trims drudgery. Marx concedes the multiplication but asks, acidly, who gets the extra time. His answer isn’t “the people” but a new, polished leisure class: the “well-to-do idlers” who can live off ownership rather than labor.
The line works because it’s both empirical and insulting. “Without doubt” mimics the certainty of Victorian boosterism, then weaponizes it against the boosters. “Idlers” is moral language, not neutral economics; it drags the bourgeois self-image (industrious, deserving) back into the old aristocratic stereotype (living on rents). Marx’s subtext is that capitalism doesn’t abolish feudal leisure; it modernizes it, giving it factory shares instead of land titles.
Context matters: Marx is writing in the age of the steam engine, the power loom, the railway - technologies that genuinely did raise productivity while also intensifying exploitation, destabilizing crafts, and concentrating wealth. The quote points to a structural asymmetry: if machines are privately owned, then productivity gains become private leisure. For workers, “time saved” often returns as longer shifts, faster paces, unemployment, or downward wage pressure - not a collective weekend.
It’s also a warning about ideology. Capitalist society promises that innovation will pay everyone back. Marx notes the payment often arrives as dividends and genteel downtime for a minority, while the majority gets the privilege of being made “efficient.”
The line works because it’s both empirical and insulting. “Without doubt” mimics the certainty of Victorian boosterism, then weaponizes it against the boosters. “Idlers” is moral language, not neutral economics; it drags the bourgeois self-image (industrious, deserving) back into the old aristocratic stereotype (living on rents). Marx’s subtext is that capitalism doesn’t abolish feudal leisure; it modernizes it, giving it factory shares instead of land titles.
Context matters: Marx is writing in the age of the steam engine, the power loom, the railway - technologies that genuinely did raise productivity while also intensifying exploitation, destabilizing crafts, and concentrating wealth. The quote points to a structural asymmetry: if machines are privately owned, then productivity gains become private leisure. For workers, “time saved” often returns as longer shifts, faster paces, unemployment, or downward wage pressure - not a collective weekend.
It’s also a warning about ideology. Capitalist society promises that innovation will pay everyone back. Marx notes the payment often arrives as dividends and genteel downtime for a minority, while the majority gets the privilege of being made “efficient.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Wealth |
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