Criminality and economic conditions

by Willem Adriaan Bonger

In general the work in factories is very monotonous, and hence brutalizing; and further, fatiguing from its great intensity. Moreover a vexatious discipline is sometimes maintained. However harmful may be the results of factory labor upon the physical, intellectual, and moral condition of the worker, they are less so than the results of sweat-shop labor. For sweat-shop hours are still longer than those of the factory; and the work is done in a place which is both kitchen and bedroom, so that not only is the workman injured but his family as well.

Let us now take up the question of wages. It is necessary that the wage should be enough to procure what is strictly needful, and in fact wages generally do not rise above this standard. Further the workman buys at a high price goods of low quality, for he who cannot spend much is powerless in dealing with the producers. Since the workman does not draw his wages till he has done the work, he must get credit for the necessaries of life (often being obliged to add to his debts on account of sickness or unemployment). His wages prevent his paying his debts, and force him, therefore to continue to trade with his creditor, who cheats him at every turn. Again, in some branches of industry he is obliged to buy what he wants from [[271]]the capitalist, or from the foreman (truck-system), or to live in a house which belongs to the capitalist (cottage system)—and then gets poorer quality at a higher price than elsewhere.

Let us take up next the dwellings of the proletariat. Capitalism is the cause of a great congestion of persons in a limited area. An enormous rise in the price of land in the cities and consequently a similar rise in rents have been the result. No class spends a larger part of its income in rent than the laboring class. The proletariat is not only lodged expensively but badly. All those who pass through the laborers’ districts know the monotonous rows of houses, ill-built, uniform and simple. But the internal arrangement of these buildings is much more miserable; the stairs and landings are narrow, the rooms small, badly lighted and ventilated, and often must serve for kitchen and bedroom combined. But notwithstanding the limited space, the number of inmates often is further increased by taking lodgers, in an attempt to make both ends meet. For all these reasons the house of the working-man is not a real home in which he can be at ease.

As if these consequences of capitalism were not serious enough, the labor of married women is added. By this the life of the family, already damaged in so many ways, has been destroyed. Furthermore the physical effect upon the woman, and even more upon the child with which she is pregnant, is most prejudicial, without reckoning that her moral condition suffers equally.

Up to this point I have been speaking of the proletarian on the supposition that he has been able to sell his labor-power. But, as we have seen already, when this sale is not possible, he and his family are left to their fate. This then is what freedom of labor means, a freedom that the slave never knows, freedom to die of hunger. No one guarantees to the workman or his family the means of subsistence if, for any reason, he is not able to sell his labor. The slave-owner had an interest in taking care of a sick slave, for the slave represented value which he did not care to see diminished. But if a workman is sick he is discharged and replaced by another. The sickness and death of the laborer do not harm the capitalist at all.

I have set forth above the numerous causes which prevent the workman from selling his labor. Forced idleness has become chronic little by little, reaching its acute stage in times of crisis. Then seasonal trades make the work of thousands dependent upon the weather. Aside from general causes, which affect whole groups, there are also individual causes. A workman displeases his employer, it may be because he is one of the leaders of a union, or for some other reason; [[272]]he is discharged, and runs, especially in times of economic depression, the risk of not being able to find employment elsewhere. If the worker falls ill or is injured (this often happens as a consequence of an unhealthful or dangerous trade), or when he reaches old age (and hard work ages men quickly), he is condemned. If the period of idleness lasts long the workman loses his ability and the habit of working (for working is above all a habit), and the time is not far distant when he will become altogether incapable of working.

The intellectual condition of the working class is easily understood. In his youth the child learns but little. The circle of his ideas remains restricted, since his parents have ordinarily neither the knowledge, the opportunity, nor the desire to supplement the little that is learnt at school. At the age when the child begins to think for himself, and his aptitudes begin to manifest themselves, he is put to work. The little that the proletarian has learned in his childhood is quickly forgotten under the pressure of the long, monotonous toil, which dulls his intelligence and makes him thus less sensitive to higher impressions. Even if this were not the case, the long duration of labor fatigues the workman too much, his domestic life does not permit him to develop himself, and further he has no money for intellectual pleasures. The pleasures of the workman belong to his kind of life. Consequently his amusements are rough and coarse. Alcohol and sexual intercourse are often the only pleasures he knows.[6]

The life of the working-man is less retired than that of the bourgeois. He sees continually the misery of his companions, which is also his own, he feels himself more at one with them, but the demand for labor always remaining below the supply, competition among the workers arouses antagonistic feeling among them. The possibility of some day becoming rich being almost entirely cut out, the working-man is less avaricious than the bourgeois, and less economical; he lives from day to day, and if he happens to get a little more than usual at any time he spends it at once.

The situation may be summed up as follows: under the capitalistic system the greater part of the population, the part upon whose labor the entire social fabric is based, lives under the most miserable conditions. The proletariat is badly clothed, badly fed, miserably housed, exhausted by excessive and often deleterious labor, uncertain as to income, and ignorant and coarse.[7] [[273]]

However, the sketch given above shows only one side of the question. At length the workers have perceived that the interests of the employer are opposed to their own, that the cause of their poverty lies in his luxury. They have begun to set up opposition when they learn that by organizing themselves into labor unions they gain a power by which they can ameliorate their lot. The work no longer being done separately as in the time of the guilds, but together, there has been this consequence for the workmen, that being now in the same position with regard to the capitalist, and in the same social condition, they have gained in the feeling of solidarity and in discipline, [[274]]two conditions which are essential to victory in the struggle. Little by little the workers have learned that their enemy is not their own employer simply, but the whole capitalist class. The strife has become a strife of classes. And capitalism being international the conflict of the working class has become international also.