If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened. Finally to say that “ the most favourable condition of wage-labour is the fastest possible growth of productive capital ” is the same as to say: the quicker the working class multiplies and augments the power inimical to it-the wealth of another which lords it over that class-the more favourable will be the conditions under which it will be permitted to toil anew at the multiplication of bourgeois wealth, at the enlargement of the power of capital, content thus to forge for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train.
— Karl Marx
