The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine,
 immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself. [116] The self-expansion of capital by means of machinery is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of livelihood
 have been destroyed by that machinery. The whole system of capitalist production
 is based on the fact that the workman sells his 406labour-power
 as a commodity. Division of labour specialises this labour-power, by reducing
 it to skill in handling a particular tool. So soon as the handling of this
 tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value
 too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable,
 like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion
 of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no
 longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either
 goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures
 with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches
 of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power
 below its value. It is impressed upon the workpeople, as a great consolation,
 first, that their sufferings are only temporary (“a temporary inconvenience"),
 secondly, that machinery acquires the mastery over the whole of a given
 field of production, only by degrees, so that the extent and intensity
 of its destructive effect is diminished. The first consolation neutralises the second. When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces
 chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it. Where the transition
 is rapid, the effect is acute and felt by great masses. History discloses
 no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom
 weavers, an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally
 sealed in 1838. Many of them died of starvation, many with families vegetated
 for a long time on 2½ d. a day. [117] volume 35 p 435 On the other hand, the English cotton machinery produced an acute effect in India. The Governor General reported 1834-35: