The technical subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour, and the peculiar
 composition of the body of workpeople, consisting as it does of individuals
 of both sexes and of all ages, give rise to a barrack discipline, which
 is elaborated into a complete system in the factory, and which fully develops
 the before mentioned labour of overlooking, thereby dividing the workpeople
 into operatives and overlookers, into private soldiers and sergeants of
 an industrial army. “The main difficulty [in the automatic factory] ...
 lay ... above all in training human beings to renounce their desultory
 habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity
 of the complex automaton. To devise and administer a successful code of
 factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was
 the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright! Even at the
 present day, when the system is perfectly organised and its labour lightened
 to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the
 age of puberty, 400into useful factory hands.” [107] The factory code in which capital formulates, like a private legislator, and at his own good will, his autocracy over his workpeople, unaccompanied
 by that division of responsibility, in other matters so much approved of
 by the bourgeoisie, and unaccompanied by the still more approved representative
 system, this code is but the capitalistic caricature of that social regulation
 of the labour-process which becomes requisite in co-operation on a great
 scale, and in the employment in common, of instruments of labour and especially
 of machinery. The place of the slave-driver’s lash is taken by the overlooker’s
 book of penalties. All punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages, and the law-giving talent of the factory Lycurgus so arranges matters, that a violation of his laws is, if possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them. [108]401We shall here merely allude to the material conditions under which factory labour is carried on. Every organ of sense is injured in an equal degree
 by artificial elevation of the temperature, by the dust-laden atmosphere,
 by the deafening noise, not to mention danger to life and limb among the
 thickly crowded machinery, which, with the regularity of the seasons, issues
 its list of the killed and wounded in the industrial battle. [109] Economy of the social means of production, matured and 402forced as in a hothouse by the factory system, is turned, in the hands of capital,
 into systematic robbery of what is necessary for the life of the workman
 while he is at work, robbery of space, light, air, and of protection to
 his person against the dangerous and unwholesome accompaniments of the
 productive process, not to mention the robbery of appliances for the comfort
 of the workman. [110] Is Fourier wrong when he calls factories “tempered bagnos"? [111]