Capitalism forces the worker to give up much of what they produce
As a result of the capitalist system, the worker cannot find work without accepting to forgo a great part of what they will produce to the bourgeois. They must sell their labor for a meager and uncertain wage. If they do find work, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of their produce to the bourgeois, and another quarter to the government or middlemen. And their tax, levied upon them by the state, the bourgeois, the landlord and the middleman, is always increasing; it rarely leaves them the power to improve their system of culture.
We condemn the feudal lord who forced the peasant to work unless they surrendered to them a fourth of what they produce. We call those times barbarous. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and a worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. They cannot find any better conditions where ever they look, because everything has become private property, and they must accept, or die of hunger.
The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Because capitalist businesses must turn a profit for the owners in order to survive, its only aim is to increase profits. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws countless workers on the streets.
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 1. Our riches (p. 51).