More from Chapter 53 on worker attitudes:
We have, however, yet other reasons for believing in the indolence and laziness of the masses in the early capitalist period. I do not even think of the numerous indicators which lead us to conclude a comfortable and cosy state of mind, like perhaps the number of holidays which interrupted the work right up until in our stricter time. Of their extent, we have difficulty in getting a proper idea. Even in the 17th century, barely 100 8-hour workshifts were operated in the Carinthian iron industry. In Paris, when they wanted in 1660 to reduce the 103 holidays to 80, riots broke out and six more were added.
I think rather that we should recall that the state of mind of the great mass of workers at the beginning of the development of capitalism could not have been any different than those men whose voices we heard have described to us. The worker found himself still in the state of mind of any “primitive” man, and that is one of idleness or at least comfort. Above all the opinion also still reigned in him which we find widespread with the pre-capitalist economic subjects — that you busied yourself and worked in order to live, not lived in order to busy yourself, to work. Thus that you did not continue working when you had “enough”. Even this idea of an “enough” is nothing other than ghost of the spirit of the pre-capitalist economic disposition — it is the same idea which in the idea of sustenance and of income befitting one’s station returns in philosophical depth and programmatic emphasis.
That this “primitive”, pre-capitalist economic disposition is no empty delusion, that it also then still survives in the economically dependent masses when the will for capitalism has long since animated an upper class, and that a characteristic of the early capitalist societal stratification is this conflict between individual economic subjects in which the acquisitiveness, the rationalism, the lust for enterprise is already active, and a mass of economic objects living still in the traditional craftsmanship — that is something a study of the economic conditions teaches us in such lands as are still in our lifetime making that transition from craftwork to capitalism.
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