The Cave by José Saramago

The very genuine motives for complaint that Cipriano Algor has about the Center's pitiless commercial policy, largely presented in this story from the point of view of frank class solidarity without, or so we believe, ever departing from the most rigorous impartiality, cannot disguise the fact, though we run the risk here of stirring up the slumbering bonfire of the historically difficult relationship between capital and work, cannot, as we were saying, disguise the fact that Cipriano Algor bears some of the blame for this himself, the main reason, ingenuous and innocent enough, but also, as so often with the ingenuous and the innocent, the malignant root of all the other reasons, was his assumption that certain tastes and needs common to his founding grandfather's contemporaries vis-à-vis ceramics would remain unchanged per omnia saecula saeculorum or, at least, for the rest of his life, which, when you think about it, comes to the same thing.

We have seen the very traditional way in which the clay here is kneaded, we have seen the rustic, almost primitive wheels they use, we have seen that the kiln outside shows traces of an antiquity unforgivable in this modern age, which, for all its scandalous defects and prejudices, has had the goodness to allow a pottery like this to coexist with a Center like that, at least until now. Cipriano Algor complains and complains, but he does not seem to understand that kneaded clay is no longer stored like this, that it will not be long before the basic ceramics industries of today turn into laboratories with employees in white coats taking notes and with immaculate robots doing all the work.