Explore "The Worker and the Machine" by Ricardo Flores Magón on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Wicked machine! " exclaims the worker, sweating from fatigue and distress. "Wicked machine, that makes me endure your rapid movements as if I were also made of steel and was granted a motor! I detest you, vile contraption, because you do the work of ten, twenty, or thirty workers, robbing the bread from my mouth and condemning my wife and my children to starve."
The machine groans to the impulses of its motor, as if it participates equally in the fatigue of its comrade of blood and muscle: man. The thousand parts of the machine move, move without ceasing. Some glide, others bounce; these ones gyrate, those ones swing; oozing black oil, hissing, trembling. It exhausts the vision of the flesh and bone slave who must pay close attention to its movements, overcoming the nausea they provoke, so that he doesn't allow a finger to be seized by one of these steel imps, so as not to lose a hand, an arm, even life itself.