And ledge of the abyss. O Holy Justice,
Who could relate the agonies I saw!
What guilt is man that he can come to this?
Just as the surge Charybdis hurls to sea
Crashes and breaks upon its countersurge,
So these shades dance and crash eternally.

Here, too, I saw a nation of lost souls,
Far more than were above: they strained their chests
Against enormous weights, and with mad howls
Rolled them at one another. Then in haste
They rolled them back, one party shouting out:
“Why do you hoard?” and the other: “Why do you waste?”

So back around that ring they puff and blow,
Each faction to its course, until they reach
Opposite sides, and screaming as they go
The madmen turn and start their weights again
To crash against the maniacs. And I,
Watching, felt my heart contract with pain.

“Master,” I sad, “what people can these be?
And all those tonsured ones there on our left –
Is it possible they all were of the clergy?”
And he: “In  the first life beneath the sun
They were so skewed and squinteyed in their minds
Their misering or extravagance mocked all reason.

The voice of each clamours its own excess
When lust meets lust at the two points of the circle
Where opposite guilts meet in their wretchedness.
These tonsured wraiths of greed were priests indeed,
And popes and cardinals, for it is in these
The weed of avarice sows its rankest seed.”

And I to him: “Master, among this crew
Surely I should be able to make out
The fallen image of some soul I knew.”
And he to me: “This is a lost ambition.
In their sordid lives they laboured to be blind,
And now their souls have dimmed past recognition.

All their eternity is to butt and bray:
One crew will stand tight-fisted, the other stripped
Of its very hair at the bar of Judgment Day.
Hoarding and squandering wasted all their light
And brought them screaming to this brawl of wraiths.
You need no words of mine to grasp their plight.

Now may you see the fleeting vanity
Of the goods of Fortune for which men tear down
All that they are, to build a mockery.
Not all the gold that is or ever was
Under the sky could buy for one of these
Exhausted souls the fraction of a pause.”

“What we in fact have here is a theory of a tendency towards relative impoverishment of the working class under capitalism in a double sense. Firstly, in the sense that productive workers tend to get a smaller part of the new value they produce: in other words there is a trend towards an increase in the rate of surplus-value. Secondly, in the sense that even when wages rise the needs of the workers as human beings are denied. This applies even to their additional consumer needs that grow out of the very increase in the productivity of labour which results from the accumulation of capital. One only has to think of the unfulfilled needs of workers in the fields of education, health, skill acquisition and differentiation, leisure, culture, housing, even in the richest capitalist countries of today, to see how this assumption remains accurate in spite of the so-called ‘consumer society’. But it applies much more to the needs of the worker as a producer and a citizen - his need to develop a full personality, to become a rich and creative human being, etc.; these needs are brutally crushed by the tyranny of meaningless, mechanical, parcellized work, alienation of productive capacities and alienation of real human wealth.”