Machinery and Large-Scale Industry
Machines free up time, but not for leisure. Capitalism has other plans for the worker.
speed things up, standardise and control. More gets produced at an ever-accelerating rate,
Machinery and Large-Scale Industry
Machines free up time, but not for leisure. Capitalism has other plans for the worker.
speed things up, standardise and control. More gets produced at an ever-accelerating rate, but increasing that rate is the end goal. Machines are not a liberator of workers from labour. Instead, they draw ever more people into the capitalist mode.
The Development of Machinery
Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the part which he gives to the capitalist for nothing. Machinery is a means for producing surplus-value.
Capital, page 492
The value of labour power varies with the value of subsistence (the “bundle of commodities” the labourer needs to survive. If the length of the working day is fixed, and the number of workers you can employ is fixed, the only way to increase surplus value is to increase productivity.
A Segway to Darwin
An interesting footnote on page 493 as Marx looks at the history of technology and compares the development of technology to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Going back to the start when he was talking about process, things are constantly evolving, there is no such thing as a static society.
Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.
Capital, page 493
Marx is setting up for these categories for those moments where dynamic change can occur. If you say tech is the prime cause, then you’re a tech determinist. But Marx isn’t using causal language. Marx is interested in the evolution of society, so this isn’t deterministic, it’s relationship based but open-ended. There is no defined end point here, and more importantly, any analysis which freezes anything into a “point” rather than taking it as a process will be incomplete.
The weaknesses of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its spokesperson whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.
Capital, page 494
No Break in the Process
The mechanisation of a process means breaking down a process and reconstituting it in a way to be best done by a machine. This reconception (the first step in which was bringing it under a single roof allowing what was previously discrete steps to be brought into a single whole. As it goes through production, the manufactured item
Is constantly in a state of transition from one phase of production to another… the collective working machine, which is now an articulated system composed of various kinds of single machine, becomes all the more perfect the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one.
Capital, page 502
In the beginning, machines were made by skilled artisans, but this posed a limitation, so it needed to be automated as well. Additionally, as the scale and speed of machines sped up, tolerances went down; a machine can work a lathe to a finer tolerance than even the most skilled worker. More importantly, a machine, operated by an unskilled worker, can work “with a degree of ease, accuracy and speed that no accumulated experience of the hand of the most skilled workman could give” (page 507).
So now there are machines creating machines. As the “artisanal” aspect of production are removed, things become more scientific.
Machines as a Source of Value
Machines are comprised of past, dead labour and cannot produce new labour. There’s a quote by JS Mill wondering why machines have never made life easier, the Marx response would be that they were never designed to make life easier, but rather to produce additional surplus value (at least in the form of relative surplus value).
This is calculated through a depreciation model, “machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to the product it serves to beget” (page 509).
What machines do do is to enable production to happen at a faster rate. What is necessary is that the productivity of the machine is measured by the amount of labour it replaces.
The Family Wage
As machines become easier to operate, this has the effect of making it possible to employ women and children. In turn, it raised the possibility of the family wage – where it used to be that the capitalist needed to pay enough to the worker to support their family, there is the opportunity to employ all the family for that same amount.
This has the potential to reconfigure all sorts of social relations. “Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of children’s play, but also of independent labour at home, within customary limits, for the family itself” (page 517).
This has the effect of increasing demand (an unholy trinity of more workers, more income, more spending), as “Domestic work, such as sewi