david harvey 7 & 8 machinery and largescale industry

CHAPTER 15: MACHINERY AND LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY

In the introduction, I noted that Marx rarely comments on his methodology. It has therefore to be reconstructed by way of careful perusal of occasional side comments, supplemented by a study of his practices. Chapter 15, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” provides an opportunity to grapple with this question at the same time as it advances the general arguments as to the character of a capitalist mode of production. The chapter is long, but the sections are logically ordered. It repays to go over this logical ordering both before and after studying this chapter.
An Important Footnote

I begin, however, with the chapter’s fourth footnote, where Marx, in the cryptic fashion he often deploys in describing methodological considerations, links together a slew of concepts in a configuration that actually provides a general framework for dialectical and historical materialism. The footnote unfolds in three phases. The first focuses on Marx’s relation with Darwin. Marx had read On the Origin of Species and was impressed with the historical method of evolutionary reconstruction that Darwin had outlined. Marx clearly envisaged his work as some sort of continuation of Darwin’s, with the emphasis on human as well as (rather than opposed to) natural history. His aim, he stated in the preface to the first edition, is to view “the development of the economic formation of society” from “the standpoint” of “natural history.” From this standpoint, the individual cannot be held “responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them” (92).
In the footnote, Marx first focuses on “a critical history of technology.” This
would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century are the work of a single individual. As yet such a book does not exist. Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter? (493)
Vico’s argument was that natural history was God’s domain and that since God moved in mysterious ways, it was beyond human understanding, but we could certainly understand our own history since we had made it. Marx earlier broached the historical approach to technological change and noted some vital transitions associated with transformations in the mode of production. Having followed Benjamin Franklin in defining man “as a tool-making animal” in chapter 7, he went on to observe that the
relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic formations as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work.
Then, in a footnote: “the writers of history have so far paid very little attention to the development of material production, which is the basis of all social life, and therefore of all real history” (286). In chapter 14 he argued that
the Roman Empire handed down the elementary form of all machinery in the shape of the water wheel. The handicraft period bequeathed to us the great inventions of the compass, gunpowder, type-printing and the automatic clock. But on the whole, machinery played that subordinate part which Adam Smith assigns to it in comparison with division of labour. (468)
This idea that there has been a human evolutionary process in which we can discern radical shifts not only in technologies but in whole modes of social life is clearly very important to Marx.
Marx did not read Darwin uncritically. “It is remarkable,” he wrote to Engels, “how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and the Malthusian struggle for existence.”1 The problem, as Marx sees it, is Darwin’s ahistorical approach to a purely natural evolution without reference to the role of human action in changing the face of the earth. The reference to Malthus is also telling because in his introduction to On the Origin of Species, Darwin attributed some of his key ideas to Malthus. And since Marx couldn’t abide Malthus, it must have been hard for Marx to swallow the thought that Malthus had so inspired Darwin. Interestingly, the Russian evolutionists who were not exposed to ruthless British industrialism (Darwin was married to a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the famous pottery industrialist, and so was familiar at first hand with competition and the division of labor and of function) put much greater emphasis on cooperation and mutual aid, ideas which were translated by the Russian geographer Kropotkin into the fundamentals of social anarchism.
But what Marx appreciated was Darwin’s approach to evolution as a process open to historical reconstruction and theoretical investigation. Marx is committed to understanding the human evolutionary process in like fashion. This is where Marx’s emphasis on processes rather than things comes in. The chapter on machinery and large-scale industry should be read as an essay on the history of technology in this spirit. It is about how the industrial form of capitalism emerged out of the world of handicraft and manufacturing. Up until this point, nobody had really thought of writing such a history, so this chapter constitutes a pioneering effort that later spawned a whole field of academic study called the history of science and technology. Read in this way, the chapter’s argument makes a lot more sense. But like Darwin’s theory, there is far more here than just history. There is a theoretical engagement with processes of social transformation, and as such, there is a good deal to debate and discuss.
The second part of the footnote proffers a short, but in my view extremely important, statement that requires elaboration:
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. (493)
Marx here links in one sentence six identifiable conceptual elements. There is, first of all, technology. There is the relation to nature. There is the actual process of production and then, in rather shadowy form, the production and reproduction of daily life. There are social relations and mental conceptions. These elements are plainly not static but in motion, linked through “processes of production” that guide human evolution. The only element he doesn’t explicitly describe in production terms is the relation to nature. Obviously, the relation to nature has been evolving over time. The idea that nature is also something continuously in the course of being produced in part through human action has also been long-standing; in its Marxist version (outlined in chapter 7), it is best represented in my colleague Neil Smith’s book Uneven Development,2 where capitalist processes of production of nature and of space are explicitly theorized.
How, then, are we to construe the relationships between these six conceptual elements? Though his language is suggestive, Marx leaves the question open, which is unfortunate since it leaves lots of space for all manner of interpretations. Marx is often depicted, by both friends and foes alike, as a technological determinist, who thinks changes in the productive forces dictate the course of human history, including the evolution of social relations, mental conceptions, the relation to nature and the like. The neoliberal journalist Thomas Friedman, for example, in his book The World Is Flat,3 happily admits to the charge of being a technological determinist; when someone pointed out to him (erroneously) that this was Marx’s position, he expressed his admiration for Marx and approvingly cited a lengthy passage from the Communist Manifesto to prove his point. In a review of Friedman’s book, the conservative political philosopher John Gray confirmed Marx’s technological determinism and argued that Friedman was indeed merely following in Marx’s footsteps.4 These observations by those generally unsympathetic to Marx are paralleled within the Marxist tradition. The strongest version of the thesis that the productive forces are the leading agent in history comes from G. A. Cohen in his book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence.5 Cohen, having inspected all Marx’s texts from the standpoint of analytic philosophy, defends this interpretation of Marx’s theory.
I do not share this interpretation. I find it inconsistent with Marx’s dialectical method (dismissed by analytic philosophers such as Cohen as rubbish). Marx generally eschews causal language (I defy you to find much of it in Capital). In this footnote, he does not say technology “causes” or “determines,” but that technology “reveals” or, in another translation, “discloses” the relation to nature. To be sure, Marx pays a lot of attention to the study of technologies (including organizational forms), but this does not warrant treating them as leading agents in human evolution. What Marx is saying (and plenty of people will disagree with me on this) is that technologies and organizational forms internalize a certain relation to nature as well as to mental conceptions and social relations, daily life and labor processes. By virtue of this internalization, the study of technologies and organizational forms is bound to “reveal” or “disclose” a great deal about all the other elements. Conversely, all these other elements internalize something of what technology is about. A detailed study of daily life under capitalism will, for example, “reveal” a great deal about our relation to nature, technologies, social relations, mental conceptions and the labor processes of production. Similarly, the study of our contemporary relation to nature cannot go very far without examining the nature of our social relations, our production systems, our mental conceptions of the world, the technologies deployed and how daily life is conducted. All these elements constitute a totality, and we have to understand how the mutual interactions between them work.
I find this a helpful way to think about the world. For instance, I was on a jury to select ideas for the design of a new city in South Korea. We, the members of the jury, had all the designs in front of us. The jury was made up mainly of engineers and planners, with a few distinguished architects and landscape designers. The latter dominated the initial discussion on the criteria we should deploy in reaching our decisions, and it mainly devolved into a discussion of the relative symbolic strengths and practical implications of circles and cubes in built forms. In other words, decisions were to be made largely on the basis of geometric and symbolic criteria. At some point, I intervened to ask: if you are building a new city, what are the things you would want to know? I would want to know, what kind of relation to nature is going to be created here (the ecological footprint, etc.)? What kinds of technologies are going to be embodied in this city, and why? What kinds of social relations are envisaged? What systems of production and reproduction are going to be incorporated? What is daily life going to be like, and is that the kind of daily life we would want? And what mental conceptions, symbolic and all the rest of it, are going to be engaged here? Is this going to be built as a nationalist monument or as a cosmopolitan place?
The other jurors seemed to find this formulation both innovative and interesting. We discussed it for a while until it got a bit too complicated relative to the time at our disposal. One of the architects then suggested that out of the six criteria, only mental conceptions really mattered, which came down to the symbolism of forms, which brought us neatly back to the question of the relative strengths of circles and cubes! But afterward I was asked where they could find out more about such an interesting way of thinking. I made the mistake of saying it’s in footnote 4 of chapter 15 of Marx’s Capital. I should have known better, because there are two typical reactions to saying this kind of thing. One is nervous and even fearful, for to concede that Marx might have said something so powerfully obvious and interesting is tantamount to admitting Marxist sympathies, and that would be horrible for one’s professional and even personal prospects. The other is to regard me as an idiot, so lacking in ideas that I can only parrot Marx and, even worse in this instance, fall so low as to cite a mere footnote! So the conversation stopped. But this is, I think, an interesting way to evaluate urban design and to critique the qualities of urban life.
This framework helps ground the theory of historical materialism in a fundamental way, and there is strong evidence, as I hope to show, that it grounds much of Marx’s tangible approach to understanding the evolution of capitalism. Let me expand on this for a moment. Imagine a framework of thought in which these six elements hang together in a single space but in intense interrelation (see figure opposite). Each of the elements is internally dynamic such that we consider each constituting a “moment” in the process of human evolution. We can study this evolution from the perspective of one of the moments or examine interactions among them, such as transformations in technologies and organizational forms in relationship to social relations and mental conceptions. How are our mental conceptions altered by the technologies available to us? Do we not see the world differently once we have microscopes, telescopes and satellites, X-rays and CAT scans? We understand and think about the world in a very, very different way now, because of the technologies we have. But by the same token, somebody somewhere must have had the mental conception that making a telescope was an interesting thing to do (recall Marx’s take on the labor process and the worst of architects). And when that person had that idea, he had to be able to find lens grinders and glassmakers and all the elements necessary in order to make the idea a reality through the production of the telescope. Technologies and organizational forms do not descend from the sky. They get produced out of mental conceptions. They also arise out of our social relations and concretely arise in response to the practical needs of daily life or of labor processes.


I like the way Marx sets this up, provided it is viewed dialectically, not causally. This way of thinking permeates Capital, and the book should be read with this framework in mind. It also provides a standard of critique, because we can analyze Marx’s own performance by how well he links these different elements together. How exactly does Marx bring together mental conceptions, social relations and technologies, and does he do it adequately? Are there aspects, such as the politics of daily life, that are left in the shadows? In other words, the dialectic between this formulation and Marx’s practices needs to be scrutinized.
So let me summarize. The six elements constitute distinctive moments in the overall process of human evolution understood as a totality. No one moment prevails over the others, even as there exists within each moment the possibility for autonomous development (nature independently mutates and evolves, as do ideas, social relations, forms of daily life, etc.). All these elements coevolve and are subject to perpetual renewal and transformation as dynamic moments within the totality. But it is not a Hegelian totality in which each moment tightly internalizes all the others. It is more like an ecological totality, what Lefebvre refers to as an “ensemble” or Deleuze as an “assemblage,” of moments coevolving in an open, dialectical manner. Uneven development between and among the elements produces contingency in human evolution (in much the same way that unpredictable mutations produce contingency in Darwinian theory).
The danger for social theory is to see one of the elements as determinant of all the others. Technological determinism is as wrongheaded as environmental determinism (nature dictates), class-struggle determinism, idealism (mental conceptions are in the vanguard), labor-process determinism or determinism arising out of (cultural) shifts in everyday life (this is the political position taken by Paul Hawken in his influential text Blessed Unrest6). Major transformations, such as the movement from feudalism (or some other precapitalist configuration) to capitalism, occur through a dialectic of transformations across all the moments. This coevolution developed unevenly in space and time to produce all manner of local contingencies, albeit contingencies limited by the interplay within the assemblage of elements implicated in the evolutionary process and the growing spatial (and sometimes competitive) integration of economic-development processes in the world market. Perhaps one of the biggest failures of the conscious attempt to build socialism and communism on the basis of capitalism was the failure to recognize the need to engage politically across all these moments in a way that was sensitive to geographical specificities. The temptation for revolutionary communism was to reduce the dialectic to a simple causal model in which one or another moment was placed in the vanguard of change, and that was supposed to be that. This approach inevitably failed.
On the surface, the third phase of the footnote appears to contradict my interpretation of the second:
Even a history of religion that is written in abstraction from this material basis is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly kernel of the misty creations of religion than to do the opposite, i.e. to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized. The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific one. (493–4)
Marx considered himself a scientist, and he is here asserting that this means a commitment to materialism. But his materialism is different from that of the natural scientists. It is historical. “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 spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality” (494). Darwin’s findings on evolution were flawed because he ignored the impact of the historical context on his theorizing (the power of the metaphors that he drew from British capitalism) and failed to carry over his argument onto and integrate his findings with human evolution. Marx was writing before Social Darwinism became popular, of course, but he prefigures a critical response to the way in which the Social Darwinists legitimized capitalism as “natural” by appealing to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Since Darwin’s theory drew its guiding metaphors from capitalism and was inspired by the social theory of Malthus, it was hardly surprising to see capitalism confirmed as wholly consistent with supposedly natural processes of competition, struggle for survival and, of course, survival of the fittest (without paying attention to Kropotkin’s mutual aid).
Marx’s general point is that natural scientists, because they failed to understand their historical moment and were barred by their methodological commitments from integrating human history into their models of the world, frequently ended up with at best partial and at worst serious misinterpretations of that world. At worst, they concealed their historical and political assumptions under a supposedly neutral and objective science. This critical perspective, which Marx pioneered, is now standard practice within the field of science studies, where it has repeatedly been shown that the importation into science of social metaphors about gender, sexuality or social hierarchies leads to all kinds of misreadings of what the natural world is actually about, even as it is understood that without metaphors scientific inquiry would go nowhere.
But there is a much deeper issue here that needs to be addressed. In the first lecture, I talked about Marx’s way of moving by descent: you start with the surface appearance, then dive deep down beneath the fetishisms to uncover a theoretical conceptual apparatus that can capture the underlying motion of social processes. That theoretical apparatus is then brought step by step back to the surface to interpret the dynamics of daily life in new ways. This is, Marx confirms in the footnote, “the only materialist and therefore the only scientific (method).” We have already seen a specific example of this method at work in the chapter on the working day. Value as socially necessary labor-time internalizes a specific capitalist temporality, and a vast field of social struggles on the surface of society ensues, concerning the appropriation of the time of others. The fact that “moments are the elements of profit” leads capitalists to be obsessed with time discipline and time control (and will shortly also explain why they are obsessed with speed-up).
But how are we to think about the relation between, say, the deep-value theory and the unpredictable ferment of surface struggles over the length of the working day? Back on page 175, Marx approvingly cites (in yet another footnote!) a famous passage from an earlier work, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy :
My view is that each particular mode of production, and the relations of production corresponding to it at each given moment, in short ‘the economic structure of society’, is ‘the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’ [mental conceptions, if you like], and that ‘the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life.
He leaves out the following sentence from the Critique, which explains that it is in the superstructure that we become conscious of political issues and fight them out.
This is what is usually referred to as the base-superstructure model. The supposition is that there is an economic base on which there arise frameworks of thought as well as a political and legal superstructure that collectively define how we become conscious of problems and fight them out. This formulation is sometimes read deterministically: the economic base determines the political and legal infrastructure, determines the forms of struggle that are found there and, to the degree that there are transformations occurring in the economic base, actually determines the outcomes of political struggles. But I can’t see how the argument can be viewed as deterministic or even causal. This is not how the chapter on the working day unfolds at all. There are class alliances, conjunctural possibilities, discursive shifts in sentiments, and the outcome is never certain. But there is always such a deep concern over the appropriation of the time of others that the issue never goes away. It is a perpetual point of contestation “between equal rights” within capitalism that can never arrive at some ultimate solution. Struggles over time are fundamental to the capitalist mode of production. This is what the deep theory tells us, and no matter what happens in the superstructure, that imperative cannot be overcome without overthrowing capitalism.
In any case, productive forces and social relations cannot exist without expression and representation in the political and legal superstructure. We have seen this with money, which is a representation of value surrounded by all manner of institutional and legal arrangements, and certainly an object of struggle and political manipulation (as is also the case with legal frameworks of private property rights). But Marx has also shown that without money (or a legal framework of private property rights), value could not exist as a foundational economic relation. Things get worked out in the monetary sphere in very particular ways depending on the dynamics of class struggle, and this has implications for how the value theory works. Is money in the political superstructure or down in the economic base? The answer, surely, has to be both.
Similarly, one would not say, from the chapter on the working day, that the outcome of the working-day struggle was determined by movements in the economic base. Furthermore, the political restriction on the length of the working day in part led capitalists to look for another way to gain surplus-value, i.e., relative surplus-value. Marx clearly does not intend this base-superstructure model to operate mechanically or causally, but he does use it dialectically.
Yet it is also true that the “working out” that goes on in the realm of struggle over the length of the working day is a working out of the fundamental fact that moments are the elements of profit, which derives from the definition of value as socially necessary labor-time. There was not a concerted struggle over the length of the working day in precapitalist societies or even in ancient Rome. Only within the rules of a capitalist mode of production does this sort of struggle make sense. Formal issues such as the length of the working day (week, year, lifetime) get thrown up precisely because of the deep structure of what capitalism has become. How these struggles get resolved depends on you and me and everybody else. And indeed, the struggle could potentially be resolved in such a way as to entail the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. A society would be constructed in which moments are not the elements of profit. Can you imagine what that would look like? Sounds rather nice, no?
My main point here is that the ways in which these things get worked out—through political and legal means, the balance of class forces, hegemonic mental conceptions and the like—are not ineffectual in relation to the deep concept of the circulation of value as capital. The real scientific method is to identify those deep elements which explain to you why certain things go on in our society the way they do. We saw that in the struggle over the length of the working day. We also see it in the struggle over relative surplus-value, which explains why capitalism has to be so technologically dynamic. We seem not to have choices over whether or not to grow or to invent because that’s what the deep structure of capitalism mandates. The only interesting question is, therefore, how is growth going to occur, and with what kinds of technological change? This forces us to consider the implications for mental conceptions, the relation to nature and all the other moments. If we don’t like these implications then we have no recourse except to engage in struggle with respect not only to one or another of the moments but to all of them simultaneously, until we ultimately come to terms with having to transform the very rule of value itself.
The circulation of capital is, however, the driver of the dynamics under capitalism. But what is socially necessary for this process to be sustained? Consider, for example, the necessary mental conceptions. If you go down to Wall Street with a big banner saying, “Growth Is Bad, Stop It Now,” would that be considered an anticapitalist sentiment? You bet it would. You would be dismissed, however, not necessarily for being anticapitalist but for being antigrowth, because growth is considered both inevitable and good. Zero growth signals serious problems. Japan hasn’t grown much at all in recent times, poor folk. But the growth in China has been spectacular, so the Chinese are the grand success story. How can we emulate them? We all happily sit around and say growth is good, technological change is good and so capitalism, which requires both, must also be good. This is the sort of common belief system that Gramsci often referred to as “hegemony.” The same sorts of issues arise concerning institutional arrangements. Capitalism requires adequate legal arrangements to function effectively. The more the Chinese moved down a capitalistic path, the less plausible it was for them to maintain a legal system that didn’t acknowledge some sorts of private property rights. But there is a great deal of latitude and contingency in the institutional arrangements that might work.
Sections 1–3: Machine Development, Value Transfers and Effects on Workers

So, finally, let us take up the materials assembled in this long chapter. I suggest you pay careful attention to the sequence of the section headings. These define a logical line of argument that structures Marx’s inquiry into the rise of the factory system and the use of machinery. He begins, however, with John Stuart Mill’s surprise at the fact that mechanical inventions, supposedly designed to lighten the load of labor, had done nothing of the kind. In fact, they had generally made matters worse. Marx himself is in no way surprised, since machines are used to produce surplus-value, not to lighten the load of labor. But this means, notice, that “the machine is a means for producing surplus-value” (492). This sounds odd, since Marx has argued that machines are dead labor (constant capital) and cannot produce value. Yet they can, however, be a source of surplus-value. The reduction in the value of labor-power through rising productivity in the wage-goods sector yields relative surplus-value to the capitalist class, while the capitalist with the best machinery will acquire the temporary form of relative surplus-value that accrues to the producer with higher productivity. No wonder capitalists hold to the fetish belief that machines produce value!
Marx then considers the difference between tools and machines. To “call a tool a simple machine and a machine a complex tool” and “see no essential difference between them” misses something essential, most notably “the historical element” (that element that he, incidentally, makes so much noise about in the footnote) (492–3). Marx was one of the first people ever to use the phrase “industrial revolution” and to make it central to his historical reconstruction. So what constitutes the heart of this industrial revolution? Was it simply a change of technology, the fact that tools become machines? Is the difference between machines and tools that machines have an external source of power? Does it entail a radical shift in social relations to parallel the transformations in productive forces? The answer is all of the above.
The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution, replaces the worker, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools and set in motion by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power. Here we have the machine, but in its first role as a simple element in production by machinery. (497)
This is predicated, however, on a transformation in the positionality (social relation) of the worker. This is just as important as the machine itself. While workers can continue to provide the motive power, at some point or other the need arose to supplement that power from an external source. Water power had long been pressed into service, but its application was limited and restricted by location.
Not till the invention of Watt’s second and so-called double-acting steam-engine was a prime mover found which drew its own motive power from the consumption of coal and water, was entirely under man’s control, was mobile and a means of locomotion, was urban and not—like the water-wheel—rural, permitted production to be concentrated in towns instead of—like the water-wheels—being scattered over the countryside and, finally, was of universal technical application, and little affected in its choice of residence by local circumstances. (499)
The steam engine liberated capital from dependence on localized sources of power, because coal was a commodity that could, in principle, be shipped anywhere. But be careful not to read too much into this invention, because “the steam-engine itself … did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the contrary, the invention of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam-engines necessary” (496–7).
And while Marx doesn’t mention it, coal also eliminated the acute rivalry, which had limited industrial development before this time, between the use of land for food production and the use of land’s biomass as an energy source. All the time wood and charcoal were primary fuel sources, the competition for land between food and biofuels raised the cost of both. With coal it became possible to mine the stored energy of the Carboniferous period; then, with oil, that of the Cretaceous period. This liberated the land for food and other forms of raw-material production and liberated industry to proliferate using cheap fuels, with all kinds of implications both for urbanization and, of course, for the way we live our lives right now. Interestingly, a response to fuel scarcities in recent times has been to go back to the land for fuel (ethanol, in particular), and this has had the predictable consequence of rapidly increasing food and other raw-material prices (with all manner of social consequences, such as food riots and increasing hunger; even my bagel has gone up in price by thirty cents). We are currently re-creating the barriers to capital accumulation that the shift to fossil fuels in the late eighteenth century so successfully circumvented by revolutionizing the relation to nature.
But the hallmark of the industrial revolution was more than just a shift in energy production. The “co-operation by division of labour which is peculiar to manufacture” now appears “as a combination of machines with specific functions.” There is a significant evolution in social relations.
In manufacture, it is the workers who, either singly or in groups, must carry on each particular process with their manual implements. The worker has been appropriated by the process; but the process had previously to be adapted to the worker. This subjective principle of the division of labour no longer exists in production by machinery. Here the total process is examined objectively, viewed in and for itself, and analysed into its constitutive phases. The problem of how to execute each particular process, and to bind the different partial processes together into a whole, is solved by the aid of machines, chemistry, etc.
The result is the evolution of “an articulated system composed of various kinds of single machine, and of groups of single machines,” and this “becomes all the more perfect the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one” (501–2).
There are a number of points to make about this statement. First is the importance of continuity in the production process, which is crucial because the continuity of the circulation of capital requires it, and machinery helps achieve this. Second, note that social relations are being transformed alongside the technical relations. Third, the analysis of the production process into its constitutive phases entails a mental transformation which brings a science (such as chemistry) to bear on technology. In other words, there is an evolution in mental conceptions. At least three of the elements examined in the footnote come into play here, while the relation to nature and to locational requirements also shifts as coal resources replace waterfalls and biomass as primary sources of energy. We see in paragraphs of this sort how Marx’s formulation in the footnote is working. The different elements flow easily together to constitute a compelling narrative of coevolution rather than causation. The outcome is an “organized system of machines to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from an automatic centre,” and this, he says, “is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, in place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster”—Marx loves images of this sort, as we have already seen—“whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs.” But, Marx reminds us, “the inventions of Vaucanson, Arkwright, Watt and others could be put into practice only because each inventor found a considerable number of skilled mechanical workers available, placed at their disposal by the period of manufacture.” That is, the new technologies could not have come on line if the necessary social relations and labor skills had not already been in place. In some cases, these workers “were independent handicraftsmen of various trades,” while others were already “grouped together” (503).
But the evolutionary process had its own momentum. “As inventions increased in number, and the demand for the newly discovered machines grew larger, the machine-making industry increasingly split up into numerous independent branches, and the division of labour within these manufactures developed accordingly.” Social relations were in full flood of transformation. “Here, therefore in manufacture, we see the immediate technical foundation of large-scale industry. Manufacture produced the machinery with which large-scale industry abolished the handicraft and manufacturing systems in the spheres of production it first seized hold of.” After the system had “undergone further development in its old form,” it finally created “for itself a new basis appropriate to its own mode of production” (503–4). Capitalism, in short, discovered a technological basis more consistent with its rules of circulation.
This is, in my view, an evolutionary, not a determinist, argument. The contradictions of capitalism as they arose in the manufacturing and handicraft period could not be resolved given the nature of the technologies which existed. Therefore, there was considerable pressure to come up with a new technological mix. Marx is telling the story of how capitalism came to “create for itself a new basis appropriate to its own mode of production.” But this whole process was
dependent on the growth of a class of workers who, owing to the semi-artistic nature of their employment, could increase their numbers only gradually, and not by leaps and bounds. But, besides this, at a certain stage of its development large-scale industry also came into conflict with the technical basis provided for it by handicrafts and manufacture. (504)
The expansionary force of capital encountered limits. The capitalist system had arrived at the point where it needed skilled workers to make the machines that would facilitate its development at the same time as its own technological basis acted as a drag on the capacity of built machines.
But the evolutionary process was hard to stop. “The transformation of the mode of production in one sphere of industry necessitates a similar transformation in other spheres.” Note here, by the way, Marx’s use of the term “mode of production.” He sometimes uses this term, as he does in the opening paragraph of Capital, to contrast, say, the capitalist and feudal modes of production. But here it means something much more specific: the mode of production in a particular industry. These two meanings interrelate: the mode of production in a particular industry creates new machine forms which actually are consistent with the capitalist mode of production understood in the broader sense. Here, however, we are talking about specific transformations in modes of production in particular spheres of industry and the dynamic interactions between them.
This happens at first in branches of industry which are connected together by being separate phases of a process, and yet isolated by the social division of labour … Thus machine spinning made machine weaving necessary, and both together made a mechanical and chemical revolution compulsory in bleaching, printing and dyeing.
Spill-over effects between different segments of a production process create mutually reinforcing changes. Furthermore, “the revolution in the modes of production of industry and agriculture made necessary a revolution in the general conditions of the social process of production, i.e. in the means of communication and transport” (505–6). This introduces one of the other themes that I find extremely interesting in Marx: that is the importance of what he calls in the Grundrisse the “annihilation of space by time.”7 The evolutionary dynamic of capitalism is not neutral in terms of its geographical form. We’ve already seen hints of this in his discussion of urbanization, the concentration that could arise through the steam engine, and the locational freedoms conferred by steam power. Connectivity in the world market also changed.
Hence, quite apart from the immense transformation which took place in shipbuilding, the means of communication and transport gradually adapted themselves to the mode of production of large-scale industry by means of a system of river steamers, railways, ocean steamers and telegraphs. But the huge masses of iron that had now to be forged, welded, cut, bored and shaped required for their part machines of Cyclopean dimensions, which the machine-building trades of the period of manufacture were incapable of constructing.
And here comes the final link in the argument:
Large-scale industry therefore had to take over the machine itself, its own characteristic instrument of production, and to produce machines by means of machines. It was not till it did this that it could create for itself an adequate technical foundation, and stand on its own feet. (506)
The capacity to produce machines with the aid of machines is, in short, the technical foundation of a fully fledged, dynamic capitalist mode of production. In other words, the growth of engineering and the machine-tool industry is the ultimate phase of a revolution that created the “adequate technical foundation” for the capitalist mode of production in general. “As machinery, the instrument of labour assumes a material mode of existence which necessitates the replacement of human force by natural forces, and the replacement of the rule of thumb by the conscious application of natural science.” This entails a revolution not only in mental conceptions but also of their application.
In manufacture the organization of the social labour process is purely subjective: it is a combination of specialized workers. Large-scale industry, on the other hand, possesses in the machine system an entirely objective organization of production, which confronts the worker as a pre-existing material condition of production. (508)
The nature of cooperation is fundamentally changed, for example.
I have gone over this section at length, in order to show how the synergistic spread of revolutions in technology both rests on and provokes transformations in social relations, mental conceptions and modes of production (in the concrete and particular sense), as well as in spatial and natural relations. The rise of this new technological system which is suited to a capitalist mode of production (in the grand sense) is an evolutionary story in which all the elements in the footnote coevolve.
In the chapter’s second section, Marx asks the following question: how is value transferred from the machine to the product? The other two modes of acquiring relative surplus-value—through cooperation and division of labor—cost capital nothing, apart from some incidental expenses. But a machine is a commodity that has to be bought in the market. This is very different from, say, merely reconfiguring the division of labor in a workplace. Machines have a value, and that value has to be paid for. Somehow the value congealed in the machine must be transferred into “the product it serves to beget,” even though no physical transfer of matter is involved (509). Initially, Marx appeals to the idea of straight-line depreciation. If the machine lasts ten years, one-tenth of the value of the machine ends up in the product each year over that time. But then he goes on to derive an important limit to the deployment of machinery:
The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product is limited by the requirement that less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery. For the capitalist, however, there is a further limit on its use. Instead of paying for the labour, he pays only the value of the labour-power employed; the limit to his using a machine is therefore fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it. (515)
This assumes (as most economists tend to) that capitalists are rational in their decisions. If the machine is expensive and you save very little labor by it, then why buy it? The cheaper the machine and the more expensive the labor, the greater the incentive to employ machinery. The calculation that the capitalist has to make, therefore, is between the value expended to buy the machine and the value saved on labor (variable capital) employed. This limit on the deployment of machinery is typically enforced by the coercive laws of competition. Capitalists who buy costly machines but save little labor by them are going to be driven out of business.
How much variable capital gets saved depends, however, on the value of labor-power. “Hence the invention nowadays in England of machines that are employed only in North America” (516). In North America, the relative scarcity of labor meant high labor costs, so employing machines made sense, but in Britain the existence of surplus labor meant cheap labor and less incentive to use machines. This calculation on the limiting conditions to the employment of machinery is significant, both theoretically and practically. There are contemporary examples in China where, with the abundance of cheap labor, something which is made with a sophisticated and expensive machine in the United States has been broken down into smaller labor processes that can be done by hand. Instead of employing one very expensive machine with twenty laborers in the United States, you employ two thousand laborers in China using hand tools. This example counters the idea that capitalism inevitably marches onward toward ever-greater mechanization and technological sophistication. Given the importance of the limiting conditions and the value relations, then all manner of oscillations can occur in the deployment of machine technologies.
In the third section, Marx considers three consequences of machine deployment for the worker. Machinery facilitated the “Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-Power by Capital. The Employment of Women and Children.” Machine technologies effectively destroyed the skill basis that existed in the handicraft period. It then became much easier to employ unskilled women and children. A number of consequences followed. It became possible to substitute the family wage for the individual wage. The latter could be reduced, but the family wage could remain constant as women and children entered the workforce. This has been an interesting and persistent theme in capitalist history. In the United States since the 1970s, individual wages have either declined or remained fairly constant in real terms, but family wages have tended to rise as more women have gone to work. What the capitalists class gets is two laborers for close to the price of one. The Brazilian economic miracle of the 1960s was likewise dominated by a catastrophic diminution of individual wages under the military dictatorship, but family wages managed to stabilize because not only women but kids went to work (child labor in the iron mines surged). This led to the famous comment by the Brazilian president Emílio Garrastazu Médici that “the economy” (he should have said the capitalist class) “is doing very well but the people are doing very badly.” There are many historical circumstances where capitalists have pursued this solution to gaining surplus-value.
This also raises the question of the relationship between the individual and the family wage. The latter is necessary for the reproduction of the working class. But who bears the cost of this reproduction? Marx is not very sensitive, as many have pointed out, to questions of gender, but he does in a footnote acknowledge the importance of the relation between household work and the buying and selling of labor-power in the market. If women enter the labor force, then
domestic work, such as sewing and mending, must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made articles. Hence the diminished expenditure of labour in the house is accompanied by an increased expenditure of money outside. The cost of production of the working-class family therefore increases, and balances its greater income. In addition to this, economy and judgement in the consumption and preparation of the means of subsistence become impossible. (518)
Consideration of the family wage raises other issues. It was very common in Marx’s time for the male, particularly in the countries Marx was familiar with, to be deliverer of the whole family labor. The result was the creation of a “gang system” for labor supply. One male figure would be held responsible for delivering the labor-power of several kids, maybe the labor-power of a wife and a sister, as well as the labor-power of nephews and kin. In France, the labor market was frequently constituted as a gang system whereby a patriarchal figure would command the labor of everybody around him and deliver that labor to his employers, leaving the question of the remuneration of that labor and distribution of the benefits to the patriarchal figure. Systems of this sort are not at all uncommon in Asia and are frequently found in the organization of immigrant groups in Europe and North America. Some of the worst aspects of this, then as now, as Marx points out in a footnote, arose (and arise) through trafficking in children and the equivalent of slave dealing. Relying very much on the reports of the factory inspectors (suffused with Victorian morality that Marx does not criticize) and Engels’s account in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Marx focuses on the “moral degradation which arises out of the exploitation by capitalism of the labour of women and children,” and the weak attempts by the bourgeoisie to counter this moral degradation through education (522). As in the case of the Factory Acts, a contradiction emerges between what individual capitalists are compelled to do by the coercive laws of competition and what the state tries to do in the way of educating children. Marx does therefore raise, albeit in a not very adequate way, issues concerning the reproduction of life (again an important but somewhat neglected element in footnote 4).
The second subsection deals with “The Prolongation of the Working Day”. Machinery in fact creates new conditions not only permitting capital to lengthen the working day but also creating “new incentives” to do so.
Because it is capital, the automatic mechanism is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will. As capital, therefore, it is animated by the drive to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man, that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier.
The machine is in part designed to overcome worker resistance, which is in any case “lessened by the apparently undemanding nature of work at a machine, and the more pliant and docile character of the women and children employed by preference” (526–7). This is, of course, a typical Victorian prejudice. In fact the women were by no means docile, any more than the children were.
But the heart of the problem here is the temporality and continuity of production. The machine wears out faster the more it is used, and there are strong incentives to use up the machine as fast as possible. To begin with, “the physical deterioration of the machine is of two kinds. The one arises from use,” and the other from non-use, i.e., it just rusts away. “But in addition to the material wear and tear, a machine also undergoes what we might call a moral depreciation.” I always find this term strange. What Marx really means is economic obsolescence. If I bought a machine for two million dollars last year, and this year all my competitors can buy it for one million (or, what amounts to the same thing, buy a machine for two million dollars which is twice as efficient as mine), then the value of commodities produced will fall, and I will lose half the value of my machine. “However young and full of life the machine may be, its value is no longer determined by the necessary labour-time actually objectified in it, but by the labour-time necessary to reproduce either it or the better machine.” The threat is that the machine will be “devalued to a greater or lesser extent” (528). To protect against this threat, capitalists are impelled to use their machinery up as fast as possible (keeping it employed twenty-four hours a day if possible). This means lengthening the working day (or, as we will see, resorting to shift work and relay systems). Machines supposed to get around lengthening the working day actually stimulate a need to further lengthen it.
Capitalists fall in love with machines because they are a source of surplus and relative surplus-value. The fetish of a “technological fix” becomes ingrained in their belief system. Yet machines are also the source of “an immanent contradiction” because “of the two factors of the surplus-value created by a given amount of capital, one, the rate of surplus-value, cannot be increased except by diminishing the other, the number of workers” (531). And since the mass of surplus-value, so crucial to the capitalist, depends on the rate of surplus-value and the number of workers, labor-saving innovations may leave the capitalist no better off. Throwing workers out of work through technological innovations from this standpoint does not seem a good idea, because the real value producers are lost from production. This contradiction will be made much of in the third volume of Capital, where the dynamics of technological innovation are seen as destabilizing and a source of serious crisis tendencies.
But the incentive for capitalists to keep on innovating is all-powerful. The competitive search for the ephemeral form of relative surplus-value becomes overwhelming in spite of the contradictions. Individual capitalists, responding to the coercive laws of competition, behave in a way that is not necessarily in the interests of the capitalist class. But the social consequences for labor can also be catastrophic.
Partly by placing at the capitalists’ disposal new strata of the working class previously inaccessible to him, partly by setting free the workers it supplants, machinery produces a surplus working population, which is compelled to submit to the dictates of capital. Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day. Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital’s disposal for its own valorization. (531–2)
Now we see why John Stuart Mill was so right.
The third subsection explicitly takes up the question of intensification. Earlier usually mentioned in passing (as, for example, in the definition of socially necessary labor-time), intensity is here confronted head-on. Capitalists can use machine technology to change and regulate the intensity and pace of the labor process. Reducing what is called the porosity of the working day (moments when work is not being done) is a key objective. How many seconds in a working day can a worker goof off? If they are in charge of their own tools, then they can lay them down and pick them up again. Laborers can work at their own pace. With machine technology, the speed and the continuity are determined internally to the machine system, and workers have to conform to the movement of, say, the assembly line (as in Chaplin’s Modern Times). There is an inversion in social relations, such that workers now become appendages of the machine. One of the great advances that occurred after 1850, once the industrial bourgeoisie got over the fact that they were going to have to deal with the Factory Acts and the regulation of the length of the working day, was that capitalists discovered that a shorter working day was compatible with increasing intensity. This repositioning of the laborer as an appendage to the labor process is of utmost importance in what follows.

In the last chapter, I invited you to look at this long chapter on machinery through the lens of Marx’s footnote 4, paying particular attention to the way “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.” When reading this chapter, it is interesting to note how Marx knits together interrelations between these different “moments” in order not only to understand the evolution of capitalist technologies but also to show what it is that the study of this evolutionary process reveals about the capitalist mode of production viewed as a totality (as an ensemble or assemblage of interactive elements). If you read this chapter this way, you will see in it a rather richer set of determinations than just a simple story about technological change.
In reading this gargantuan chapter (where it is all too easy to get lost), I also suggested it would be helpful to pay attention to the section headings in order to maintain a sense of the dynamism of the whole argument. Consider the story so far. In the first sections, he explained how capitalism evolved a unique technological basis by transforming the technologies associated with handicraft and manufacturing industries. This basis is eventually achieved by the production of machines by machines, and by the organization of many machines into a factory system. But machines are commodities that have to be paid for. Their value, therefore, has to circulate as constant capital during the machine’s lifetime. If that lifetime is ten years, then one-tenth of the value of the machine ends up in the product every year. But this imposes a limit—the depreciating value of the machine should be less than the value of the labor replaced by it. This creates the possibility for uneven geographical development. If labor costs are high in the United States relative to Britain, then the incentive to employ machinery in the United States is greater. Trade-union power in West Germany from the mid-1970s on sustained high wage rates, which produced a strong incentive for technological innovation. The West German economy then gained relative surplus-value vis-à-vis the rest of the world through technological advantage, but the labor-saving innovations produced structural unemployment.
In the third section, Marx examined the implications for the laborer (the relationship between technologies and social relations). The transformation from skilled crafts to machine minding permits the employment of women and children in ways that might not have been possible earlier on. This allows the substitution of family labor (the family wage) for individual labor (the individual wage), with savings for the capitalist and widespread ramifications for family structures, gender relations and shifts in the role and form of domestic economies. But the introduction of machinery also creates an incentive to prolong the working day to confront the problem of “moral depreciation” (economic obsolescence) and the danger of the devaluation of old machinery by the introduction of new and better machines. Capitalists therefore strive to recuperate the value congealed in the machine as fast as they can, which means keeping the machine employed twenty-four hours a day if possible. Machinery can also be used to intensify the labor process. Capitalists can take control of both the continuity and the speed of the labor process and thereby reduce the porosity of the working day. Intensification emerges as an important capitalist strategy for squeezing more surplus-value out of the laborer. This is the story so far.
Sections 4–10: Workers, Factories, Industry

The seven remaining sections of the chapter on machinery both deepen and broaden our perspectives on what can be “revealed” about capitalism through an examination of technological evolution. In section 4, Marx examines the factory per se. This is the centerpiece of his concern, not simply as a technical thing but as a social order. But here I need to insert some critical caveats. Marx relies heavily on two sources for his understanding of the factory system. Engels’s firsthand experience of Manchester-style industrialism was critical and was supplemented by the writings of Babbage and Ure, who were the day’s leading pro-capitalist ideologists and promoters of principles of efficient industrial management. Marx tends to universalize what is going on in Manchester as if this is the ultimate form of capitalist industrialism, and he is, in my judgment, a bit too accepting of Babbage and Ure’s ideas. If Engels had been in Birmingham, Marx’s presentation might have been quite different. The industrial structure there was small-scale but assembled in such a way as to realize economies of agglomeration. It was more craft-oriented, with workshops producing guns, jewelry and various metallurgical products, and it seems to have been highly efficient and characterized by very different labor relations from those found in the huge cotton factories of the Manchester region. Marx evidently knew very little about what we might call the Birmingham model of capitalist industrialism and therefore failed to address a distinction that has been long-lasting in the history of capitalist development. South Korean industrialism since the 1960s has been Manchester-like, but Hong Kong’s has been more Birmingham-like. Bavaria, what is called the Third Italy and other similarly organized industrial districts (Silicon Valley being a special case) have been critically important in recent phases of industrialism, and this is very different from the Manchester-like industrial forms in the Pearl River Delta of China. The point, however, is that all the industrial world was not and is not like the factories of Manchester. Marx’s account of the factory, while compelling, is one-sided.
Marx begins by noting that
along with the tool, the skill of the worker in handling it passes over to the machine. The capabilities of the tool are emancipated from the restraints inseparable from human labour-power. This destroys the technical foundation on which the division of labour in manufacture was based. Hence, in place of the hierarchy of specialized workers that characterizes manufacture, there appears, in the automatic factory, a tendency to equalize and reduce to an identical level every kind of work that has to be done by the minders of the machines; in place of the artificially produced distinctions between the specialized workers, it is natural differences of age and sex that predominate … In so far as the division of labour reappears in the factory, it takes the form primarily of a distribution of workers among the specialized machines. (545)
Workers can move from one machine to another. They become, in effect, machine minders.
Marx is here describing the deskilling that accompanies the rise of the factory system, such that all labor is rendered increasingly homogeneous. If you can mind this machine, you can mind that machine. The continued significance of deskilling throughout the history of capitalism has been the subject of considerable debate in more recent times (beginning with Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital,1 which provoked a lot of commentary and study from the 1970s onward). Furthermore, “the motion of the whole factory proceeds not from the worker but from the machinery,” and for that reason “the working personnel can continually be replaced without any interruption in the labour process” (546). The result is that workers are reduced to the lifelong task of serving particular machines. Plainly, the worker and social relations are being transformed along with the worker’s work, such that workers become mere appendages of machines.
In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages … Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content … [The] conditions of work employ the worker. However, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the worker during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundation of machinery. (548–9)
In other words, mental conceptions are now divided from physical labor. The mental conceptions lie with the capitalists—they are the ones who are designing things. Laborers are not supposed to think; they are just simply supposed to mind machines. This may not be true in fact, of course, but the point is that this is the structure for which the capitalist class struggles day and night, and as a consequence the whole structure of mental conceptions, social relations, reproduction of life, relation to nature and so on is being transformed along class lines.
The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science [read mental conceptions], the gigantic natural forces [read the relation to nature], and the mass of social labour embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with those three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master’.
But this transformation is predicated on that capacity to so degrade the positionality of workers that they are no more than appendages of machines, unable to use any of their mental powers and subjected to the capitalists’ “autocratic power” (549) and despotic rules. Skill now resides only with those who design the machines, the engineers and so on, who become a small group of highly specialized workers. But as Marx earlier remarked, as a counterpoint there emerges “a superior class of workers, in part scientifically educated, in part trained in a handicraft; they stand outside the realm of the factory workers, and are added to them only to make up an aggregate” (545–6).
Transformations of this sort were bound to provoke resistance, particularly from skilled workers. This is the focus of section 5, dealing with “The Struggle Between Worker and Machine.” The so-called Luddite movement (named after a fictional character called Ned Ludd) was a machine-breaking movement in which workers would protest their deskilling and loss of jobs by smashing the machines. They saw the machines as their competitors, as the destroyer of their skills and the creator of their job insecurity. But Marx notes an evolution in the politics of this revolt:
The large-scale destruction of machinery which occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin government, composed of such people as Sidmouth and Castlereagh, a pretext for the most violent and reactionary measures. It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments. (554–5)
This statement calls for careful evaluation. Marx seems to suggest here that the problem is not machines (the technology), but capitalism (the social relations). It may be inferred (wrongly in my view) that machines are in themselves neutral, that they can therefore be used in the transition to socialism. It seems to have been historically true that the workers themselves gave up on indiscriminate machine breaking in favor of targeting those capitalists who were using machine technology in the most brutal manner. But this seems to violate the spirit of Marx’s general line of argument, particularly given my reading of the fourth footnote, in which technologies and social relations are integral to each other. Under this reading, there is bound to be a problem with machines, too, since they have been designed and set up in such a way as to internalize certain social relations, mental conceptions and ways of producing and living. That workers are being turned into appendages of machines is not, surely, a good thing. Nor is the deprivation of mental capacities associated with capitalist machine technologies. So when Lenin praised Fordist techniques of production, set up factory systems for production similar to those being created by US corporations and made the argument that the transformation of social relations wrought by the revolution was what fundamentally mattered, he was treading on dangerous ground. Marx himself appears ambiguous in these passages. Elsewhere, he is more critical of the nature of the technologies through which capitalism has found its own basis. The technologies discussed in this chapter are those suited to a capitalistic mode of production. This should lead us automatically to pose the problem of discovering those distinctive technologies appropriate to a socialist or communist mode of production. If you take the technologies of a capitalist mode of production and try to construct socialism with them, what are you going to get? You are likely to get another version of capitalism, which is what tended to happen in the Soviet Union with the spread of Fordist techniques. In the same way that Marx critiqued Proudhon for merely instantiating bourgeois notions of justice, so Marx is in danger here of endorsing the instantiation of capitalist technologies.
One way to defend Marx is to go back to how he depicts the rise of capitalism. In the manufacturing period, capitalist development rested on late feudal handicraft and manufacturing technologies (while changing their organizational form), and this was necessarily so given the conjunctural conditions. It was only later that capitalism came to define its specific technological basis. In exactly the same way, socialism was bound to make use of capitalist technologies in its early revolutionary stages, and given the exigencies of the moment (war and mass disruption), Lenin was therefore correct to turn to the most advanced capitalist technological forms in order to revive production and so protect the revolution. But a socialist revolutionary project in the long term cannot, given my reading of the footnote, avoid the question of the definition of an alternative technological basis as well as alternative relations to nature, social relations, production systems, reproduction through daily life and mental conceptions of the world. And this, it seems to me, has been one of the acute failures in the history of actually existing communisms. This issue is, of course, broader than communism, since the question of appropriate technologies to realize certain social and political aims, be they feminist, anarchist, environmentalist or whatever, is a general matter deserving of close consideration. Technologies, we have to conclude, are not neutral with respect to the other moments in the social totality.
The problematic class character of capitalist technologies is actually confirmed in Marx’s text. “Machinery,” he writes,
does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous. It is a power inimical to him, and capital proclaims this fact loudly and deliberately, as well as making use of it. It is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital. According to Gaskell, the steam-engine was from the very first an antagonist of ‘human power’, an antagonist that enabled the capitalists to tread underfoot the growing demands of the workers … It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt. (562–3)
So capitalists consciously construct new technologies as instruments of class struggle. These technologies not only serve to discipline the laborer within the labor process but also help to create a labor surplus which will depress wages and worker aspirations.
Marx here introduces the idea of technologically induced unemployment for the first time. Labor-saving innovations put people out of work. Indeed, over the past thirty years, strong technological changes and incredible increases in productivity have generated unemployment and job insecurity and made it much easier to discipline labor politically. The tendency has been to blame outsourcing and competition from low-wage labor in Mexico and China for the ills of the US working class, but studies show that about two-thirds of the job losses there are due to technological change. When I arrived in Baltimore in 1969, Bethlehem Steel was employing more than twenty-five thousand workers, but twenty years later it was employing fewer than five thousand workers, producing about the same amount of steel. “The instrument of labour strikes down the worker” (559).
The claim that technologies are used as weapons of class struggle is not hard to substantiate. I recall reading a memoir of an industrialist, a machine-tool innovator, working in Second Empire Paris. He gave three motivations for innovation: first, to lower the price of the commodity and improve competitive position; second, to improve efficiency and eliminate waste; third, to put labor in its place. From the Luddites onward, the class struggle over technological forms has been an endless feature within capitalism.
Section 6, “The Compensation Theory,” focuses on the aggregate relationship between capital and labor as a consequence of technological changes. If capitalists save variable capital by employing fewer laborers, then what do they do with the capital they save? If they expand their activities, then some of the labor rendered redundant is reabsorbed. On this basis, bourgeois economists of the time invented a compensation theory to prove that machines in aggregate did not cause unemployment. Marx does not deny that there can be some compensation, but how much is problematic. You can pick up 10 percent of the laborers you just made redundant, or 20 percent. There is no automatic reason why all will be reabsorbed. “Machinery necessarily throws men out of work in those industries into which it is introduced,” but it may, “despite this, bring about an increase in employment in other industries. This effect of machinery, however, has nothing in common with the so-called theory of compensation” (570). Even if most workers eventually get re-employed, there is still a serious transitional problem. “As soon as machinery has set free a part of the workers employed in a given branch of industry, the reserve men”—that is, the reserve army which is always out there—“are also diverted into new channels of employment, and become absorbed in other branches; meanwhile, the original victims”—those thrown out of work—“during the period of transition, for the most part starve and perish” (568). There are also adaptation problems: steelworkers cannot become computer programmers overnight.
Therefore, since machinery in itself shortens the hours of labour, but when employed by capital it lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital it heightens its intensity; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of nature but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital it makes them into paupers, the bourgeois economist simply states that the contemplation of machinery in itself demonstrates with exactitude that all these evident contradictions are a mere semblance, present in everyday reality, but not existing in themselves, and therefore having no theoretical existence either. (568–9)
The machine always has to be seen in relation, therefore, to the capitalist use of it. And there is no question but that capitalist uses are often ruthlessly and needlessly oppressive. But if the machine is viewed “in itself” as a “victory of man over the forces of nature,” as well as “in itself” endowed with potentially virtuous possibilities (such as lightening the load of labor and increasing material well-being), then we are back to the dubious proposition that capitalist technology “in itself” can lay the basis for alternative forms of social organization without any major adjustment, let alone revolutionary transformation. The question is posed once more of the positionality of organizational forms, of technologies and machines in the transition from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to socialism or communism. This is one of the big questions raised in this chapter, one that deserves long and hard thought.
Compensation also arises because the introduction of machines increases employment in the machine-tool industry. But recall, “the increase in the labour required to produce the instruments of labour themselves, the machinery, coal, etc. must be less than the reduction in labour achieved by the employment of machinery” (570). Then there is the possibility of increasing employment in raw-material extraction. But in the case of cotton, this unfortunately meant the intensification and expansion of slave labor in the US South rather than the expansion of wage employment. But if all these possibilities for compensation are blocked, then the original problem of what the capitalists should do with their excess capital remains. They acquire this excess, either individually or as a class, as the value of labor-power declines and as the number of laborers they employ tends to decrease.
What is posed here, albeit in somewhat shadowy form, is the problem of what the bourgeoisie should do with all its surplus capital. This is a huge and fundamental problem. I call it the capital-surplus-absorption problem. Capitalists necessarily end up with more of something, a surplus, at the end of the day, and then they’ve got the problem of what do they do with that surplus the next day. If they can’t find anything to do with it, they are in trouble. This is the central problem that gets taken up in later volumes of Capital. Marx does not attempt to analyze this in all its fullness here, but he does throw out some suggestions. “The immediate result of machinery is to augment surplus-value and the mass of products in which surplus-value is embodied. It also increases the quantity of substances for the capitalists and their dependants to consume” (572). So “the production of luxuries increases” while the market for surplus product may also be increased through the expansion of foreign trade.
The increase in means of production and subsistence, accompanied by a relative diminution in the number of workers, provides the impulse for an extension of work that can only bear fruit in the distant future, such as the construction of canals, docks, tunnels, bridges and so on. (573)
Investments in long-term physical infrastructures which don’t bear fruit for many years can become vehicles for surplus absorption. Remarks of this sort eventually led me to theorize, in The Limits to Capital, the crucial role of geographical expansions and long-term investments (particularly in built environments) in the stabilization of capitalism.
In addition,
the extraordinary increase in the productivity of large-scale industry, accompanied as it is by both a more intensive and a more extensive exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production, permits a larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively. Hence it is possible to reproduce the ancient domestic slaves, on a constantly extending scale, under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc.
This class of unproductive people includes
all who are too old or too young for work, all ‘unproductive’ women, young persons and children; … the ‘ideological groups’, such as members of the government, priests, lawyers, soldiers, etc.; … all the people exclusively occupied in consuming the labour of others in the form of ground rent, interest, etc. (574)
All this large population has to be supported out of the surplus. With reference to England and Wales, Marx cites the 1861 census figures, which show that “all the persons … employed in textile factories and metal industries, taken together, number 1,039,605,” while those in mining accounted for 565,835, compared with the 1,208,648 persons in the servant class (or “modern domestic slaves”) (574). We tend to think that the radical shift from manufacturing to services occurred in the past half century, but what these figures illustrate is that this is not a new sector at all. The big difference is that Marx’s servant class was not for the most part organized along capitalist lines (a lot of servants lived in). There were no stores whose signs said “Nails,” “Cleaners,” “Hair Salon” or whatever. But the population numbers involved in this form of employment were always large and too often neglected in economic analyses (including that of Marx), even though they outnumbered the working class in the classic sense of factory workers, miners and the like.
Section 7, on the “Repulsion and Attraction of Workers through the Development of Machine Production,” examines the temporal rhythms of employment corresponding to the ebb and flow of business cycles. Profits, Marx argues, “not only form a source of accelerated accumulation, they also attract into the favoured sphere of production a large part of the additional social capital that is constantly being created, and is always seeking out new areas of investment” (578). But as surplus capital flows into these newly favored areas, it encounters certain barriers such as “those presented by the availability of raw materials and the extent of sales outlets” (579). Where are you going to get the new raw materials from, and whom are you going to sell your surplus product to? These, as we shall see, are key questions, and we will come back to them in the final section, “Reflections and Prognoses.”
The immediate answer that Marx proffers here is—India! You go wreck the domestic industries of India and turn that vast population into your market, at the same time as you also turn India into a raw-material producer for your own market. That is, you engage in imperialist and colonialist practices and geographical expansions. The problem is solved by what I call a spatial fix. As a result,
a new and international division of labour springs up, one suited to the requirements of the main industrial countries, and it converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field. (579–80)
Now all this lies, as yet, outside the grasp of Marx’s theoretical apparatus. But what we clearly see from this section is the social necessity within a capitalist mode of production to solve its capital-surplus disposal problem through geographical and temporal displacements.
Ebbs and flows in the industrial cycle are characteristic of capitalism.
The factory system’s tremendous capacity for expanding with sudden immense leaps, and its dependence on the world market, necessarily give rise to the following cycle: feverish production, a consequent glut on the market, then a contraction of the market, which causes production to be crippled. The life of industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation. The uncertainty and instability to which machinery subjects the employment, and consequently the living conditions, of the workers becomes a normal state of affairs, owing to these periodic turns of the industrial cycle. Except in the periods of prosperity, a most furious combat rages between the capitalists for their individual share in the market. This share is directly proportional to the cheapness of the product. Apart from the rivalry this struggle gives rise to in the use of improved machinery for replacing labour-power, and the introduction of new methods of production, there also comes a time in every industrial cycle when a forcible reduction of wages beneath the value of labour-power is attempted so as to cheapen commodities. (580–2)
This broad-brush description of cyclical movements in the economy lacks any theoretical underpinning, and the exact mechanisms that produce such movements remain unexplored. Marx moves, as it were, from the terrain of theory to a schematic description of the cycles of boom and bust characteristic of the British economy in his time. What follows is a history of the boom and bust cycles in the British cotton industry, the main purpose of which appears to be to simply illustrate his historical point. He summarizes the story:
We find, then, in the first forty-five years of the English cotton industry, from 1770 to 1815, only five years of crisis and stagnation; but this was the period of monopoly. The second period from 1815 to 1863 counts, during its forty-eight years, only twenty years of revival and prosperity against twenty-eight of depression and stagnation. Between 1815 and 1830 competition with the continent of Europe and with the United States sets in. After 1833, the extension of the Asiatic markets is enforced by ‘destruction of the human race’. (587)
A footnote makes clear that the “human destruction” he is referring to was that wrought by the British as they forcibly used the opium grown in India to sell in China in return for Chinese silver that could be used to buy British goods.
In Section 8, “The Revolutionary Impact of Large-Scale Industry on Manufacture, Handicrafts and Domestic Industry,” Marx examines what happens as different labor systems are brought into competition with one another. This section raises some intriguing questions. In Marx’s time, there were domestic labor systems, handicraft systems, manufacturing systems and factory systems all coexisting, sometimes in the same region. When brought into competition with one another, these systems underwent adaptations, sometimes producing new hybrid forms, but with the general result that conditions of work became absolutely appalling if not totally intolerable in all sectors. Handicraft workers had to work five times as hard to compete with the products of power looms, for example. But Marx seems to believe that, ultimately, the factory system was going to prevail. I say “seems” because he does not explicitly say so. But there are many hints here of some sort of teleological progression, such that capitalism necessarily and increasingly moves toward a factory-based system. The older and hybrid labor systems, hanging on by organizing totally inhumane systems of exploitation (which Marx, with the help of the factory inspectors, will describe in graphic detail), could not possibly last. If this is what he is saying, then there are grounds for disagreement.
I prefer to read him in another way, possibly against the grain of his own thinking. Capitalists, I would argue, like to preserve a choice of labor system. If they can’t make sufficient profit by the factory system, they want the option to go back to a domestic system. If they can’t make it that way, they’ll go off to a kind of quasi-manufacturing system. That is, instead of taking the conditions Marx describes in this chapter as temporary and transitional, I prefer to read them as permanent features (options) of a capitalist mode of production in which competition between different labor systems becomes a weapon to be used by capital against labor in the struggle to procure surplus-value. Using Marx’s account of the devastating consequences of competition between labor systems this way provides a better understanding of exactly what’s going on in the world right now. The revival of sweatshop and family labor systems, putting-out systems, subcontracting systems and the like has been a marked feature of global neoliberal capitalism over the past forty years. The factory system has not always worked to capital’s advantage, and Marx does have some good insights as to why. Workers, brought together in a large factory, can become all too aware of their common interests and become a potentially powerful collective political force. Industrialization in South Korea after 1960 or so produced a large-scale factory labor system, and one result was a strong trade-union movement that became a politically potent force until disciplined in the crisis of 1997–8. The labor system in Hong Kong rested on sweatshop family labor and subcontracting structures, and there is little in the way of a trade-union movement there. There are, of course, all sorts of other factors that come into play, but the point is that the availability of a choice of labor system is important to capital in the dynamics of class struggle.
I therefore find it most valuable to read these sections of Capital as a cautionary tale of how capitalists, endowed with a choice of labor process and labor system, use that choice as a weapon in class struggle over surplus generation. The factory workers are disciplined by competition with the sweatshops, and vice versa. The heightening of competition between labor systems has made matters much worse for labor in recent times compared with, say, the 1960s or 1970s, when in many parts of the capitalist world there were largish factory systems and strong labor organizations that supported social movements with some degree of political influence and political power. Back then, it was tempting to think that the factory system was indeed going to drive out all else and that the politics that flowed from this would lead on to socialism. Many people who read Capital during the 1960s favored such a teleological interpretation.
Consider, then, Marx’s account in greater detail. First we get the subsection “Overthrow of Co-operation Based on Handicrafts and on the Division of Labour,” which describes a distinctive displacement of one labor system by another. Second, the impact on manufacture and domestic industries is examined. In this instance, the theme is adaptation and not overthrow.
The principle of machine production, namely the division of the production process into its constituent phases, and the solution of the problems arising from this by the application of mechanics, chemistry and the whole range of the natural sciences, now plays the determining role everywhere. (590)
In other words, the mental conceptions associated with machine technologies penetrated into the reorganization of the older systems. Science and technology only began to coalesce with industry in the nineteenth century, which indeed entailed breaking down labor processes scientifically into component phases, routinizing and mechanizing them. But this implied a mental revolution in the way we understood the world, such that it became possible to apply scientific method to all labor systems (including artisanal ones). To be sure, this did not happen automatically in manufacture and the domestic industries, where older forms of thinking had long prevailed. But the consequences for those industries that were reorganized according to scientific and technical principles were horrific, if Marx’s account of lace production (596–9) is anything to go by.
The form domestic industry now took had, in fact, “nothing but the name in common with the old-fashioned domestic industry.” It had “been converted into an external department of the factory, the manufacturing workshop, or the warehouse.” In this way, capital “sets another army” of workers in motion holding them together “by means of invisible threads.” He cites the example of a shirt factory employing 1,000 workers along with “9,000 outworkers spread over the country districts.” This form of labor organization remains common to this day, particularly in Asia where the Japanese automobile industry, to take just one example, rests on the basis of a vast network of domestic subcontractors producing auto parts. “Shameless exploitation” is characteristic of these “modern” forms of domestic industry in part because “the workers’ power of resistance declines with their dispersal” and because “a whole series of plundering parasites insinuate themselves between the actual employer and the worker he employs” (591).
The widespread transformations in all labor systems were complicated in their specifics. “The revolution in the social mode of production which is the necessary product of the revolution in the means of production is accomplished through a variegated medley of transitional forms” (602). But, and this is the closest Marx gets to endorsing a teleological perspective, “the variety of these transitional forms does not, however, conceal the tendency operating to transform them into the factory system proper” (603). This is, however, a tendency and not a law, and when Marx uses the word “tendency,” it is important to note, he nearly always has in mind counteracting tendencies that make actual outcomes uncertain. But in this instance he does not examine potential countertendencies.
Marx does describe how “this industrial revolution, which advances naturally and spontaneously, is also helped on artificially by the extension of the Factory Acts to all industries in which women, young persons and children are employed” (604). Only the largest businesses, he notes, had the resources to comply with the regulations.
Though the Factory Acts thus artificially ripen the material elements necessary for the conversion of the manufacturing system into the factory system, yet at the same time, because they make it necessary to lay out a greater amount of capital, they hasten the decline of the small masters, and the concentration of capital. (607)
Big capital consequently often supports the rigorous enforcement of all kinds of regulatory regimes on, for example, occupational safety and health, particularly if small businesses can’t afford them, leaving the whole field to the large corporations. What is called “regulatory capture” has long been a feature in the history of capitalism. Corporations capture the regulatory apparatus and use it to eliminate competition. When Mini Coopers first came out in Britain in the early 1960s, the regulatory regime in the United States excluded them by insisting that headlights had to be this much off the ground, whereas for the Mini Cooper, they were only that much. So much for the real practices of free trade!
The seasonality that characterizes some lines of production poses another set of problems to which capital has to adapt. One of the reasons I find Capital such a prescient book is that Marx often identifies tendencies at work in the capitalism of his time which are all too easy to identify in ours. There has, for example, been a tendency within capitalism to construct what came to be known in the 1980s, as a result of Japanese innovation, as “just-in-time” systems. Marx noted in his day how fluctuations in demand and supply, both seasonal and annual, called for flexible modes of response. He cites a contemporary commentator:
‘The extension of the railway system throughout the country has tended very much to encourage giving short notice. Purchasers now come up from Glasgow, Manchester, and Edinburgh once every fortnight or so to the wholesale city warehouses which we supply, and give small orders requiring immediate execution, instead of buying from stock as they used to do. Years ago we were always able to work in the slack times so as to meet the demand of the next season, but now no one can say beforehand what will be in demand then.’
For this flexibility to be achieved, however, the creation of an adequate infrastructure of transport and communications was necessary. “The habit of giving such orders becomes more frequent with the extension of railways and telegraphs” (608).
Section 9, on “The Health and Education Clauses of the Factory Acts,” poses another set of interesting contradictions. “Factory legislation,” Marx begins by noting,
that first conscious and methodical reaction of society against the spontaneously developed form of its production process, is, as we have seen, just as much the necessary product of large-scale industry as cotton yarn, self-actors and the electric telegraph. (610)
The Acts not only sought to regulate the hours of work but also had something to say about health and education, topics which most industrialists resisted vociferously. Nevertheless,
as Robert Owen has shown us in detail, the germ of the education of the future is present in the factory system; this education will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.
Why are we suddenly talking about “fully developed human beings” in a chapter rife with stories of the destruction of the dignity and the appropriation of all the capacities of the laborer by capital? Could it be that individual capitalist resistance to health and education provisions is irrational from a capitalist class perspective? “As we have seen, large-scale industry sweeps away by technical means the division of labour characteristic of manufacture” and reproduces “this same division of labour in a still more monstrous shape … by converting the worker into a living appendage of the machine” (614). The effects on children are particularly devastating. But there are some positive signs in the midst of all this.
Right down to the eighteenth century, the different trades were called ‘mysteries’ (mystères), into whose secrets none but those initiated by their profession and their practical experience could penetrate. Large-scale industry tore aside the veil that concealed from men their own social process of production and turned the various spontaneously divided branches of production into riddles, not only to outsiders but even to the initiated. (616)
The modern science of technology entailed a veritable revolution in our mental conceptions of the world. “The varied, apparently unconnected and petrified forms of the social production process were now dissolved into conscious and planned applications of natural science, divided up systematically in accordance with the particular useful effect aimed at in each case.” (616–17)
The result was an industrial revolution in every sense of the term.
Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionizes the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another. Thus large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions. (617)
This necessity generates a major contradiction. On the negative side, large-scale industry “reproduces the old division of labour with its ossified particularities” and “does away with all repose, all fixity and all security as far as the worker’s life-situation is concerned; … it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands the means.” This results “in the reckless squandering of labour-powers, and in the devastating effects of social anarchy” (617–18). But then there is the positive side.
Large-scale industry, through its very catastrophes, makes the recognition of variation of labour and hence of the fitness of the worker for the maximum number of different kinds of labour into a question of life and death. This possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice. That monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve, in misery, for the changing requirements of capitalist exploitation, must be replaced by the individual man who is absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of him; the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn. (618)
Capitalism requires fluidity and adaptability of labor, an educated and well-rounded labor force, capable of doing multiple tasks and able to respond flexibly to changing conditions. Herein lies a deep contradiction: on the one hand, capital wants degraded labor, unintelligent labor, the equivalent of a trained gorilla to do capital’s bidding without question, at the same time as it needs this other kind of flexible, adaptable and educated labor, too. How can this contradiction be addressed without giving rise to “revolutionary ferments” (619), particularly when it would be difficult for individual capitalists, intensely pursuing their own self-interest and impelled by the coercive laws of competition, to act on it?
One collective class answer lay in the educational clauses inserted into the Factory Acts. Such clauses were not necessarily enforced, Marx notes, particularly in the face of individual capitalist resistance. Nevertheless, the fact that the clauses were deemed necessary in a state which, as we earlier noted, was governed by capitalists and landlords is significant. It suggested that “technological education” for the working class, “both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in the schools of the workers.” Again:
There is also no doubt that those revolutionary ferments whose goal is the abolition of the old division of labour stand in diametrical contradiction with the capitalist form of production, and the economic situation of the workers which corresponds to that form.
So mark well: the development of these sorts of “contradictions of a given historical form of production is the only historical way in which it can be dissolved and reconstructed on a new basis” (619).
The development of this fundamental contradiction is crucial to understanding transformations in the reproduction of the labor force. Large-scale industry plays an important role in “overturning the economic foundation of the old family system, and the family labour corresponding to it.” It has “also dissolved … old family relationships,” revolutionized relationships between parents and children and curbed the misuse of parental power that arises through the gang system. The capitalist mode of exploitation, by sweeping away the economic foundation which corresponded to parental power, made the use of parental power into its misuse” (620). But,
however terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organized processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes. (620–1)
It is obvious, Marx concludes,
that the fact that the collective working group is composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages must under the appropriate conditions turn into a source of humane development, although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalist form, the system works in the opposite direction. (621)
The quest for fluidity, flexibility and adaptability of labor revolutionizes the family as well as relations between the sexes! Pressures of this sort continue to be with us, at the same time that the negative side of the contradiction Marx here identifies continues to be omnipresent. This is, we should conclude, a permanent rather than transitory contradiction within the heart of capitalism.
So what we suddenly encounter at the end of this long chapter, full of negative imagery, are some positive and revolutionary potentialities for the education of the working classes and a radical reconfiguration (with the aid of state power) in its conditions of reproduction. Capital needs fluidity of labor and therefore has to educate the laborers while breaking down old paternalistic, patriarchal rigidities. These ideas aren’t really well worked out in Marx’s text. But it’s interesting that he would find it important to insert them into this account. And in the same way that the politics of the working day was derived to save capital from its self-destructive tendencies, here, too, that politics contains the kernel of a working-class politics to overthrow the whole capitalist system.
This brings Marx, after a lengthy and detailed review of the Factory Acts, to his conclusion, in which once again he flirts with a teleological formulation:
If the general extension of factory legislation to all trades for the purpose of protecting the working class both in mind and body has become inevitable, on the other hand, as we have already pointed out, that extension hastens on the general conversion of numerous isolated small industries into a few combined industries carried on upon a large scale; it therefore accelerates the concentration of capital and the exclusive predominance of the factory system. It destroys both the ancient and the transitional forms behind which the dominion of capital is still partially hidden, and replaces them with a dominion which is direct and unconcealed. But by doing this it also generalizes the direct struggle against its rule. While in each individual workshop it enforces uniformity, regularity, order and economy, the result of the immense impetus given to technical improvement by the limitation and regulation of the working day is to increase the anarchy and the proneness to catastrophe of capitalist production as a whole, the intensity of labour, and the competition of machinery with the worker. By the destruction of small-scale and domestic industries it destroys the last resorts of the ‘redundant population’, thereby removing what was previously a safety-valve for the whole social mechanism. By maturing the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one. (635)
Section 10, “Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture,” brings “the relation of man to nature” back into the picture, making, as it were, a brief but important cameo appearance in the overall argument. “In the sphere of agriculture,” Marx claims, “large-scale industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere,” in part because “it annihilates the bulwark of the old society, the ‘peasant’, and substitutes for him the wage labourer,” which in turn generates class conflict in the countryside. The extension of rational scientific principles to agriculture simultaneously revolutionizes relations between agriculture and manufacturing and “creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis” between agriculture and industry. But this potentially positive outcome occurs at the expense of disturbing
the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. (637)
This problem is exacerbated by increasing urbanization. “All progress in capitalist agriculture,” Marx concludes,
is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker. (638)
The relationships between technology, nature, the production and reproduction of life take a negative turn even as revolutions in mental conceptions and social relations open up positive possibilities. Marx does not advocate going back to a society where production processes were “mystères.” He plainly believes that the application of science and technology can have progressive implications. But the big problem in this chapter is to figure out where, exactly, these progressive possibilities might lie and how they can be mobilized in the quest to create a socialist mode of production. Marx, while he does not solve this problem, poses it and forces us to reflect on it. Technological and organizational changes are not a deus ex machina, but deeply embedded in the coevolution of our relation to nature, processes of production, social relations, mental conceptions of the world and the reproduction of daily life. All these “moments” get combined in this chapter, some far more prominently than others. This chapter can and should be read as an essay on thinking through these relations. But the sense of method that then arises permits an interrogation of Marx’s argument on Marx’s own terms.