Marx’s
Capital Volume 1, Part 7b
Comintern
Machinery
Marx begins
this great chapter on “Machinery and Modern Industry” (download linked below)
by developing the idea of division of labour in manufacture, to the division of
processes among machines.
“A real machinery system, however, does not
take the place of these independent machines, until the subject of labour goes
through a connected series of detail processes, that are carried out by a chain
of machines of various kinds, the one supplementing the other. Here we have
again the co-operation by division of labour that characterises Manufacture;
only now, it is a combination of detail machines.”
“As soon as a machine executes, without man's
help, all the movements requisite to elaborate the raw material, needing only
attendance from him, we have an automatic system of machinery, and one that is
susceptible of constant improvement in its details.”
“Modern Industry had therefore itself to take
in hand the machine, its characteristic instrument of production, and to
construct machines by machines. It was not till it did this, that it built up
for itself a fitting technical foundation, and stood on its own feet.
Machinery, simultaneously with the increasing use of it, in the first decades
of this century, appropriated, by degrees, the fabrication of machines proper.
But it was only during the decade preceding 1866, that the construction of
railways and ocean steamers on a stupendous scale called into existence the
cyclopean machines now employed in the construction of prime movers.”
“Modern Industry raises the productiveness of
labour to an extraordinary degree, [but] it is by no means equally clear, that
this increased productive force is not, on the other hand, purchased by an
increased expenditure of labour. Machinery, like every other component of
constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to the
product that it serves to beget.”
The last
paragraph of Section 3 is one of the most memorable and shocking in the whole
of Capital, Volume 1, and the long last paragraph of Section 4 is a
denunciation of the horrors of the factory system.
Section 5
shows the brutal effect of machinery on the working class from the beginning of
machine-working, which effects have been felt all along and still are felt
today, two centuries after the “industrial revolution”. Marx was an eye-witness
to a great expansion of this system and a true witness of its terrible
consequences for the working class.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Capital V1,
C15, Machinery and Modern Industry.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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