Machinery
Karl Marx begins this
great chapter 15 of Capital, Volume 1, on “Machinery and Modern Industry”, (download linked below) by
developing the idea of division of labour in manufacture, into 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.
Please download and read this chapter:
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