Course on Marx's Capital:
Week 14
Co-operation
Chapters
11, 12 and 23 of Capital, Volume 1 (download linked below) which follow the
enormous Chapter 10, are short, and require little introduction, because they
are straightforward.
They are plain
enough to provide plenty of material for study-circle discussion, especially if
there are people with work-experience present.
The
following two excerpts demonstrate how well Karl Marx understood the workplace.
The
co-operation Marx writes about here is co-operation in general, whereby people
work together under a capitalist.
Rate and Mass of Surplus Value
“Within the process of production, capital
acquired the command over labour, i.e., over functioning labour-power or the
labourer himself. Personified capital, the capitalist takes care that the
labourer does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity.
“Capital further developed into a coercive
relation, which compels the working-class to do more work than the narrow round
of its own life wants prescribes. As a producer of the activity of others, as a
pumper-out of surplus labour and exploiter of labour-power, it surpasses in
energy, disregard of bounds, recklessness and efficiency, all earlier systems
of production based on directly compulsory labour.
“At first, capital subordinates labour on the
basis of the technical conditions in which it historically finds it. It does
not, therefore, change immediately the mode of production. The production of
surplus value — in the form hitherto considered by us — by means of simple
extension of the working day, proved, therefore, to be independent of any
change in the mode of production itself. It was not less active in the
old-fashioned bakeries than in the modern cotton factories.”
Co-operation
“When numerous labourers work together side by
side, whether in one and the same process, or in different but connected
processes, they are said to co-operate.”
“By the co-operation of numerous
wage-labourers, the sway of capital develops into a requisite for carrying on
the labour-process itself, into a real requisite of production. That a
capitalist should command on the field of production, is now as indispensable
as that a general should command on the field of battle.”
“The directing motive, the end and aim of
capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of
surplus-value, [14] and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest
possible extent. As the number of the co-operating labourers increases, so too
does their resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity
for capital to overcome this resistance by counterpressure. The control
exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the nature
of the social labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but it is, at the
same time, a function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is
consequently rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the
living and labouring raw material he exploits.”
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