Outline of Marx's Discussion

Even if the "boundaries of the working day" cannot be extended [say by workers' struggles to set legal limits on the length of the working day] and are given as A - C, (where A is the beginning of work and C is quitting time - and this day is broken into two parts: A --- B [necessary labor] and B ---- C [surplus labor]) it is still possible for the capitalists to increase their share of value (and thus their surplus value), by reducing necessary labor, i.e., reducing the workers' share of A-------B (V) to A---B' (V'). With the working day fixed, this would increase the capitalist share from B ---- C to B -------C'.

This could be achieved by:

a. Pushing down the wage to the equivalent of A-B' —but, if we assume the wage must = value of labor power (V) and that the workers wages support them just at the level of subsistence, then a fall in wages below this level would mean a collapse in the ability of the workers to reproduce themselves, which would eventually undercut A - C. Marx notes that this often happens but must be assumed away in the analysis of self-sustaining accumulation.

b. Pushing down the value of the means of subsistence

--i.e., reducing V without reducing the real wage or the ability of the workers to reproduce themselves.
--to do this requires an increase in productivity in the production of the means of subsistence

Increases in Productivity - Relative Surplus Value

--"we mean an alteration in the labor process of such a kind as to shorten the labor-time socially necessary for the production of a commodity" (p. 431)
--the capitalists achieve this by "revolutionizing" the "technical and social conditions of the [labor] process and consequently the mode of production itself" (p. 432)
--"I call that surplus-value which arises from the curtailment of the necessary labor time, . . . relative surplus value." (p. 432)
--relative surplus value can be derived either from:
--an increase in the productivity of producing the means of subsistence
--an increase in the productivity of producing the instruments and raw materials used in the production of the means of subsistence, which in turn lowers the value of the means of subsistence

Competition

Competition acts to circulate productivity raising technological change:

--the capitalist who introduces productivity raising change lowers costs and thus increases profits if sales continue at a price indicated by average productivity, that capitalist thus gains a temporary advantage and gains a greater share of surplus value vis ;aacute& vis competitors

Marx's examples involve showing how increased production in the same period results in less value per unit of output, thus lower costs

--the increased productivity, assuming it is translated into increased production, will expand supply and push down prices, threatening other capitalists' profits and market share
--they are therefore under pressure to adopt the same or similar productivity raising innovations in order to lower their costs "the law of the determination of value by labor-time . . .acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the new method" (p. 436)
--if they do this their costs will fall, output will rise, prices will fall and the temporary advantage of the original innovator will be wiped out
--however, as a result of this process, overall V has fallen so S/V has risen for the capitalists as a class and more relative surplus value has been realized collectively

Productivity and the Working Day

Marx is careful to note that although rising productivity makes it possible for the amount of work by all workers to be reduced - because what they need can now be produced with less work - this "is by no means what is aimed at in capitalist production" (p.438).

Instead, the only reduction in work is experienced by those workers displaced by machinery and unable to find other work (and thus to earn their bread).

Cleaver Commentary

Marx lays out his theory of relative surplus value after his exposition of absolute surplus value. Although he does not spell it out in this chapter, as he will in Chapter 15 and in the appendix, the distinction between "absolute" and "relative" surpus value is historical as well as analytical. (See commenatary on Chapter 15) The capitalist take-over of production is at first merely formal, that is to say, the capitalists take control of production methods as they find them historically. This Marx will call this the "formal subordination of labor to capital". It is only later, in part under the pressure of workers' struggles, that the capitalists begin to invest heavily in the technological changes which are at the heart of relative surplus value. The resultant changes in the organization of work Marx will call the "real subordination of labor to capital." The pressures which will drive this investement will be two fold: 1) workers' success in limiting and then reducing the length of the working day (already discussed in Chapter 10) —which, ceteris paribus, reduces S and S/V, and 2) workers' struggles at the point of production which force capitalists to reorganize in order to regain control. The dynamics of these conficts will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 15.

Relative Surplus Value as a Strategy

In this chapter Marx speaks of relative surplus value as if it were an object, a certain amount of surplus labor time extracted by capitalists. However, it is called "relative" surplus value because of the way in which it is extracted: by raising productivity and lowering the value of the means of subsistence. Therefore, we should recognize that not only does relative surplus value refer to the process of raising productivity, but also that it constitutes a strategy of capital in dealing with the working class. As a strategy, relative surplus value is considerably more subtle than absolute surplus value.

In absolute surplus value, as we have seen, workers are forced to work longer hours, hours which rebound to the profit of the capitalist not to that of the worker whose wage (or value of labor power) we have assumed constant. In relative surplus value, some workers suffer from the introduction of machinery by losing their jobs —increasing unemployment (driving workers from the active into the reserve army of labor, discussed in Chapter 25). But for those who remain the costs are not immediately obvious —unless perhaps the reorganization of the factory is carried out in a way blatantly designed to undermine workers' self-organization. On the contrary, the increased productivity which lowers costs can not only raise profits but can even be used by the capitalist to meet workers' demands for higher wages. Marx doesn't discuss this possibility in the chapter but it is implicit in the analysis.

This is clear if we take a simple (though overdrawn) case of a generalized doubling of productivity. In Marx's exposition the capitalists always get the full benefit in the form of a halving of V and the consequent increase in S. However, it is also possible for the capitalist to increase in real wages somewhat and still earn larger profits. Suppose, for example, that in time period 1 total output given a fixed working day = 100 and this was evenly divided in real terms and in value terms between the classes such that V = 50 and S = 50. Now suppose that in the next period 2, productivity is doubled such that total output = 200. Under the circumstances the per unit value of output would be halved and the working class could retain the same real income if V fell to 25 while the capitalists arrogated 3/4ths of the value to themselves with S = 75. This is the kind of example Marx gives. But, suppose the workers fought for a real wage increase of, say 50%. With the rise in productivity, the capitalists could grant such an increase, in which V would rise from 25 to 37.5, but surplus value would still rise from 50 to 62.5! Not only would their absolute level of profit increase, but so too would the rate of exploitation (rising from 50/50 to62.5/37.5). Herein lies the subtlety: relative surplus value makes it possible for the capitalists to grant an improvement in living conditions to the workers while at the same time retaining and augmenting their own power (measured in terms of value —and thus workers— commanded). This possibility provides the capitalists with a new tool for dealing with the working class: not only can new technology be used against them, but those who retain their jobs can be persuaded to cooperate with such change by being paid higher wages.

The flip side, of course, is that workers come not only to recognize how technological changes which raise productivity lower costs and raise profits, but to demand an equal share in the results. Eventually, long after Marx wrote, workers would achieve the power to impose "productivity deals" on business wherein the fruits of productivity increases would be shared equally between business and labor, i.e., both real wages and real profits would rise while the rate of exploitation remained the same. Such deals would be written into industrial union contracts and be supported by state measures in the so-called Keynesian Era.

Rising Productivity and Less Work

During the Keynesian era, the subtlety of relative surpus value changed: capitalists would insist that workers take the benefits from rising productivity uniquely in the form of increased wages and money benefits but would not even discuss taking the benefits in the form of less work. Marx's comment that "the shortening of the working day, therefore, is by no means what is aimed at in capitalist production" would continue to be the case right down to the present.

Nevertheless, beginning in the late 1960s, after three decades of rising real wages, workers would begin to demand shorter working days once again. They would begin to discuss the possibilities of the 4- day or 36 hour week. It would take the Great Recession of 1974-75 and the Great Reagan Depression of 1981-83 to remove these demands from the workers' agenda. And, despite this, the issue would come bounding back in the late 1980s in France, in Germany and in other countries.

Given this history, it is important to recognize how Marx's analysis of relative surplus value makes clear the technical possibility of converting rising productivity into less work as well as more income. In the case given above, of a doubling of productivity, there are many possible outcomes. Marx's example used to illustrate the idea of relative surplus value resulted in a shift in value distribution from 50/50 to 25/75 —he holds the working day fixed to concentrate on a new dynamic. But suppose we do not suppose the working day to be fixed. Clearly, a doubling of productivity, technically speaking, could be translated into 1. doubled output (which could be shared between the classes according to some deal or another) with the same working hours, 2. the same output with only half as much work, or 3. some positive increase (but less than doubling) of output produced together with less work, e.g., a 50% increase in output with 25% less work. Such are the technical possibilities. The political possibilities are determined by the dynamics of the class struggle. In Marx's time, the capitalists had the power to avoid workers taking the fruits of productivity growth in the form of less work (except in so far as they forced reductions through acts of Parliament as in Chapter 10). Today workers are fighting to do just that: raise their wages and reduce their work in exchange for cooperating with productivity raising technological change. The capitalists, of course, continue to resist because reduced work time raises their costs and undercuts the very basis of their kind of social order —one built around the endless subordination of life to work.

Competition

The pressure of competition —i.e., the threat of losing market share to another capitalist who can sell cheaper— plays an explicit role in Marx's account of the circulation and diffusion of technological change. Once one capitalist introduces new productivity raising, cost cutting methods, others are under pressure to follow suit. This understanding was by no means unique to Marx but was shared by capitalists as well as many political economists and social observers of the period of the industrial revolution.

One literary articulation of this view from the 19th Century can be found in Charlotte Brontë's 1849 novel Shirley which deals with the period of the Luddites (circa 1810-1812) in which workers organized themselves to break machines whose introduction was depriving them of employment and income.1 In the scene from which the following excerpt comes, a group of angry workers are confronting the capitalist textile mill owner Mr. Moore and demanding that he stop, or at least slow, the introduction of new labor-displacing machinery. Their protest comes in the midst of a depression caused by the Napoleonic Wars which cut off English exports from the Continent and caused much unemployment among mill workers. Moore responds that he cannot slow down the introduction of new technology without being swept away by other capitalists who would refuse to do the same. The opening speaker is a worker William Farren who speaks with a strong Yorkshire accent.

Moore's admonition to the workers to take up their problems with Parliament but to leave him alone, is consistent with his own complaints against the war with Napoleon, which through Napoleon's Continental system and the English Orders in Council, cut off British exports and his markets. He understands the government's role in contributing to current economic distress. On the other hand, even though Moore will eventually become somewhat more sympathetic to the plight of the workers, and do something for William Farren and has family, nowhere in the novel, as generally was true in the time period, does he become an advocate for either government regulation of technological change or for government intervention to help the poor cope with it. On the contrary, Moore will use the government, its troops and judiciary to pursue, prosecute and punish (through transportation to Australia) those workers who attacked destroyed his machines and attacked his mill —exactly the punishment which was metted out by his real-life counterparts.

Within the argument of Moore we can discover the class basis of competition. Moore is confronted by his workers. So too, we can suppose, are all his "competitors" among the Yorkshire clothiers (as well as others ouside the region). Those best able to command their workers will win the competitive battle, those less able will lose. In the novel, as in real history, there are other capitalists who are beaten down by their workers; that is to say, their mills are burned and their machinery destroyed. Moore plays tough, introduces cost reducing machinery and suceeds in defending his mill against a Luddite attack. When the trade blockades are later lifted he is in a position to sell his accumulated stocks, expand production using the new technology and sell at a competitive price. Those capitalists who failed to introduce the new machinery due to the resistance of their workers, or whose mills were damaged or destroyed, would obviously be at a competitive disadvantage, if they could function as capitalists at all. In short, "competition" among capitalists can be seen not merely as a dog-eat-dog game played without reference to the working class, but rather as a sort of social darwinistic process through which the power of capital over the working class is maximized. Where workers are so strong as to impede accumulation, their bosses go under and the workers thrown out of work and into unemployment and subsequently at the mercy of other, stronger, capitalists.

This class analysis of "capitalist" competition allows us to avoid the widespread practice of interpreting it as a process which goes on independently of the self-activity of workers who are therefore seen as only suffering the consequences of a process beyond their ken. When Marx says on p. 433 that we can only understand how the "immanent laws of capitalist production manifest themselves in the external movement of individual capitals" and "assert themselves as the coercive laws of competition" by grasping "the inner nature of capital", we must recognize that "inner nature" as class struggle and interpret competition accordingly. Competition is the dynamics of a particular organization of the class conflict wherein the management of capitalist domination is allocated to diverse capitalists whose relative skill in managing (controling) their workers will determine their success. The competitive struggle, therefore, although it appears in the consciousness of many capitalists (and of many Marxists) to be something that goes on only among capitalists, it concerns the organization of the "competition" between between capital and labor. The competition between classes underlies and determines the competition among capitalists. Concepts For Review value of labor power stunted reproduction wage less than value of lp competition productivity of labor relative surplus value motives of individual capital sum of reductions transfer of value diffusion of technological change productivity and work time real subsumption of labor to capital revolutionizing production formal subsumption of labor to capital

1 The period of machine breaking was much longer that the period of the "Luddite Movement". Instances of machine breaking began in the 18th Century and would continue into the 1930s. See Marx's discussion in Chapter 15 and Charles Poulsen, The English Rebels, London: Journeyman, 1984, Chapter XIII, "The Reign of King Ludd", pp. 140-146.

Questions for Review

1. What is the effect on the reproduction of labor power if the wage is reduced to less than the value of labor power? What concrete effects might this involve today? Why does Marx exclude this case from consideration in this chapter?

2. How does Marx define the productivity of labor? How does its increase cause a decrease in the per unit value of products?

3. Increases in the productivity of labor producing which goods cause a fall in the value of labor power? Directly? Indirectly?

4. What are the motives for the individual capitalist to introduce technological change that increases productivity?

5. How can an increase in productivity for individual capitals result in a transfer of surplus value to them from other capitalists? When does this transfer stop?

6. Why don't increases in productivity, which decrease the work time necessary to produce goods, result in decreases in the working day for workers?

7. Suppose productivity increased 10% in the aggregate production of goods. What are the different choices that are technically possible for enjoying the fruits of this increase in terms of more goods and less work? How would you want to distribute the benefits? Why do you think we are never asked to vote on this issue?

8. Deconstruct the concept and dynamics of "competition" in class terms. That is to say discuss the relationships among capitalists in terms of the relationships between classes. In your answer consider the usual neoclassical cases of competition through price and through product differentiation.

Outline of Marx's Discussion

Capitalist Production

= large number of workers (Handicraft becomes manufacture as number of workers grows.)
= extensive scale
= large quantities of products
= revolution in the objective conditions of the labor process, e.g., economies of scale, increasing returns to scale, fall in value per unit of output

Co-operation

-- "many workers working together side by side in accordance with a plan"
-either in the same process, same kind of work
-or in different but connected processes
= a "social force", a "new power"
= a "new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one"
= workers strip "off the fetters of [their] individuality, and develop the capabilities of [their] species"

Sources of productive power of cooperation (social labor):

1. heightens mechanical force of labour
2. extends sphere of action over a greater space, or , contracts field of production
3. sets large masses of labour to work at critical moments (e.g., harvests)
4. excites rivalry between individuals
5. creates continuity and manysideness
6. simultaneous operations
7. economizes the means of production by use in common
8. lends to individual worker the character of average social labor

Co-operation implies:

--"a directing authority" to "secure the harmonious co-operation", e.g., an orchestra
--authority
--"special function arising from the nature of the social labour process"
--"a function of the exploitation of a social labor process", i.e., valorization

Co-operation and class struggle:

=increased resistance to the domination of capital
= increased repression of this resistance

Co-operation under capitalist authority:


= "a plan drawn up by the capitalist"
= "the powerful will of a being outside them"
= "in form it is purely despotic"
= requires "officers (managers) and NCO's (foremen, overseers)"

Workers are brought together by capital

--they are "incorporated into capital"
--their productive power is a "free gift" to capital, costs it nothing
--their productive power appears as "inherent in capital"
--as their numbers increase so too does their resistance

Earlier forms/results of co-operation:

--Egyptian pyramids and such, under domination of ruling class
--early hunting peoples
--Indian communitie with common ownership of MP, indiv. rooted in tribe or community

Cooperation = "the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production"

Commentary

Marx's discussion of co-operation in this chapter served two purposes. First, he laid out the results of his studies of the concrete nature of the capitalist organization of work. Second, he laid the groundwork for continuing his analysis of the technological changes involved in capital's relative surplus value strategy. In chapter 7 he defined work in very abstract and theoretical terms, first the labor process and then valorization. In chapter 12 he launched the discussion of the capitalist strategy of reorganizing of the labor process to increase (relative) surplus value. So, in chapter 13 he began to provide an approach to understanding the qualitative changes involved in such reorganization. Reorganization is, first of all, reorganization of co-operation.

To begin with, he emphasized that work under capitalism is collective. "Co-operation" concerns large numbers of workers brought together by the capitalist and put to work. He recognized that workers have cooperated collectively throughout history. Co-operation is not new under capitalism. What is new is the particular way in which co-operation is organized by the capitalists. This emphasis on co-operation follows from Marx's analysis of labor (and the resistance to labor) as the core of the social relations of capitalism. Although capitalists appear to be responsible for co-operation, and thus to "deserve credit" for this social development, Marx insisted on the long standing existence of co-operation. From that perspective, however responsible the capitalists may be for the particular form it takes, it remains a force outside, an autonomous force of labor itself which capital must constantly strive to domesticate to its own ends. Part of this force appears to be purely technical: the way in which co-operation results in increases in productivity (output per worker) so that the output of a large number of assembled workers is greater than the sum of the output of the same number of isolated workers. But even this "technical" aspect of co-operation will turn out to be immanently political and related to the dynamics of intra- as well as inter-class relationships.

As we have seen in the discussion on primitive accumulation, the capitalists forged a new system of co-operation on the ruins of earlier ones. At the beginning this co-operation was often indirect as many workers came to be controlled (through a putting-out system) by a single merchant capital. But over time, the conflict between such workers and that capital led the latter to gather the workers together in one place and encarcerate them in a factory where they could be observed and controlled. In these new circumstances, various kinds of struggle became much more difficult. For example, artisans who had appropriated the scraps of their raw materials (wood, silk, leather, etc.) —and cut the raw materials so as to maximize the amount of scraps— found themselves increasingly under the eye of the capitalists, or their overseers, who were diligent to eliminate such practices and thus to reduce both their own costs in raw materials and the income of the artisans. Such a reorganization —a first step in what Marx called the "real" subordination of labor to capital— was clearly not just technical but a strategy in the class struggle. So too would be all of those which have followed, right down to the present.

Scale, Authority and "Rivalry"

The growth in the scale of production meant that more and more workers were being subsumed under the command of the capitalist —a change which is initially only a quantitative one. Sometimes this just meant more workers doing the same thing. But many times, especially in manufacturing, it increasingly meant a qualitative change as more and more people worked on a set of related tasks. That "relatedness" meant the need for the co-ordination of tasks, the organization of co-operation.

All directly social or communal labor on a large scale requires, to a greater or lesser degree, a directing authority, in order to secure the harmonious co-operation of the activities of individuals, . . . A single violin player is his own conductor: an orchestra requires a separate one. (pp. 448-9)

Marx is talking here about a necessary co-ordination of co-operation inherent in "the nature of the social labor process" —an issue which he only explores within capitalism. Within capitalism, he argues, this "authority" —"the work of directing, superintending and adjusting— becomes that of capital. At this point he passes into a second aspect of the issue: the specificity of the social relations of co-operation under capitalism: class antagonism. As the scale of capitalist undertakings grew, he argued, so did the conflicts and the complexity of the issue of the organization of co-operation. "As the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital . . . " (p.449) It is this resistance, of course, which dictates the need for capital to create a whole officer corps of supervisors and overseers to make sure that the large army of workers actually do as much work as their employers desire —that the "collective power of masses" is maximized. Thus, his analysis of co-operation is two-sided and parallels his earlier analysis of work in chapter 7: first a discussion of the labor process independently of capital, second, a discussion of the specificity of the process under capitalism, i.e., within valorization.

The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function arising from the nature of the social labor 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 conditioned by the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the raw material of his exploitation. (p. 449)

Marx's analysis, while providing an approach to grasping technological issues in terms of antagonistic class relationships, has been seized upon as a technologically deterministic justification of hierarchical authority, not only under capitalism but under all large scale, complex systems of social co-operation, including socialism. Some of the terms and metaphors which he used, especially "directing authority" and "orchestra director" clearly lend themselves to this interpretation. This line of deterministic interpretation was given a powerful boost by Frederick Engel's piece on "Authority" published in 1873. That piece, written against anarchist slogans of abolishing authority, argued that "authority" was inherent in technology. In the case of the cotton spinning mill, he wrote, "the authority of steam . . . cares nothing for individual autonomy" and the "forces of nature" subject humans "to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel." "If," he argued, "the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other . . . " The one-sideness of this argument is striking. It totally ignores the issue of the genesis of the "conditions of production" —how the capitalist organization of production technology has been structured within the context of class antagonism in order to maximize capitalist control over the working class. He is refusing to enter into the analysis demanded by the anarchist attack on authority, namely, an investigation into how the conditions of production can be changed to eliminate authority and to replace it with democratic decision making. He fails to question why it is that in industry as he knows it "the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions". Why is production organized so that this is "the first condition"? At this point in our reading of Capital the contrast between Engels' argument and Marx's is not so obvious. Later, when we get to chapter 15, it will be much clearer. Once we read Marx's analysis of how "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" we see the one-sidedness and inadequacy of Engels' argument. (p. 563)

Nevertheless, this kind of argument was taken up and elaborated by the Bolsheviks, especially by Lenin who used it to justify the overthrow of the factory committees and the soviets (which had been created during the revolution by Russian workers) and the imposition of top-down, party-state-managerial despotism. Although he professed to believe that ultimately "every cook could govern", i.e., co-ordination could occur within co-operation by the workers themselves, he called for and imposed top-down hierarchical control that tended to destroyed all bottom-up initiatives.

A second aspect of Marx's analysis of co-operation which was used for the same purpose was his notion that one source of the heightened productivity of co-operation derived from the stimulus it gave to "animal spirits".

Apart from the new power that arises from the fusion of many forces into a single force, mere social contact begets in most industries a rivalry and a stimulation of the 'animal spirits', which heightens the efficiency of each individual worker.

There are two things to say about this. First, while "rivalry" may stimulate "animal spirits", it need not be the only or even the main source of such stimulation. People who come together to act in concert (e.g., in work) can provide each other with support and positive feedback which also makes each individual more productive. Second, capital has generally promulgated "rivalry" not only to stimulate "animal spirits" (e.g., get more work) but as ameans to divide and conquer the working class. Such rivalry or competition has been fostered at the level of the shop-floor and it also characterizes capitalist organization at the inter-firm level, and even the international level. In Lenin's view such "rivalry" or competition was to be encouraged in the socialist USSR in order to generate the most work possible. In December 1917, right after the revolution of October, Lenin argued: "Far from extinguishing competition, socialism, on the contrary, for the first time creates the opportunity for employing it on a really wide and on a really mass scale . . . our task is to organize competition." "All 'communes' —factories, villages, consumers' societies, and committees of supplies— must compete with each other as practical organisers of accounting and control of labour and distribution of products." Here Lenin is calling for new forms of competition among production units —new, but not all that different from competition among capitalist firms. This competition, Lenin demanded, should be organized in such a way as to weed out those who would not work hard enough: "workers who shirk their work . . . will be put in prison . . . [elsewhere] they will be put to cleaning latrines . . . [elsewhere] they will be provided with "yellow tickets" . . . so that everyone shall keep an eye on them, as harmful persons . . . [elsewhere] one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot" and so on. These comments were aimed at justifying the imposition of a new work discipline by whatever means necessary. Those who must be forced to work, as he makes clear, are not only reactionary capitalists and intellectuals out to sabotage the revolution, but also those workers who had revolted, at least in part, to "lighten the burden of labor". But his method is to identify "slovenliness, carelessness, untidiness, unpunctuality, nervous haste, the inclination to substitute discussion for action, talk for work" etc with intellectuals and to call on workers, especially the party faithful, to root out such idlers and to identify and correct any such tendencies among members of their own class. In this manner, right at the beginning of Bolshevik rule, Lenin made as clear as could be that Bolshevik style socialism means more, not less, work for the working class.

Is this Marx? Or rather, are such views lineal descendents of Marx's ideas? Can the despotism of the Soviet state be traced to Marx's own views on technological necessity? I don't think so. There is nothing in his treatment of co-operation in the abstract that implies that such co-ordination could not take place within co-operation through the self-management of "associated producers". His observation that any large scale social labor process involving large numbers of people requires co-ordination seems uncontestable as far as it goes. But it doesn't go very far. The form of that co-ordination remains to be determined and in the various social situations he mentions —slave plantation economies, ancient Egypt, primitive hunting, capitalism— he makes quite clear that we can expect the form of co-ordination to vary enormously. The same is true for his very few words in this chapter on "rivalry" or competition among workers. Both his earlier work in the 1844 Manuscripts attacking the ways in which capital pits worker against worker and his later discussion in Capital, chapters 20 and 21 on how capitalists manipulate wages to encourage competition and hierarchy, suggest that in general he understood "rivalry" to be only one form of "animal spirits" and that various kinds of non-competitive but mutually stimulating interactions would characterize un-alienated, post capitalist work relations. He certainly recognized how within capitalism the mangement of co-operation has generally involved the use of competition (i.e., to divide and conquer the working class) and he hardly embraced it as an inevitable part of the production process.

Since Marx wrote we have more than 130 years of experience with a wide diversity of forms of co-operation, most of which have been elaborated within capitalism but some of which have been developed explicitly against it. Over the years, as workers have succeeded in gaining time away from waged work and capital has responded by colonizing that "free" time —the process I discussed in my commentary on Chapter 10— the institutions of that colonization have recreated many of the characteristics of the capitalist factory, including "co-operation" with its characteristic capitalist/socialist rivalry/competition. The most familiar examples are undoubtedly the school and the nation state. In school students are encouraged from a very early age to compete against each other for grades and honors —it is one of the ways they are prepared for later competition in the waged workplace. Such competition in the class room is complemented and reinforced by competition in "physical education", especially intramural sports which are almost always organized through individual or team competition. In the case of team competition the stimulation of "animal spirits" is central to the realization of the powers of "co-operation" —to the point of encouraging animosity and scorn among competitors. At the level of the school system, interscholastic competition is institutionally encouraged in sports, in music, in academic subjects and, individually among men and especially women for popularity and social status. From secondary school through the university, "school spirit" is fostered with marshal band music and pep rallies as students are pitted against students, often with violent langauage and ferocious antagonism. In the wider community, competition is fostered by everything from the fashion industry and beauty contests to soap operas and politicians. All of this, of course, lays the groundwork for the most fatal competition of all, that of patriotism which pits workers against workers on the basis of nationality, ethnicity and race. Such competition, repeatedly critiqued by those like Mark Twain and George Orwell, not only provides the pyschological basis for war but is used to spur workers on a day to day basis. This is something with which, in the 1980s and 1990s, we have become all too familiar. "International competitiveness" has become one of the major buzzwords and strategies of the day as Americans are pitted against Japanese, Europeans or Mexicans by businessmen and politicians heavily engaged in trying resolve the current crisis of class command by finding new ways to impose work.

Against such forms of capitalist co-operation through competition workers have formed their own systems of co-operation: in industry, shopfloor solidarity and unions; in schools, small group collaboration and cheating and large scale protest movements; in the community, grassroots organizations of women, gays or other self-organized movements; at the international level, peace movements against war or grass roots organizing against international competition, e.g., current continent-wide resistance to NAFTA. Sometimes such self-organization may involve the détournement or direct subversion of the institutions of capitalist co-operation, at other times it may involve the creation of counter-movements or institutions created especially for the purposes of struggle. In revolutionary moments, the working class often displays collective imagination through the creation of new approaches to the organization of co-operation, e.g., the Paris Commune in 1871, the Soviets in 1905 and 1917, the workers councils in Germany in 1918-19 and in Hungary in 1956.

The "Co-operative" Movement

Marx's insistence on the autonomy (vis à vis capital) of co-operation as a quality of human social labor was closely related to his understanding that the overthrow of capitalism by the workers would not lead to social dissolution (as capitalist fears and ideology have often warned) but to the liberation of co-operation from capitalist command. Thus, those few times when Marx spoke of labor in post-capitalist society he often refered to "associated labor" —a labor which would certainly involve new kinds of social co-operation. Marx, of course, refused to speculate on, much less design, such future forms of co-operation and focused instead on the study of how co-operation was evolving within capitalism as one aspect of the developing struggle between labor and capital.

Another who was fascinated with the phenomenon of co-operation and who also saw that it predated capitalism and would certainly post-date it, was the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. A geologist-geographer who developed political concepts at least in part out of his scientific research, Kropotkin became convinced that the history of other animals as well as that of humans was shaped by natural instincts to social co-operation. Against the vulgar Darwinist notion —so suitable to capitalist ideology— that evolution was the outcome of an endless war of all against all, Kropotkin pitted his studies of natural and human history which showed the endless variety and continuity of co-operation —what he called "mutual aid". From his scientific field experience in Siberia to his historico-political studies of Western society, Kropotkin drew myriad examples of both animal and human co-operation and argued that co-operation was the dominant reality of social life within species. Beings might hunt and kill other species, but, for the most part, their relationships among themselves were co-operative. Kropotkin spent considerable time ferreting out the underground history of bottom-up co-operation in villages and cities, among farmers and artisans, in manufacturing and industry. Like Marx, he refused to design a post-capitalist world and instead studied the trends in the present which pointed to the future.

But if Marx and Kropotkin refused to design the future, others were much less restrained. Those whom Marx called the "utopian" socialists, such as Robert Owen in England or François Marie Charles Fourier in France designed both plans and experiments on the basis of their own ideas of how co-operation could be reorganized for the benefit of workers.

Owen (1771-1858) was a businessman who developed ideas of improving productivity and the lives of workers by reorganizing both industry and private life through the creation of relatively small scale co-operative villages. He began his experiments in the yarn mills and village of New Lanark, Scotland. At the same time that he introduced modern machinery, Owen also improved the living conditions of workers by keeping wages up during depressions, by upgrading housing and sanitary arrangements, building schools, and organizing the supply of workers' commodity needs at cost. Owen believed that through education and the transformation of the whole community, inside and outside the factories, society could be improved and reorganized around democratic cooperation. Because education had to proceed democracy, however, Owen felt free to intervene directly in workers' lives, not only improving their material conditions but also monitoring their behavior —to the point of installing colored behavior indicators near each workers' position in the factory to signal the quality of their character from day to day. Later, as he worked his ideas into a systematic approach to the reorganization of society around cooperative communities, Owen became involved in a variety of experiments, the best known of which were New Harmony Village in Indiana (1824-1827) and Orbiston (1825-1827) in Lanarkshire. These and several other such experiments were organized around communal ownership of property and co-operative labor. None lasted very long and Owen's efforts to persuade business and state leaders to finance the spread of his approach failed.

Owen's innovations at his Lanark Mills soon became widely known and provided inspiration for a variety of reformers, including some very wedded to preserving the class distinctions of Old England within the new conditions of industrialization. One such was Benjamin Disreali (1804-1881) who before becoming Prime Minister of England wrote a series of romantic Tory novels lamenting the decline of the old values. These were the three "Young England" novels: Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847). In Sybil, for example, Disreali denounced the capitalist "spirit of rapacious coveteousness". Since the Reform Act of 1832, which admitted the industrial middle class to the electorate, he argued, "the altar of Mammon has blazed with triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases, to propose an Utopia to consist only of WEALTH and TOIL, this has been the breathless business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage." (p. 56) He then followed up graphic descriptions of some of the worst working class slums with a glowing portrayal of the establishment of one Mr Trafford, a very Owenite business-man.

Charles Fourier (1772-1837), about a year younger than Owen, also got his start in business and went on to design new social institutions around co-operation in labor and society. Like Owen, Fourier's ideal new social units were small-scale villages based on co-operative principles but linked in a regional (and ultimately even global) network. Also like Owen, Fourier's plans extended beyond the workshop to the larger society where he advocated co-operation in education and even love. His utopia included not only collective work but also collective emotional and sexual linkages designed to liberate people from the frustrations he felt were inherent in the traditional family. Basing himself on a theory of desire quite different from Owen and most other utopian thinkers, Fourier's plans for reorganization sought to reshape society in order to meet and balance a well-defined list of intellectual, psychological, emotional and physical needs. Whereas Owen thought people could be reeducated to fit into a more rational social order, Fourier sought to fit the social order to eternal human desires. Unable to achieve the implementation of his ideas during his life-time, Fourier's energies were focused on their theoretical design —the imaginative working through of how social relationships might be reorganized in a non-competitive, co-operative fashion to achieve individual happiness within social harmony (which, in his view, necessarily included a considerable dose of rivalry and competitiveness). It was left to his followers to actually set up working models of his ideal communities (or "phalanxes"); at least 40 were launched, especially in America, during the 1840s, but like the Owenite experiments none lasted very long.

While Marx rejected such approaches to transcending capitalism as off-shoots of the immaturity of the proletariat in the early 19th Century, he nevertheless considered these inventive social reformers "revolutionary" in "many respects" and applauded the way they identified the class antagonisms of capitalism and provided "the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class".

Such experiments left in their wake not only a tradition of "intentional communities" but also a whole social movement which has spread an ideology and practice of "co-operation" across the face of the earth. From their origins in England and France to the U.S. and hence to the Third World, "co-operatives" have been held out as an alternative path to the dog-eat-dog competition of capitalism. Many co-operative organizations have been centered on production, e.g., peasant or farmer co-operatives where individual family farmers collaborate to share equipment and jointly market their output. Others have been centered on the sphere of reproduction, e.g., consumer co-operatives or housing co-operatives.

As in all social inventions such experiments have created new terrains of class struggle. Owenite co-operatives were often offered as reformist alternatives to getting beyond capitalism through revolution. Others have been created to generate collective strength for local as well as wider struggles against the constraints of the system. Governments have somtimes legalized bottom-up efforts, but generally they have sought to use co-operatives not to get beyond capitalism but rather to "co-opt" dissent and to diffuse gathering revolutionary energies. The history of the class struggle is, in part, a history of the struggle over the creation and utilization of new forms of co-operation.

Recommended Further Reading

Some of the "orthodox" Marxist embrace of authority can be found in the following works. Engels' essay "On Authority", in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 23, New York: International Publishers, 1988, pp. 422-425, was written in 1873 at the request of Italian editor Enrico Bignami for his Almanacco Repubblicano. Lenin's writings which deal with issues of authority and competition include: V. I. Lenin, "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government," (April 1918) in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965, which was written i n the Spring following the October Revolution, and V. I. Lenin, "A Great Beginning. Heroism of the Workers in the Rear. 'Communist Subbotniks' (June 1919), V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 29, pp. 409-434.

For the results of Kropotkin's studies on "Mutual Aid" among animals and throughout human history, see his book Mutual Aid. Subsequent historical research has added to and complemented his work. See, for example, Maxine Berg's The Age of Manufactures 1700-1820, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986 which presents the results of recent research into the diversity of pre-industrial forms of manufacturing that reveals a wide variety of forms of co-operation --many of which proved extremely resistant to capitalist takeover.

For chapter length introductions to the ideas and efforts of Robert Owen & Charles Fourier and their followers, see Keith Taylor, The Political Ideas of the Utopian Socialists, London: Frank Cass, 1982. For a sample of Owen's own work see: Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, London and New York, 1927. For a taste of Fourier's writings see: Mark Poster (ed) Harmonian Man. Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, New York, 1971. Most of his original writings (in French) have been assembled in a multivolume collection.

See Todd Wells' thesis on the class politics of co-operatives in the Third World, esp. Nicaragua.

Concepts for Review

extensive scale guilds Owenite village average social labor economies of scale phalanxes increasing returns to scale joint consumption competition plan of work co-operation authority social productive power worker rivalry

socialist competition humans as social animal faux frais scholastic competition social labor working class resistence patriotism alien will despotism of valorization int'l competitiveness superintendence productivity of capital mutual aid precapitalist cooperation mode of production

Questions For Review

(An * means one possible answer can be found at the end of the Study Guide.)

1. In what sense is co-operation the "fundamental form" of the capitalist mode of production?

2. Juxtapose and contrast capitalist co-operation with pre-capitalist co-operation, both that based on traditional community solidarity and that based on coercion.

3. How is the difference between the earliest capitalist production and pre-capitalist manufacturing "purely quantitative"?

4. What does Marx mean by the "average social labor time"? How can it be measured?

5. How does the factory or collective workshop realize increasing returns to scale for the capitalist? How does this reduce his unit costs of production?

*6. Give all the sources of the new social productive power that Marx associates with co-operation. Does the capitalist pay for this?

7. "When the worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species." Comment.

8. As the capitalist assembles and puts to work increasing numbers of workers, what do those workers do? How does this involve a political recomposition of the class?

*9. Marx speaks of growing working class "resistence." How adequate a choice of words is this? Are workers always reactive?

10. What happens to the costs of supervision as workers organize and struggle? Should we see the expenses of company goons and state police as among the faux frais of production?

11. In what sense is the factory run under a "despotic plan"? If the plan is the product of a "powerful will" outside the workers which "subjects their labor to his purpose," in what sense does this involve "ALIENastion"?

*12. Apply the analysis of this chapter to schooling. In what sense is there cooperation? Supervision? Unavoidable antagonism? Working class struggle? Despotism?

Outline of Marx's Discussion

"Manu"-facturing

= "a particular sort of co-operation" based on the division of labor among large numbers of specialized workers
= "division of labor in manufacturing is merely a particular method of creating relative surplus value"
= "dependent on the strength, skill, quickness and sureness with which the individual worker manipulates his tools"

Manufacturing Period = mid-16th -- last third 18th Century

1. The Dual Origin of Manufacture

--from the assembling of large numbers of different kinds of skilled workers
--from the assembling of large numbers of the same kind of skilled workers
--both cases -an increasing division of labor, increasingly narrow specialization
--"decompostion of a handicraft into its different partial operations"

2. The Specialized Worker and His Tools

--"collective worker" made up of highly specialized individual workers
--one-sided work means less time in execution, i.e., increased productivity
--repetition of same task eliminates gaps in work, increases productivity
--as the workers becomes more specialized so do their tools
--tools of specialized worker = differentiated, simplified and adapted to specialized tasks, e.g., 500 varieties of hammer
--both worker and tool become perfected for narrow task, impoverished for others

3. The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture

--heterogeneous: parts made separately workers then assembled, e.g., watch making
--organic: production through a series of sequential processes, e.g., needle making

The "collective worker"

= "formed from the combination of the many specialized workers"
= each worker a specialized organ of the whole

Mutual interdependence

= a given proportionality to achieve continuity of all workers
= appropriate number of workers for each operation
= extension of scale by multiplying groups
= different skills = different training = different values of labor power
= hierachy of labor-powers, hierarchy of wages

Simplification of tasks = devaluation of labor power, as V decreases, S increases

4. The Division of Labor in Manufacture and Society

Division of labor in manufacture

--unmediated by exchange
--planned, organized by the despotism of capitalists
--depends for its development on growth of social division of labor

Social division of labor in society

--mediated by exchange of commodities (anarchy) e.g., cattle-breeding, tanning, shoemaking
--division of labor in general (agriculture vs industry etc)
--division of labor in particular (particular industries)
--division of labor in detail (within the workshop)

"foundation of every division of labor . . . is the separation of town from country"

Division of labor at each level has an impact on the division of labor on other levels

--"anarchy in the social division of labor and despotism in the manufacturing division of labor mutually condition each other"
--ultimately, the division of labor "seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society"

Earlier forms of society: —ancient Indian communities

--fixed, authoritative plan of division of labor and village
--blending of agriculture and handicrafts
--mostly "self-sufficing" communities, production for use
--each individual craftsman . . . conducts in his workshop all

the operations of his handicraft in the traditional way

--medieval guilds
--separated, isolated and perfected handicrafts
--master, limited number of journeymen
--worker and tools closely united

5. The Capitalist Character of Manufacture

--"the collective working organism is a form of existence of capital"
--productive power of collective worker "appears as the productive power of capital"
--"knowledge, judgement and will" which "is lost to specialized workers is concentrated in the capital which confronts them"
--counterpart to this is the impoverishment and crippling of the specialized worker
--"converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity", "mutilates the worker"
--capitalism is the first system "to provide the materials and the impetus for industrial pathology"
--Greeks understood the division of labor only in terms of use-value
--Main Obstacle: resistance of handicraft workers who are still "the regulating principle of social production", skills of handicraft workers in manufacturing gives them power to be insubordinate
--Results: failure to seize all disposable labor time, manufactures must follow movement of workers
Solution: introduction of machinery which will "abolish the role of the handicraftsman as the regulating principle of social production."

Commentary

In this chapter Marx deepens his discussion of co-operation begun in Chapter 13. He examines the organization of co-operation within the context of manufacture, the first re-organization of capitalist beyond the simple annexation of handicraft workers through the putting-out system. In the putting-out system the organization of production remains unaltered, handicraftpeople continue working as before using their own tools in their old ways. But in manufacturing the capitalists increasingly impose a new division of labor in which the workers become increasingly specialized, performing only one part of a larger production process involving many workers and many steps. Yet, throughout the manufacturing period it is still the handicraft worker, however specialized, who is the moving force of production, or what Marx calls "the regulating principle of social production". The word manufacturing derives from two latin roots: manus for hand and factura for making. Thus manufacturing is "making by hand" and it is the workers' control over the use of their hands which regulates the rhythm and quality of the work. Manufacturing work thus corresponds very closely to Marx's analysis of labor in Chapter 7 in which a worker uses tools to transform raw materials. This is a situation which Marx will juxtapose to "machino-facture" in which the rhythm of work will be determined largely by the machine and the worker will be both used by the tools and demoted from their central role, i.e., stripped of their power.

A major focus in this chapter is on how the capitalist bringing together of large numbers of workers leads from a simple assembling of those with handicraft skills to an ever deeper division of labor. Whether different kinds of craftspeople with complementary skills are assembled or a large number of those with the same skill, the end result, he argues, has been the same: namely an ever increasing specialization of work and tools. This division and specialization derives from the reorganization of worker activities in order to produce a larger number of products at a more rapid pace, i.e., to increase productivity or the efficiency of production (and thus relative surplus-value).

This increasing specialization results in that process of deskilling or "disvalorization" of workers which I discussed in my commentaries on primitive accumulation. Whether we are talking about peasants forced to become one-sided farm laborers, midwives reduced to nurses, or craftspeople reduced to narrowly specialized workers, in all cases there is a loss of skill and of meaning from the point of view of the individuals and an appropriation and transformation of skill by capital. There is also, of course, a parallel process of "devalorization" as many skills and meanings, both personal and collective, are lost for good. I will discuss Marx's analysis of some the negative effects of these losses below in the section on "the effects of specialization on the worker".

The Collective Worker

Marx's analysis of how the varied skills of the handicraft worker become distributed piece-meal across a much larger body of worker, leads him to see that larger body as itself constituting a collective worker and each worker merely an "organ" of the larger body. "The collective worker, formed out of the combination of a number of individual specialized workers, is the item of machinery specifically characteristic of the manufacturing period." (p. 468) Because each of the specialized workers is more effective at their parcellized and individualized tasks, this collective worker is more productive than an equal number of unspecialized workers who did everything. "The one-sideness and even the deficiencies of the specialized individual worker become perfections when he is part of the collective worker." (p. 469) This metaphorical way of speaking about a large scale social set of complex relationships has certain limitations but it is nevertheless a very powerful one. It evokes not only the reality of productive co-operation, i.e., that these workers learn to work together as one, but also that of class struggle wherein these same workers learn to struggle as one vis à vis the capitatlists for whom they work, e.g., in wildcat strikes or in unions.

But if the concept of the "collective worker" emphasizes unity by its use of a singular figure to represent a complex group, Marx also recognizes the internal divisions and separations which compose this unitary figure. Not only does he understand how the collective worker is composed of different kinds of workers populating a particular division of labor, but he recognizes that the division of labor is never a simple horizontal set of differences but rather a vertical hierarchy.

Since the various functions performed by the collective worker can be simple or complex, high or low, the individual labor-powers, his organs, require different degrees of training, and must therefore possess very different values. Manufacture therefore develops a hierarchy of labor-powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages.

In other words the reproduction of workers who require complex training necessitates higher wages. This is an application of the discussion in Chapter 6 of the value of labor power. When we consider dramatically different skill levels, such as that of manual workers performing simple tasks and engineers who design machinery or chemists who work out new chemical processes for production, it seems reasonable that on the assumption that such workers tend to produce off-spring of the same character, the engineers and chemists would require higher wages to rear children capable of achieving the same level of education and training. Within a generation on the other hand, it is not quite so obvious why engineers and engineers should require higher income than manual workers to reproduce themselves as such. We can imagine that they need more resources for continuing eduation, communication with their peers, books, tools of their trade and so on, but this is speculative. Marx certainly doesn't present any such evidence. Therefore, as in Chapter 6 we can take his suggestion here as only a step toward a theory of the wage hierarchy in manufacturing.

One thing is certain, no matter how trivial the actual differences between production tasks, or however tenuous the connections to the costs of reproducing labor power, capitalists always impose a wage hierarchy as a means of dividing and conquering the "collective worker". As the recent movement by women for equal wages on the basis of "comparable worth" has repeatedly demonstrated, many wage differentials have no relationship either to the complexity of the job or to the "value of labor power". When he turns to the subject of wages in Chapters 19-22, Marx will further develop his analysis of the relationship between the wages and hierarchy.

What consideration of the hierarchy of labor powers and wages brings out is that the division of labor involves not merely differences in tasks, it also involves differentials in power. It is not just that some are highly skilled and some less skilled or unskilled. The highly skilled receive more wages than the less skilled just as the less skilled receive more than the unskilled. In as much as wages represent not only power to command the means of life but also power to struggle, the hierarchy of wages involves a hierarchy of power not only among workers but in their respective and joint relations with capital.

Recognition of these relations by a number of Marxists in the post-World War II period, led both to empirical studies of historical changes in the make-up of the collective worker and to the development of a new set of Marxist concepts to discuss them. Whereas Marx spoke of the division of labor, these Marxists came to speak of the complex set of power relationships woven into and constructed against the division of labor in terms of a particular "class composition". Historical studies of the changing division of labor in the 20th Century led to an interpretation of how the rise of Taylorism and then Fordism led to a particular figure of the collective worker they called "the mass worker". Taylorism, the term given to the work of Frederick Taylor and those who followed him, denotes the meticulous analysis of the labor process and subsequent use of that analysis to impose the most detailed and efficient specialization possible on the collective worker. Taylor quite consciously carried out the redesign of the production process and of the pattern of co-operation to achieve precisely that concentration of power of command in the hands of capital at the expense of the worker that Marx describes so well in this chapter. Taylor's work was dedicated to the final destruction of the power of the handicraft worker to exert any control at all over the work process. Fordism, the term given to Henry Ford's reorganization of the Taylorist division of labor around the assembly line, completed what Taylor had begun through the subbordination of all moments of work to a single interconnected machine —what the French call "La Chaine", a nice term that evokes the chains of slavery. The "mass worker" who emerged within this restructured labor process was a new kind of collective worker, one totally allienated from work and capable of self-organization at the level of the industry as a whole. The industrial union would be the product of the self-activity of the mass worker.

Research on the mass worker while developing and applying Marx's analysis of the collective worker also brought out a gaping hole in his analysis. In as much as the mass worker emerged during the same period in which the working class was successful in dramatically reducing the working day —as discussed in my commentary in Chapter 10— its rise was accompanied by both an expansion of working class leisure and the capitalist colonization of that leisure through such institutions as the public school, the expulsion of women from certain waged jobs back into unwaged homework and home economics to shape that work and the family along with it. Although Marx, at one point, hints that the division of labor "seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society", he does not develop this. (p. 474) While we might be willing to tolerate this failure to extend the analysis of the division of labor beyond the factory in a period in which virtually everyone, men, women and children were being forced into the factory, that failure becomes intolerable in a period when class relations are expanding outside waged work. On the other hand, unwaged housework has always been present and therefore an analysis of the place of that labor in the larger division of labor as well as an analysis of the division of labor within housework are required for any complete understanding of the collective worker in any period. We can ask, for example, how the work of child rearing was shared within the working class family and community. Who undertook which tasks? How much of the work was done by unwaged women, how much by unwaged children, how much by male waged workers and so on, and how these proportions changed over time and in response to what?

In her novel of working class life Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell would draw our attention to her observation that even in the inferno of Manchester's rapid industrialization, working class men were able and willing to assume roles of nurturing and caring. Under both normal circumstances (the opening walk in the countryside) and emergencies (the starvation of William Davenport and his family) they have the knowledge necessary and willingness to nurture, shop for food and medicine, cook, administer to the sick and comfort the bereaved. However, Gaskell shows the limits to these abilities —the men leaving the preparation of tea and food to the women in the opening chapter, Job Leah's ignorance about how to care for an infant during his return trip from London, John Barton leaving the care of his dead wife's body to his daughter, and so on— and on the whole portrays these roles as being mostly assumed by women, e.g., Mary who takes care of her father and herself, Alice Wilson who takes care of everyone. This said, it is interesting how she portrays much less of a strict gender division of labor than we might have expected.

One thing the novel suggests, certainly true though requiring much more investigation than it has been given, is that the political behavior of workers can only be understood by grasping the patterns of their lives in their homes and communities as well as in their factories. While this may have been particularly true in the "hungry '40s" when large numbers of workers had their wages reduced or lost their jobs —so that the experience of distress was more than usually a home and community based one— it is also true at other times and thus an understanding of these things is vital to any thorough analysis of the class composition.

Just as we can study with Marx the wage hierarchy within the factory, so too can we study the hierachy between the waged and unwaged and among the unwaged (say among women, retired male workers and children), i.e., at the level of the social factory (capitalist society as a whole). The dependence of the unwaged on the waged —say at the level of the family— conditions the relations between the two and explains both the privileges demanded by the waged and the forms of struggle of the unwaged. To the degree that Marx failed to recognize or treat such relationships there has been scope for extending his meticulous analysis of waged work to the unwaged. Not surprisingly since Marx's time it has been primarily women who have pushed Marxist research in this direction just as amongst bourgeois novelists of the 19th Century it was mainly women like Jane Austin or Elizabeth Gaskell who explored these issues. Also not surprisingly it has mainly been within the context of upsurges in women's struggles that such work has occurred most recently within the rise of the women's movements of the 1970s.

The analysis of the mass worker mentioned above did lead eventually to an analysis of the division of labor at the level of society as a whole and the recognition of how capital has manipulated those divisions to an analysis of society as a "social factory". On the one hand, it was recognized how Henry Ford wanted his factory overseers to check up on the family lives of his workers. On the other hand, the public school system —which only became generalized in the Progressive Era— came to be seen as an institution which organizes the division of labor in the inter-generational reproduction of labor power. It reproduced many of the conditions of work of the mass worker in its own organization and by tracking girls into home economics and boys into industrial arts, etc. helped reproduce the gender differentials which help found the larger wage/unwaged divisions in society. Recognition of these aspects of the unwaged dimensions of the mass worker has led to a much more complete study and understanding of the dynamics of class relationships throughout the social factory.

More contemporary research of this sort has sought to identify the emergence of yet another figure of the collective worker, namely the "socialized worker". This socialized worker is argued to have been emerging within a crisis of Fordism brought on by the struggles of the mass worker who succeeded in the late 1960s and early 1970s in rupturing the pattern of capitalist relative surplus value based on Fordism in industry and Keynesianism at the level of the state. The "socialized" worker is so named because, it is argued, the self activity of workers has begun to break down the very distinction between the spheres of production and reproduction, between the factory and the rest of society.

The Effects of Specialization on the Worker

The division of labor in manufacturing constructs a more highly productive collective worker out of the activities of its constituent specialized individuals in part by making each of them more effective in the narrow task assigned. But the price paid for that enhanced effectiveness at one narrow task is a crippling of their other real or potential abilities. "Constant labor of one uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of a man's vital forces, which find recreation and delight in the change of activity itself." (p. 460)

"Manufacture . . . seizes labor-power by its roots. It converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house, through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations, just as in the states of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. . . . the individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation . . ."

Although he recognizes that any division of labor, in any kind of society will involve some restriction on the potential development of the individual, Marx argues that in capitalism this is carried to a barbaric extreme. "Since manufacture . . . attacks the individual at the very roots of his life, it is the first system to provide the materials and the impetus for industrial pathology." (p. 484)

It should be remembered that Marx was far from the first to take up this theme. In Chapter 14 he points out that Adam Smith before him was well aware of this kind of negative impact on the individual worker and that Smith learned of it from his own teacher Adam Ferguson. (p. 483) Where Marx goes beyond Ferguson and Smith is in providing a class analysis of the dynamics of these relations, especially in analysing their role in the class struggle. (see next section below)

In the following graphic portrayal Jack London describes one of those one-sided, specialized and crippled workers of which Marx speaks. In his analysis of the collective activities of a glass factory (pp. 466-467) Marx ends with the production of the glass bottle. London picks up where Marx leaves off to describe the work of attaching the bottle stoppers to the bottles.

Whether the worker portrayed in this short story was drawn from life is not known. He might well have been because London worked in many of the industries described in his stories. But even if he was not, the portrayal gives vivid concreteness to an all too common phenomenon in the 19th and even the 20th Century.

This problem of the crippling caused by highly specialized work has grown with capitalism and has continued to be the object of both working class struggle and academic study throughout the 20th Century. In the post-WWII period, for example, the self-organization of farm workers led directly to a battle over the "short handled hoe" a tool the farm workers argued was imposed on them by capitalists who wanted their overseers to be able to immediately identify a worker who stopped working (by standing up straight). No matter to the agribusiness growers in California and elsewhere that the result of 8 hours or more of stoop labor was physically crippling to the workers. Even in the domain of mental labor —forseen by Ferguson in 1767— over specialization has led to an inability of workers (including the graduates of business and engineering schools) to understand enough of the background and framework of a problem to generate creative solutions.

Since Marx's time, the development of capitalist industry has brought with it an ever greater mass of disease, poisonings, cripplings, and other injuries for industrial pathologists to study. When we broaden our attention to the social factory, we can begin to recognize how all kinds of pathologies from drug use and suicides to environmental degradation have been as integral to capitalist development as the factory based problems that preoccupied Marx. As we might expect one byproduct has been the ever renewed struggles by workers against such conditons of work and life, both through the fight for safety and health regulation within the official work place and through the battles for a wide variety of health, consumer and environmental programs in the society at large.

Already in the 1857 Grundrisse manuscripts Marx, following Fourier, had forseen the necessary condition for overcoming this problem: not the abandonment of the division of labor as some romantic pastoralists have suggested but such a drastic reduction in work time that people's work could be enriched by a diversity of life experiences. Where Marx went beyond Fourier was in identifying the forces at work in the class struggle that were pushing society in this direction. His early synthesis in the Grundrisse laid out the analysis most clearly: how working class struggle forced capital to substitute machinery for labor raising the productivity of labor and creating both the technical possibility of less work and, tendentially, undermining the capitalist ability to impose it. Some of that analysis reappeared in Chapter 10 of Capital in the discussion of working class struggle for less work. Some more can be found in Chapter 25 of Volume I where he analyses the genesis of the reserve army of the unemployed. Still more can be found in the Grundrisse and in Volume III of Capital where Marx analyses the implications of this constant substitution of constant for variable capital, (i.e, a rising organic composition of capital): an increasing difficulty in putting people to work . These analyses lead to his discussion in Volume III of the "realm of freedom" where work is reduced to a single component of a multifaceted social life.

The Class Struggle

Much of what I have just discussed can be read in terms of the capitalist use of the division of labor to divide and control the working class. Certainly much of Marx's analysis is focused on the benefits to capital of the division of labor in manufacture irrespective of the costs to workers. But there is another side to Marx's analysis, the side that recognizes the power that workers do have even within this division. Precisely because in manufacturing production is still based on handicraft skills, workers' command over those skills give them power over the labor process —power to produce and power to refuse to produce.

Since handicraft skill is the foundation of manufacture, and since the mechanism of manufac-ture as a whole possesses no objective framework which would be independent of the workers themselves, capital is constantly compelled to wrestle with the insurbordination of the workers. (pp. 489-490)

He goes on to quote Andrew Ure that "the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become." (p. 490) Skilled workpeople can be self-willed and intractable because they control the rhythm and pace of certain phases of the production process. They still wield tools and just as they know the most efficient way to use them, they also know less efficient ways. In conflict with capitalists —say over the conditions of labor or the length of the working day— it is therefore possible for such workers to slow down or sabotage the production process without the capitalists or their overseers being able to understand when or how this is done. Early in the chapter (p. 460) Marx noted how the craftsman creates "gaps in his working day" as he shifts from one operation to another. The capitalist refinement of the division of labor tends to eliminate such shifts, and thus the gaps, but never completely achieves its ends. At the end of the chapter he concludes that the proof of the still remaining power of handicraft workers in the manufacturing division of labor lay in the failure of capital to "seize control of the whole disposable labor-time of the manufacturing workers". As his last remarks suggest, it was only with the introduction of machinery that a Frederick Taylor would be able to strip the last shreds of power from the hands of production line workers. Unfortunately for the capitalists the response of the workers to being blocked in one source of power would be to develop others!

When we expand our attention from the factory to the sphere of reproduction with its own evolving division of labor, we can also find endless examples of people using their command over work processes to resist the imposition of labor. Whether we examine the struggles of unwaged housewives or students, we discover a myriad of methods, subtle or blatant to refuse work. The housewife fed up with being condemned to life as a broodmare, uses her knowledge of her own body to resist conception and procreation. The student bored or annoyed with imposed school work uses feined dullness or wit to distract teachers and open gaps for play or contemplation in the school day.

Recommended Further Reading

Among the Italian Marxists who analyzed the rise and development of the mass worker were Romano Alquati, Raniero Panzieri, and Sergio Bologna. In the introduction to Reading Capital Politically, I gave a sketch of these theoretical developments (see Study Guide, Part 1). Sergio Bologna has recently written a fairly comprehensive overview of the development of these historical studies. That overview has been translated and published in two parts in the journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists: Sergio Bologna, "Theory and History of the Mass Worker in Italy", Common Sense, #11, Winter 1991, pp. 16-29, Common Sense #12, Summer 1992, pp. 52-78.

The Marxist researchers who have elaborated the concept of the socialized workers are those working with Toni Negri and Jean-Marie Vincent, the principal editors of the Parisian journal Futur Antérieur. Among the contributions to the study of this figure of the collective worker are:

Marx's writings on Indian society grew out of his efforts to understand the evolution of colonialism within the British empire and within global capitalism more generally. Characteristically, he looked for an understanding of the relationship between the nationstates (colonizing and colonized) in the class dynamics within each and the linkages between social antagonisms in England and those in India through trade, investment and war. For a collection of his writings see S. Aveneri (ed) Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, New York: Doubleday, 1969. Virtually all of his writings on India are now available in the volumes of the Collected Works.

Concepts For Review

Questions For Review

(An * means one possible answer can be found at the end of the Study Guide.)

1. What are the two ways in which manufacture emerges from handicraft production? In each case what is the impact on the workers' skills?

2. What are the advantages of specialized labor wherein a worker performs one, narrowly defined task over and over? What are the disadvantages to the worker? How does manufacturing "provide the materials and the impetus for industrial pathology"? How are workers "crippled"?

3. What is the impact of specialization in manufacturing on the tools used by workers and how does this pave the way for the rise of machinery?

4. What are the differences and similarities between "heterogeneous" and "organic" manufacture? How does the organic organization of manufacture tend to produce continuity and uniformity in the average time of production for each worker? How might this be achieved in heterogeneous manufacturing?

5. Discuss Marx's passing reference to the link between machinery and the development of mathematics. What does this suggest about the social development of science more generally?

*6. What does Marx mean by "the collective worker"? What is the origin of this "item of machinery"? Why does Marx use this latter term?

7. What are the technical origins of the wage hierarchy? How does Marx explain this in terms of the value of labor power? What is the impact of specialization and deskilling on the value of labor power? Thus on surplus value?

8. How are the origins of the division of labor in manufacturing and the division of labor in society different? How does their separate development influence each other?

9. List the ways Marx sees the division of labor in manufacture to be despotic while that in capitalist society is anarchic.

10. How does Marx contrast the division of labor in capitalist manufacture with that of the guilds? With that of traditional Indian (Asian) communities?

11. How does the emphasis of classical political economy on productivity and quantity contrast with the views of Plato and other ancient Greek writers on the division of labor?

*12. What is the source of workers' power during the period of manufacture and why is capital "constantly compelled to wrestle with the insubordination of the workers"? What was Marx's evidence of the successful exercise of this power?

13. "We make a nation of Helots, and have no free citizens." Comment.

14. What is the relation between tendencies to market equilibrium and the anarchy of the market?

Section 1. The Development of Machinery

Outline of Marx's Discussion

Mill: machines have not lightened toil
Marx: machines are the means for producing relative surplus value

Rise of machinery = conversion of tool into machines

Machine:

= complex tool
= tool driven by natural force
= motor mechanism + transmitting mechanism + tool or working machine
= tools of man have become implements of a mechanism, multiplied
= a mechanism that performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools, whether the motive power is derived from man or from another machine
= soon becomes one element in a complex system of machinery

Complex system of machinery

= simple co-operation of similar machines
= "a connected series of graduate processes carried out by a chain of mutually complementary machines of various kinds"
= "the co-operation by division of labor which is peculiar to manufacture, but now it appears as a combination of machines with specific functions"
= fixed proportions established by their capacities, numbers, speed
= "collective working machine" = "articulated system"
= "constitutes itself a vast automaton"
= automatic system of machinery when the machines "elaborate the raw material, without man's help, and needs only supplementary assistance from the worker"
= "a mechanical monster"
= development in one sector led to development in connected spheres
= implied need for large scale industry to produce machines, i.e., for machines to be built by machines
= replacement of the worker-subject by an "objective organization"
= organization of machinery technically requires co-operation of labor

Commentary

One of the basic themes of this chapter is set out in the very first paragraph where Marx quotes John Stuart Mill to the effect that machines have not "lightened the day's toil of any human being." Marx's response, of course, is that in capitalism machinery is not introduced to lighten toil but to increase relative surplus value. In this way he introduces an argument which will frequently appear in the chapter: the paradox of capitalism that the very machinery which reduces the effort necessary to produce a given product results in more work rather than less. The various ways in which machinery causes an increase in labor will be explored at different points in the text.

What his exposition of the nature of machines primarily deals with is the way in which machines accomplish the same tasks as those carried out by workers. They substitute both mechanical contrivances for the various gesture and operations of the workers and motor power for human energy. He traces the development of machines from relatively simple substitutes for particular operations to complex systems of machinery driven by non-human energy sources. But the story is always the same: machines accomplish that transformation of non-human nature that he identified in Chapter 7 as the nature of human work. Thus particular machines replace particular workers and systems of machines replace large numbers of co-operating workers. In the place of the co-operation of humans, we have the co-operation of machines. In this process some humans are rendered redundant and expelled from production and others are reduced to being mere tenders of machines.

This displacement accomplishes what is for Marx a fundamental change in the work process, one which had already begun in manufacturing but which is completed in modern industry. That change is the replacement of the central role of the worker in commanding the work process by the machine. From being the central subject who works, the worker is demoted to being one more cog in the system of machines.

While Marx's analysis is clearly focused on the factory —most of his examples are drawn from main sectors of 19th Century British industry— bringing that analysis up to date requires its application to the world outside the factory which has also been transformed by the proliferation of machines. Increasingly throughout the 20th Century machines have been developed not merely as mechanisms of production but also as elements of consumption. To some degree Marx anticipates this as he notes "But as well as this, 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. . . . 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." (pp. 505-506) To these we can add the 20th Century proliferation of automobiles, trucks, airplanes, telephone, radio and television, computer networks. But if these developments amounted, in part, to an "adaptation" of and to the rise of machine systems in production, they carried those systems into the extra-factory world of everyday life. Ocean steamers, railways, automobiles and airplanes are not only adjuncts to production but, to varying degrees, they also organize consumption and provide the means not merely of the reproduction of labor power but also become vehicles of struggle and self-valorization. Just as Marx studied the implications of this transformation for our understandings of the dynamics of exploitation and class struggle in the factory, so can we study the implications for this wider proliferation for our struggles and our desires.

What Marx's analysis provided is a methodological point of departure for querying the nature and meaning of machine technology whereever we find it. For example, take the clothes washing machine, a common fixture in most households. This machine, like those that Marx discusses, substitutes a mechanism for human work. Sometimes these machines are used in capitalist enterprise: cleaning factories where they are used alongside dry-cleaning machines, pressing machines, and so on. Commonly they are used in the home that is not organized as a business. Technically the role is the same, but socially and politically it is quite different. In the factory, the machine substitutes for waged labor and allows the capitalist to process more dirty fabric (clothes, linen, etc) while dispensing with workers. In the home, the washing machine allows the unwaged houseworker to accomplish the same tasks of cleaning but in much less time and with much less effort. But if there is displacement of work, there is normally no displacement of workers —with the possible exception of a reduced marriage rate by those who feel less need of a spouse/domestic worker. Whereas, as we will see in Capital the threat to employment often led workers to resist and attack machines, in the household houseworkers, usually housewives more commonly fought for machines, i.e., for the expenditure of household wages on such machines, because of the dramatic reduction in their work loads. Such expenditure undoubtedly often amounted to a diversion of the wage in a direction that benefited housewives much more than waged husbands and thus reflected and contributed to a shift in burdens of work and power. As such the proliferation of such labor-savings devices in the 20th Century has certainly been a reflection of the growing power of women to escape servitude and improve their lives vis à vis men.

Yet, there has been another analogy between the capitalist use of the machine in the factory and the housewife's use of such machines in the home. Just as in the former case, the machine was manipulated, as we will see to increase work, so too have the dynamics of capitalist intervention in the home tended to increase the very work that such machines have reduced. How? First, through advertising the peddlers of both washing machines and their associated products, e.g., soaps, have raised expectations and standards of acceptable levels of "cleanness" to the point where washing is much more frequent than ever before. Advertisements condemning "ring around the collar" or "spots on the glasses" that might offend employer or mother-in-law spur houseworkers to more frequent and more thorough cleaning. While it may be that even with such repetition, clothes cleaning still requires less time than it used to, at the level of the household as a whole with all its "labor-saving" devices, there is some evidence that in many families the total amount of housework has not been reduced by the introduction of such machines —and thus their potential for the liberation of human life-time from work has not been realized.

Section 2. The Value Transferred By the Machinery to the Product

Outline of Marx's Discussion

Natural forces cost capital nothing, but their exploitation through machinery requires costly investment

Machinery

--enters useful labor wholly, the whole machine is engaged
--enters valorization bit by bit, adds what it loses by depreciation
--so, the more labor required to produce the machine and the quicker it is used up, the more it transfers to the product
--as the mass of machinery per worker grows so does C/V, the ratio of the value added by machinery (+ raw materials + intermediate goods) to the value of labor power

Condition for introduction of machinery: "less labor must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery" (p. 515)
or
"value of machine" must be less than "value of labor power displaced" (p. 515)
or
money cost of machine must be < money cost of labor

therefore:

in general, the lower the wage, the less incentive for the introduction of machines; low wages = "squandering of human labor power for despicable purposes", e.g., in England

Commentary

The basic message of this section is the same as that of Chapter 8 on constant and variable capital: machinery, as a sophisticated form of constant capital, only adds to the value of the product what it transfers to it. It does not create any new value. As I discussed in my commentary on Chapter 8 this is a misleading way of putting things. The "transference" under consideration here is merely the validation of the contribution of the labor that went into creating the machine to the final product created with the use of the machine. Therefore the amount of value "transferred" depends on how much labor went into the machine and how much product is processed by the machine. The greater the former, the more transferred. But, the greater the latter, the less transferred per unit of output. So, the longer a machine lasts, ceterus paribus, the smaller the amount of value attributable to it per unit of product, i.e., the less of a role the original labor of producing the machine plays in the creation of the final product.

There are two essential ingredients in the creation of machines and in their functioning which deserve comment here: "natural forces" and "science". Now for Marx "natural forces" includes both non-human forces like steam, water, etc. and human forces like "the productive forces resulting from co-operation". Although he doesn't define "science", it is certainly one of the elements of human co-operation. Science has developed as a collective way of thinking about and interacting with the world through the interconnected activities of vast numbers of people. Instead of saying, as he does in footnote 23 that "'Alien' science is incorporated by capital just as 'alien' labor is.", Marx should say "as one aspect of 'alien' labor". For what is science if not the development and elaboration of just that thinking "will" which Marx defined in Chapter 7 as making the worst of architects better than the best of bees?

As with science, so too with "technology" which is traditionally defined as the "application of science to industry". In footnote 4 of the previous section, Marx noted that "a critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century are the work of a single individual." (p. 493) With this he was insisting on the collective character of technological change. As with science, its application is the work of vast numbers across space and time. The contributions of individuals are often critical, but they are always building on the work of others before them and along side them. They "invent" in response to perceived real problems, generally having considerable experience and related materials close at hand.

Unfortunately, although considerable history of scientific and technological development has been written since Marx's time, the vast majority of it remains unknown to most people. Instead, popular ideas derive from Hollywood images of isolated "mad scientists" and the failure to teach the history in schools. In the case of Hollywood, take the recent, hugely popular film Back to the Future. That film and its sequel presented, once again, invention as the work of a crazy (albeit lovable) inventor working out of his home in total isolation. In the case of schools, it is common at the elementary and secondary level to teach children about "great inventors" and their inventions in ways which totally abstract from the socio-historical contexts within which they worked. The purpose is undoubtedly ideological —reinforcing bourgeois individualism— and pedagogical —you the individual child can hope to achieve great things— but the method obfuscates any real understanding of invention and technological change and by mystifying it transforms the "inventors" into magicians and their creativity into a totally magical and unknowable art. Well meaning teachers who then pressure every student to be an "inventor" through obligatory and competitive "invention fairs" complete the alienation from creativity by asking children to "invent" in total abstraction from the normal social contexts and processes in which real invention takes place. Under these circumstances, most of the children have nothing substantial to suggest and wind up feeling silly and inadequate in comparison with the inventors and inventions they are given as role models. The end result is the opposite of that intended: an alienation from imagination of those who can not understand that their lack of ideas derives from a social rather than an individual failing.

*In the 1950s as the centrality of science and technology to industrial development (via productivity increases and relative surplus value) became preoccupations of policy makers, the negative public perception of scientists came to be perceived as a problem. In an era when Sputnik and aggregate production functions dictated increased investment in human capital and the expansion of science curriculum in public schools, efforts were made to change both popular images and the in-group orientation of scientists who wrote only for each other in technical and mathematical jargon indecipherable by the general public.

** Although the literature of science fiction has often reproduced this same misunderstanding of the processes of invention —compare H. G. Wells' Time Machine with Back to the Future— the fact that it has increasingly been written by scientists and those with serious scientific understanding has meant that it sometimes gives a much truer portrayal of the social processes of discovery.

Section 3. The Most Immediate Effects of Machine Production on the Worker

Outline of Marx's Discussion

(a) Machinery draws in women and children

--by reducing the need for muscle power, machinery makes it possible to employ less muscular women and children and to "break" the resistance of male workers
--so the whole family enters the factory
--this reduces time for housework, time for play
--less time to cook, to care for infants, to sew; thus need to buy substitute commodities
--less time for children to learn these domestic skills
--male labor devalorized, family wage spread across earnings of all family members
--M - LP less free, as parents forced by low wages to sell children's labor power ≈ slavery
--devastating impact on children's health
--"thrown into a situation physically and morally polluted"
--high infant death rates
--insufficient nourishment, dosing with opiates
--intentional starving and poisoning
--"intellectual degeneration", led to unenforced or subverted laws mandating schooling
--some "schools" were not really schools at all
--overcrowded, to few teachers, too few materials
--close, noisome atmosphere

(b) Machinery prolongs the working day

--machinery as "perpetual motion", limited only by worker endurance and resistance
--use of women and children lessens resistance of class as a whole
--increased working day means more rapid turnover of machinery, more surplus value
--increasing the length of working day reduces marginal costs fixed in machinery
--this is of increasing importance as C/V rises
--monopoly introduction of machinery by individual capital lowers costs and gives increased surplus value
--Contradiction: increase in C displaces V and potential for S
--displacement of V by C offsets rise in S/V and creates pressure for capitalists to compensate for loss in relative surplus value by increasing working day and absolute surplus value
--displacement of V produces "a surplus working population"
--by "revolutionizing" "the mode of labor as well as the social organism" machinery breaks the resistance of workers ["decomposition" of working class power]

Paradox: most powerful instrument for reducing work, increases it instead
--so much for the dreams of Aristotle, Antipater and Stolberg

(c) Machinery intensifies labor

--limitation of length of working day leads to increased use of machinery
--to increase productivity and relative surplus value
--to increase the intensity of labor and thus surplus value
--intensification via "heightened tension of labor-power"
--intensification via "a closer filling up of the pores of the working day"
--labor-time now "acquires a measure of its intensity, or degree of density"
--intensification achieved via piece wages
--shortening of labor time makes increased intensity possible —"subjective condition"
--intensification achieved via speed-up of machines
--intensification achieved via having one worker tend more machines, e.g., cotton looms
--intensification undermines workers' health , e.g., exhaustion, lung disease
--intensification leads to further struggle for shortening of working day, e.g., 8-hours movement

Commentary

The Great Paradox

The "most immediate effects of machinery on the worker" which Marx describes here are all negative: the introduction of machinery is used by capital to impose work on women and children, to prolong the working day and to intensify labor. The great paradox which Marx sees in the capitalist use of machinery appears fully elaborated here: the machine reduces the need for muscle power —which should lighten labor— but draws in and exhausts women and children; the machine makes it possible to produce more in a shorter period —which should lighten labor— but it is used instead to prolong it; the machine which allows one to accomplish the work of many faster than ever —which should lighten labor— is used to make the one work at an exhaustingly rapid pace. Thus at the end of section (b) he writes:

Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labor-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labor-time at capital's disposal for its own valorization. (p. 532)

In quoting from Aristotle's Politics and the poetry of Antipater and Stolberg, Marx is showing how this capitalist use of the machine amounts to a betrayal of the dreams and hopes of humanity. From time immemorial humans have sought to use their intelligence and imagination not only to improve their world but to reduce their drudgery and free themselves for new and more diverse pursuits. In some ways, as Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto, capitalism liberates the possibilities for such developments by destroying many traditional barriers to innovation and change. But even in its historically unprecedented flexibility, capitalism imposes new barriers —including the endlessness of its imposition of work.

The Historical Relation Between Absolute and Relative Surplus Value

Although, as this chapter makes clear, absolute and relative surplus value often co-exist as capitalist strategies, Marx nevertheless suggests a fundamental historical linkage between the two approaches. On the one hand, during the period of the "formal" subordination of labor to capital, before there is any capitalist modification of the labor process, absolute surplus value dominates, i.e., the main way capitalist seek to extract more surplus labor is through making workers work longer. On the other hand, the historical success of workers' resistance to absolute surplus value forces capital to shift its emphasis to relative surplus value.

As soon as the gradual upsurge of working-class revolt had compelled Parliament compulsorily to shorten the hours of labor, and to begin by imposing a normal working day on factories properly so called, i.e., from the moment that it was made impossible once and for all to increase the production of surplus-value by prolonging the working day, capital threw itself with all its might, and in full awareness of the situation, into the production of relative surplus value, by speeding up the development of the machine system. (pp. 533-4)

Capital's tendency, as soon as a prolongation of the hours of labor is once for all forbidden, is to compensate for this by systematically raising the intensity of labor, and converting every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means for soaking up labor-power. (p. 542)

It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to argue that throughout the last 150 years as the working class has been on the offensive attacking absolute surplus value by reducing the amount of official waged work time, capital has come increasingly to depend upon relative surplus value strategies for its survival and expansion. Indeed, with the development of the Keynesian state in the period following the Great Depression of the 1930s, capital sought the institutionalization of relative surplus value through a variety of productivity deals, formal and informal, that linked rising wages and profits to rising productivity. By creating an institutional framework within which workers' struggles for less work and more pay could be paid for by increased investment and rising productivity, relative surplus value became systematized as a key component of capitalist strategy and growth. This formalization can be seen partly in collective bargaining and industrial union contracts and partly in the tax and investment policies of the state that has quite consciously fostered technological change with the object of achieving steady growth in productivity. While such policies have fairly consistently favored investment in new and better capital equipment in private industry, they have also expanded investment in science and technology outside the factory both through research and development programs and through human capital investment in education. The contemporary preoccupation with "high tech" industrialization is only the latest phase in a long history of relative surplus value strategies.

Machinery and Life outside the Factory

Although, as we have seen, Marx spends little time in Capital analyzing life outside the factory, his discussion of the ways in which the development of machinery allow the capitalist to draw women and children into production leads him to a recognition of the interrelatedness of waged and unwaged work. Factory inspector reports and other sources indicate how time and energy spent by women and children on the waged job dramatically reduces the time and energy available for both the work of reproduction and life more generally. He cites evidence of high infant mortality rates resulting from the neglect or mistreatment of the young by women whose time is eaten up by the factory. * He notes observations that women working long hours can not keep up with their traditional domestic tasks and young girls forced to work for wages never even learn the skills necessary. As a result domestic work (e.g., sewing and mending ) does not get done and working class families either go without or are forced to purchase commodities to replace what they might have produced themselves at home (e.g., new clothes) —thus reducing their real disposable income. The 19th Century evidence from periods of crisis and high female unemployment about how family health often improved with increased time at home, e.g., from increased breast feeding, resembles contemporary experience in the Third World where the fall in agricultural export prices sometimes leads to improved peasant health, e.g., via improved nutrition as family effort is redirected from export to subsistence crop production.

*At this point in the text, Marx's focus is on women and children but it should be obvious that the long hours and exhausting expenditure of energy required of men also played hob with the relations among fathers, wives and children. The brutality and violence of the factory has often been brought home by those who have been forced to w ork there. Listen, for example, to the song "Factory" by Bruce Springsteen and note the lines "Dad comes through the gates with death in his eyes, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight". Where blue collar workers often bring home physical brutality, middle class white collar workers bring home the psychological brutality of the office and carry out the same kind of transference of their anger to their children; only the character of mistreatment differs.

More generally, Marx's analysis draws our attention to the close connection between waged and unwaged work, between the work of production and the work of reproduction. In the early 20th Century as restrictions on women's and children's wage labor grew and both were increasingly expelled from waged work, the reconstitution of the family became a preoccupation of capitalist social policy makers who contributed both to the emergence of the modern nuclear family (of a male wage earner, an unwaged housewife and unwaged children) and such complementary institutions as the public school system. The early efforts to give waged working class children some education —that Marx critiques in this chapter— becomes a much more generalized effort to re-incarcerate all children. Over the last thirty years as women have re-entered the waged labor market in large and growing numbers both families and social policy makers have been concerned with the impact on family life and reproduction. The substitution of collective day-care for parental care, the phenomenon of latch-key children, rising divorce rates and child abuse have all become widely discussed and hotly debated issues. Positions have ranged from feminist and gay efforts to create (and demand the social acceptance of) a wider range of what are considered "healthy" family structures to conservative attempts to re-impose the rapidly disappearing nuclear family structure by making alternatives illegal or socially unacceptable. In short, the development of these debates has forced recognition of the very interrelatedness that Marx emphasized back in the 1860s.

As mentioned in the commentary on section one above, machines, and the subordination of life to them, has become omnipresent not only in the factory but in the larger social factory. Besides the domain of housework, already discussed, machines have also been used to organize the time of recreation such that it becomes that of re-creation of labor power. Probably one of the most widely commented examples of this is the television —which has been generally portrayed as a device whose entertainment reduces the worker to a passive witness to an ever changing spectacle manipulated to inculcate passivity more generally. This interpretation has been a application of the analysis of the Frankfort School and critical theory whose theorists elaborated a critique of traditional "culture" as dividing the population into an active minority —those who perform— and a passive majority —those who witness. A more recent example of this kind of subordination, of only slightly less passive responses, was the first generation of arcade computer games which activate only hand-eye motor responses and proved, for some, most addicting. The following song, "Machines" by the City Boys reproduces and comments on such addiction.

Even today as more interactive software has widen the possibilities of self-activity vis à vis computer games, a visit to the arcade centers of any shopping mall will provide opportunities to witness the kind of manic, obsessive behavior being critiqued in the song. The current crop of arcade games has replaced space invaders with street fighting and friends can duke it out with each other or with gangs, but the nature of the "entertainment" has changed little. On the positive side, at the level of eye-hand coordination such games have an attraction similar to some sports, without the risk of humiliation in failure. They also provide the opportunity for a kind of cathartic release of tension, and perhaps aggression in a harmless manner. On the other hand, the players are jumping hoops set by an unknown programmer rather than crafting their own world so the games recreate life as experienced by those who believe themselves helpless to change it.

More interesting are the myriad role-playing games designed for personal computers that test not eye-hand coordination but ones cleverness, wit and imagination. That the kind of appeal of these games is fundamentally different from arcade games is widely recognized and proven by the spread of do-it-yourself programs with which those without programming skills can none the less craft their own worlds to play in. At this point the machines begin to be more like tools in the hands of workers —the kind of thing Marx talks about when discussing handicrafts— rather than machines into which the players merely fit like cogs in a predesigned system. In any event, we are forced to recognize the spread of such new forms of "recreation" and can bring to its analysis the theoretical tools of Capital for thinking about the roles it plays in the organization of our lives, or, in our own organization of our lives.

Machinery and Child Labor

Most striking in Marx's survey of the impact of machinery on the family are his descriptions of the virtual slave dealing in children whose confinement in factory work wipes out both current play and future prospects. Both capitalists who wanted the children's labor and parents who needed the children's wages participated in this trade. Once adult workers succeeded in imposing legal restrictions on the use of young children, both capitalists and some parents would seek to slip underage children past the factory inspectors, each for their own reasons: of exploitation and of survival. In Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell gives space to the voice of one such parent, a mother whose husband has died of starvation and fever and who desperately needs the income of one of her children.

Unfortunately, as I have pointed out elsewhere, neither such needs nor such practices have disappeared since Marx wrote. From the agribusiness fields of America through the carpet factories of South Asia to the brothels of Southeast Asia, children are still being sold into virtual or out and out slavery by poor parents and still put to work, often under the vilest of conditions by capitalists greedy to suck every drop of profit from their veins.

Intensity of Labor

By addressing changes in the intensity of labor, Marx adds a whole new dimension to his analysis not only of surplus value but of value itself. Throughout the book, right up to this chapter, he has always held the intensity of work constant. In the discussion of absolute surplus value, both intensity and productivity were held constant. Then in chapters 12-14 the discussion of relative surplus value analyzed the impact of changes in productivity while holding the length of the working day and intensity constant. But in subsection (c) of section 3 he discusses the implications of changes in intensity. These changes are introduced at this point because they are so intimately related to the widespread use of machinery in modern industry. As he shows through many examples, the capitalists introduce machinery not only to raise productivity (output per input of labor) but also to increase work, i.e., make workers work harder (and sometimes longer). Machines allow the use of women and children who are easier to force to work harder. Machines set the rhythm of work, so by speeding them up the capitalists can force the workers who work with them to work harder. Machines work continuously so it is harder for workers to create "pores" of free time in the working day and so on.

Under these circumstances, Marx notes "a change took place in the nature of relative surplus value". (p.534) The change is that not only are the capitalists getting more surplus value from increased productivity, but they are getting more work, i.e., more value and surplus value, in a given work time. This raises an interesting theoretical question. Why does Marx treat increasing intensity as a form of relative surplus value rather than absolute surplus value? After all working harder would seem to be analogous to working longer because in both cases capital is extracting more work (rather than just getting a larger share as is the case with relative surplus value as we have studied it). How does working harder produce more surplus value? Suppose in the aggregate speed-up results in workers working twice as hard and producing twice as much output in a given time. Assuming as Marx does that the value of labor power hovers around that amount of abstract labor required to produce subsistence, then it will be possible to reproduce labor power with only half the work time as before. The value of labor power will remain the same, the real consumption of the workers will remain the same but the capitalists will now arrogate to themselves more of the output and labor time, both in physical and value terms. To illustrate:

t1 assume total output = 100 units, and S/V = 1, so V = 50u, S = 50u, V = 4hrs, S = 4hrs (8hr day)

t2 let output double so = 200 units, so V = 50, S = 150, V = 4hrs, S = 12hrs* so S/V goes to 3.

*4+12 = 16hrs equivalent of working twice as hard in 8hrs

So, doubling the intensity of labor has reduced the relative value of labor power while increasing the relative amount of surplus value, a result analogous to what happens when productivity is raised and intensity is constant. This would seem to be why Marx treats the strategy of increasing intensity as a component of the strategy of relative surplus value instead of absolute surplus value in which workers also work harder (i.e., longer).

In Marx's discourse, rising intensity is described as a "heightened tension of labor-power" because workers work more intently, more focused, both physically and consciously on their tasks. In the case of Jack London's Johnny, quoted above, such tension was mainly corporeal as his total focus on his stopper tying reduced his thinking toward zero. In other jobs that necessarily involve calculation, judgment and even the engagement of individuals' personalities, the strain can be more intellectual and emotional than muscular. Today we are more likely to speak of this in terms of "stress" —the increased nervous tension and emotional drain that comes with high-pressure, intense labor in both factory and office. As in the case of Johnny or say agricultural workers forced to use short-handled hoes, it is obvious how physical speedup can lead to physical breakdown. It has also become increasingly clear how psychological stress can lead to psychological breakdown. Moreover, recent research has made the connections between both kinds of stress more apparent. Physical stress can lead to psychological collapse, e.g., nervous breakdown;* psychological stress can lead to physical breakdown, e.g., heart disease and heart attacks.

*There is a very humorous but still serious treatment of this problem in Charlie Chaplin's classic film Modern Times where speeded-up assembly-line work leads Charlie to a nervous breakdown, spontaneous disruption, sabotage and hospitalization.

As capital has penetrated and manipulated the world outside the official workplace, subjecting all of life to the ever faster rhythm of machine paced existence —from increased pressure for grades in school, through the commuter freeway to the rapid fire sensory barrage of television and other forms of "entertainment"— the physical and psychological stresses of the factory have become commonplace throughout the social factory. This phenomena, whether recognized as an element of the capitalist organization of society or not, has been increasingly recognized as constituting pathological conditions by both medical and social critics. From epidemiologists who have come to recognize the connections between stress and disease to psychologists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysists and new age healers of various sorts whose professions have expanded rapidly in response to the demands of overworked, overstressed workers, housewives and students, this recognition has spread in the last thirty years.

Working Class Response

In Marx's writings there are two major kinds of working class response to the pressures and injuries caused by the ever increasing subordination of life to machinery: one is objective, the exhaustion and using up of people's lives, the other is subjective: revolt. "There cannot be the slightest doubt," he writes at the end of the section, "that this process [increasingly intensity] must soon lead once again to a critical point at which a further reduction in the hours of labor will be inevitable." And in a footnote he adds: "Agitation for a working day of 8 hours has now (1867) begun in Lanchashire among the factory workers." (p. 542) In other words, faced with a speed-up they cannot stop, the workers fight for fewer hours.

But this is not the only kind of resistance workers have posed to such speed-up. Far more common has been the day to day sabotage of speed-up and periodical revolts that have taken the form of official and wildcat strikes to stop or reverse the process. Remember the excerpt from "Counter-planning on the Shop-floor" by Tom Watson that described how workers organized rod-blowing contests and water fights in auto plants to fight the endless pressure of the assembly line. In Chaplin's Modern Times, when Charlie flips out in response to repeated speed-up he does not just walk away, he disrupts the line, squirting oil in the faces of other workers and sabotaging the machinery. Today it is not uncommon to read about such workers returning to their places of "employment" and shooting bosses and even fellow workers —whether the job place be a post-office, a factory, an office or a school.

Resistance can be individual or collective and the later is usually more effective. The isolated individual worker who tries to sabotage speed-up has a real problem in a collective work situation and may be caught and fired, or frustrated with lesser efforts flip out and take ultimately self-destructive action, such as shooting the boss, or drugs, or self. Collective action on the other hand is often highly effective. In the case of sabotage, it is harder for bosses to identify those responsible as workers shield and protect each other. In the case of more formal protest, strikes and wildcat strikes workers can and have been successful at rolling back speed-ups and at imposing work rules which make such intensification harder to implement. As in the case Marx cites —the struggle for the 8-hour day— such struggles can be successful not only in a particular plant or industry but at the level of national legislation, reducing the need for isolated less powerful resistance.

If each introduction of new machinery offers the capitalists new opportunities for class decomposition and speed-up, it also sets off another round of struggle against work intensity. An interesting question is what the long term up-shot of this conflict has been. In the period Marx is describing in this chapter the capitalists are clearly on the offensive, accelerating the introduction of machinery and the pace of work. From Marx's description of the excesses to which this led in the mid-19th Century it seems likely that the intensity of labor reached the maximum intensity possible. Subsequently, worker struggles have periodically reduced the intensity of work, which is probably why capitalists have so frequently sought to increase it. In the long run, therefore we can imagine, thought there is little statistical evidence to substantiate the speculation, that since the height of capitalist power —perhaps around or after the time that the length of the working was maximized— the general tendency has been for a reduction in intensity, with periodical success by capitalists in raising it.

Section 4. The Factory

Outline of Marx's Discussion

The capitalist factory as a whole combined co-operating workers using machines, collective worker = dominant subject
= "a vast automaton", a "self-regulated moving force" of machines that uses workers,
automaton = subject, workers = conscious organs
= deskilling means skill distinctions and hierarchy disappear

--replaced by differences "of age and sex"
--replaced by distribution of workers among specialized machines
--there are those who "are actually employed on the machines"
--there are those who "merely attend them (almost exclusively children)"
--very small group of "engineers, mechanics, joiners, etc"
--in part scientifically educated, in part handicraft
--workers adapt to the machines, are easily replaceable
--specialty of handling a tool becomes specialty of serving the same machine
--reduces costs of producing labor power
--makes worker helplessly dependent

Machines = power of capital

= embody science, natural forces and mass of social labor

--all of which have been stripped from the working class

--"separation of the intellectual faculties" from manual labor

= factory requires "barrack-like discipline"

--which requires military like organization of command

--of overseers (N.C.O's) over manual laborers (grunts)

--discipline imposed through "autocratic code", "book of penalties"

= damage to workers

--"does away with the many-sided play of the muscles"
--"confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity"
--physical damage from high temperatures, dust, noise, speeded-up machines
--robbery of necessities: space, light, air and protection from dangerous machinery

Commentary

This short section summarizes what has been said before, emphasizing how within the factory the workers are, simultaneously, subordinated to the automatic machine system, deskilled and reduced to organs of the machine themselves, and stripped of their freedom. "Factory work . . . does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity." (p.548)

Marx makes clear, however, that this deskilling and impoverishment of the work process does not result in a homogeneity of the working class. Capital does not abandon its methods of dividing the workers to conquer them, it merely substitutes new divisions for the old, divisions of young and old, of men and women, of one kind of machine tender versus another. As he has mentioned elsewhere, these divisions have been complemented by those of ethnicity, race, nationality, tribal affiliation and virtually every other potentially divisive difference capital can identify. Marx's general distinctions between those employed on machines, those who merely attend them (e.g., feed materials to them) and the more technically trained class of engineers, mechanics and joiners etc., constitutes a rough beginning to an analysis of the class composition of the factory. In any actual factory such an analysis could be considerably refined to bring out relevant distinctions of power, of class allegiance, of income, of the degree to which various kinds of workers are assigned responsibility over others, and so on.

At the end of the section, Marx asks "Was Fourier wrong when he called factories 'mitigated jails'?" This likening of factories to jails is apt from several points of view. Both are sites of incarceration. Both are usually surrounded by walls, fences and guard-posts that keep workers in and others out. To a considerable degree jails in capitalism have been work-houses. The Texas penal system, for example, is one great labor camp, a southern Gulag in which all inmates are condemned to work. In the most profound sense, factories are the jails of the working class given the way in which capital condemns one and all to life sentences at hard labor. Indeed, as Michel Foucault has pointed out incarceration is the paradigm of social control in capitalism. Everywhere you look capitalism has incarcerated social life within closed walls (jails, factories, asylums, hospitals, schools, stadiums, concert halls, shopping malls, swimming pools, the single family dwelling) at the expense of free life (in the commons, the streets, village square, the open forest, the free flowing river, communal housing, and so on).

Section 5. The Struggle between Worker and Machine

Outline of Marx's Discussion

Worker struggles against machines

--18th Century: struggles against ribbon-looms, wool-shearing machines, sawmill
--19th Century: struggles against power-looms by handloom weavers
--Luddite movement, early 1800s
--Sheffield file grinders in 1865
--machines become "competitor of the worker himself"
--"section of the working class thus rendered superfluous", e.g., unemployed
--In England, gradual extinction of hand-loom weavers
--as prices dropped, "many weavers died of starvation"
--In India, "bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains"
--machines are "a power inimical" to the worker
--weapon to suppress strikes

Commentary

Workers struggle against machines because machines are used by capitalists against the workers. "Hence the character of independence from and estrangement towards the worker, which the capitalist mode of production gives to the conditions of labor and the product of labor, develops into a complete and total antagonism with the advent of machinery." (p. 558) Machinery "is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital. . . . 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." (p. 563)

There are several important implications of these passages. First, to a considerable degree if capitalists introduce machinery against workers, then we can understand the history of the development of technology as a capitalist response to the struggles of workers. This is different from the usual Marxist view that sees technological development solely as the outcome of the competition between capitalists. Better from the perspective of this chapter, to see capitalist competition as a particular organization of the class struggle in which the success of some capitalists in dealing with their workers, e.g., introducing new machinery that raises productivity and cuts costs, forces others to make similar attacks on workers' power.

Second, although in commenting on the Luddite movement Marx notes "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", the fact is that he shows precisely how machinery was indeed an "antagonistic" "power inimical" to the workers. His own examples show that it is really not possible to separate machinery from its use by capital. Machinery is always developed within a particular concrete context, e.g., to break strikes based on a certain configuration of working class power, and therefore always embodies a certain class content in its material form. There is no such thing as politically neutral technology. While it may not always be in the workers' best interests to "break" machines, as the Luddites did, the revolutionary transformation of society must certainly involve the transformation of machinery and the relationships between workers and their machinery so that both embody new and changed social relationships. Failure to recognize this can lead to most reactionary policies, e.g., those of Lenin who favored the introduction of Taylorism in the Soviet Union.

Third, technological innovation, although used by capital against workers, derives not from capital but from the working class. It is only labor that is creative and innovative. Here capital seeks to turn some aspect of the working class' own power against it. This is the secret behind Ure's observation (quoted by Marx on p. 564) that "capital enlists science into her service". "Science", like technology, is but an aspect of the collective knowledge and know-how of labor. "Enlisting" science, means tapping that knowledge and ability in ways which benefit capital at the expense of labor. This is accomplished, in part, through the imposition of a strict division between manual workers and "mental" labor in which the latter are privileged over the former and come to identify and cooperate with the capitalist enterprise instead of their fellow workers. As the numbers of the "mental" workers grow, the same method is then used against them: the imposition of a division of labor that divides to conquer.

Concepts for Review

Questions For Review

(An * means one possible answer can be found at the end of the Study Guide)

1. How is the machine a means of producing surplus value?

2. What are the three parts of fully developed machinery?

3. Describe the transition from tools to working machine. How does the latter generally include the former?

4. How did the steam engine satisfy the requirements of large-scale machines with working tools?

5. How does Marx distinguish between the cooperation of similar machines and a complex system of machinery? Why does he consider the latter to be a "real machine system"?

6. What converts a system of machinery into an "automaton"? Why does Marx call it "a mechanical monster" with "demonic power"?

7. In what sense did the system of machine production first grow spontaneously out of a material basis which would prove inadequate to it? What material basis would suffice?

8. What was the impact of machinery on those workers with "semi-artistic" skills?

9. In what ways might the development of machine technology in one industry spur the development of that technology in a related industry?

10. Similarly, how does such a technology in industry call forth a change in communication and transportation?

*11. Marx says in footnote 23, page 508, that "science, generally speaking, costs the capitalists nothing." Is this still true? Why ? Why not?

12. How does the value of machinery enter into the valorization process? What is the influence of the length of life of the machine?

13. Explain why it is that with machines "the value arising out of the instrument of labor increases relatively but decreases absolutely"?

14. What is the relationship between wages and the tendency to substitute machinery for labor? How are Marx's comments on this substitution similar to those of neoclassical economics? How are the different?

15. Why were women often used instead of horses for hauling barges in England in the mid-19th Century?

16. How did machinery facilitate the annexation of labor previously used in the home? What is the relationship between domestic labor and necessary labor time?

17. How did Marx see machinery transforming the nature of the contract for labor power?

18. How did the employment of women on machines adversely affect the health of their children? Is this true today as increasing numbers of women enter the labor force?

19. Characterize Marx's critique of education in the period of the rise of machinofacture. How could education be dangerous? (See pp. 523-526, 613-614, 618-619, 628-629).

20. How was machinery a powerful means of increasing absolute surplus value? What were the inducements for the capitalists?

21. What is the "moral depreciation" of the value of a machine? How is this an application of Marx's analysis of socially necessary labor time in Chapter One?

*22. Although the productivity raising use of machinery tends to increase relative surplus value, it also tends to displace labor. How does this constitute an "immanent contradiction"? How can the capitalists compensate for the difficulties of this contradiction?

*23. What is the "economic paradox" associated with labor saving technological change?

24. What is the "condensation of labor" or a rise in the intensity of labor? What is its impact on productivity? On value produced?

25. Discuss the implications of Marx's assertion that intensive and extensive magnitudes are two antithetical and mutually exclusive expressions for one and the same quantity of labor.

*26. How does machinery facilitate the increase in the intensity of labor? How did this constitute a capitalist response to the successful working class attack on the hours of labor such as the Twelve Hours Act of 1844 and the Ten Hours Act of 1847? Why does this, in turn, lead to new attacks on the length of the working period?

27. How does the factory constitute a paradigm for the incarcerated society of capital?

28. In what sense does the machine system become the autocratic "subject" of the production process? What happens to the role of the worker?

29. How does machinery lead to deskilling and new hierarchies, new class compositions?

30. What is the relation between deskilling and the relay system?

31. How does machinery deprive work of all interest and content? How is this a form of alienation?

32. What is there in the way capitalists want to use machines that makes them particularly dangerous (physically) for workers?

33. What was the Luddite movement? What was its logic? Its illogic? Are there still elements of this movement alive today?

34. How did the American civil war give an impetus to the development of machinery in England?

35. How do workers use strikes to differentiate themselves from the machines to which they are tied?

*36. How does machinery constitute "the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes"?

*37. What was the "compensation theory" and how did Marx critique it? To what degree do you think Marx's argument is applicable to the current cycle of increased automation?

38. How does the widespread use of machinery give the capitalist mode of production a new elasticity to respond to changes in demand?

39. How does machinery prompt new surges of imperialism? And how does this result in a "new and international division of labor"?

40. What are the phases of the industrial business cycle?

41. What determines success in the competition among capitalists for market shares?

42. How was the cotton famine of 1860-61 advantageous to English textile manufacturers?

43. How does the introduction of the sewing machine typify the transition from manufacturing to machinofacturing? Describe the steps of this process.

*44. What is the upper limit on the intensity of labor? The lower limit?

45. In this chapter there are several references to post-capitalist society. Assemble and analyze them.

46. What was the impact of machinery on family structure Marx observed?

47. Why was the generalized extension of the Factory Acts inevitable? How does this generalize working class struggle?

48. How does large-scale agriculture annihilate the peasants and transform them into wage laborers? How do they resist?

49. How does capitalist production "disturb the metabolic interaction between humans and the earth"? How does Marx's commentary provide the basis for a critique of capitalist violations of ecological balance?

50. Compare Marx's discussion of the dispersion and power of workers in agriculture and in domestic industry.

Answers to Review Questions for Chapters 13-15

Chapter 13

6. The sources of the new social productive power that Marx associates with co-operation primarily concern the outcome of people working together as opposed to working separately. The complementarity of co-operation makes the productivity of the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Not only are there economies of scale in the use of physical capital, but there is a "social force that is developed when many hands cooperate in the same undivided operation" which results in the "creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one." (p.443) Mere social contact, Marx argues, begets "a rivalry and a stimulation of the ‘animal spirits’ which heightens the efficiency of each individual worker." Moreover, the "combined working day" as he puts it, "heightens the mechanical force of labor", "impresses on the similar operations . . . the stamp of continuity and manysideness." (p. 447) All of these things, along with those previously mentioned has the result that "When the individual worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality and develops the capabilities of his species." (p.447). In all cases, Marx argues, this social power is one that flows to and is appropriated by the capitalist gratis.

9. Working class resistance? As in "As the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital." p. 449. When we imagine workers herded into sweatshops and forced to work long hours for low wages, the image of the resistance to a dominating force seems realistic. On the other hand, with the development of large scale production and expanded cooperation has gone a development, a political recomposition of the working class which has moved it from a merely reactive or reistant power to an active and aggressive one. As we saw in the discussion of absolute surplus value the struggle over work time has shifted over the long run in favor of labor. It is labor which has aggressively fought for less work and capital which has resisted the reduction of working time. Thus the emergence of the working class as an autonomous force able to initiate struggle beyond mere reaction.

12. Co-operation in schooling? Very little. Mostly students are managed so as to compete with each other on an individualistic basis and they work separately, take tests separately and so on. Even in classes where students are brought together in large numbers, the habit of individual work is so strong that there is often resistance to hearing other students speak and "waste" class time that could be spent on individual contemplation of what the professor said or wants! Sometimes there are group projects, group papers, group test taking in which students are organized to work cooperatively such that their individual efforts are linked and they may achieve a higher level of productivity than they might alone. But this is rare in the formal organization of the school. Of course, it is also true that students also, often, intentionally breakdown this isolatin and cooperate with each other in studying or even in test taking (cheating) in order to raise their productivity despite the formal organization of the classroom. Supervision? Certainly, this is the job of the professor and/or TA. Unavoidable antagonism? Certainly so between the students and the professor for the one makes the others work and hands out grades. Also, frequently between students as they compete for position in the hierarchy. Working class struggle? From time to time students are able to break through their isolation and cooperate in either covert (cheating?) or overt (rebellion) cooperative struggle against the norms and practices of schooling. Despotism? Certainly in many classrooms where there is no flexibility, no room for individual variation or initiative and only the despotic plan of the syllabus.

Chapter 14

6. The "collective worker" is the personification of all the workers working together cooperatively. The collective worker, Marx argues, is "formed out of the combination of a number of individual speciallized workers". It is "the item of machinery specifically characteristic of the manufacturing period." (p. 468) Marx calls the collective worker an "item of machinery" because he is arguing that not only does the capitalist use and treat workers as such but with the development of the organization of collective labor the group of workers as a whole increasingly function like parts of a machine, each working with the others, the whole functioning like a machine. In the next chapter on machinery and modern industry he will elaborate on this theme and argue that the collective worker in fact becomes more an more a mere mechanistic part in a larger automated machine system.

12. The source of workers power was their ability to control the labor process --their "handicraft skill". They not only wielded tools but sometimes even constructed their own tools and designed the labor process. Their control over the labor process gave them power vis a vis management which could not do with them literally anything it wanted. Capital was "constantly compelled to wrestle with the insubordination of the workers" mostly because they constantly reasserted their subjectivity, their humanity and refused, as often and as much as possible, to behave like the machines they were supposed to emulate. Thus Marx quotes Ure "the more skillful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become. . . " (p.490)

Chapter 15

11. Free science? It depends on who pays for it. To the degree that business invests surplus value in research and development (R&D) then certainly they do not get it "free" —except in the usual sense of the exploitation of workers who get paid far less than the value of their product. On the other hand, a great deal of R&D is financed out of the public purse which is primarily paid for by income taxes on the middle class, i.e. the working class. The results of such R&D could well be seen as a free good stolen from the working class. Moreover, today, as pharmaceutical companies tap the traditional knowledge of Third World peoples and then patent it, they are certainly getting "free science" and those who generated the knowledge are being ripped off. (See a recent issue of Cultural Surival Quarterly devoted to this process.)

22. The displacement of labor by machinery, which results from the productivity raising strategies of relative surplus value, might be called an "immanent contradiction" in the sense that the capitalists need to raise c/v in order to maintain control but by displacing labor they are, at least potentially, undercutting their ability to impose work. The offsetting tendency of business is to constantly invest in the development of new industries which can absorb the displaced labor —or the labor force entrants who can not be absorbed by the old, high c/v industries. Thus the dramatic increase in c/v and automation in the manufacturing sector of the U.S. in the late 1950s which led to much "structural unemployment" and worries about the future ability of capitalism to put people to work was "compensated for" by the rise of the service sector which provided a much more rapid growth in employment possibilities.

23. The economic paradox is that while rising c/v and the associated rising productivity creates the potential for reducing work for everyone, the potential to realize Aristotle’s dreams of doing away with the need for slaves and servants, under capitalism these developments lead to more work rather than less. More work in the sense that capitalists make more profits and thus have more resources to put more people to work; more work in the direct sense that they fiercely resist any reduction in the working day and use increased automation to intensify labor, i.e., making people burn up more of their available life’s energy in the time on the job.

26. Machinery facilitates an increase in the intensity of labor because the machine is used by the capitalist to regulate the rhythm of work, to eliminate the "pores" in the working day, and eventually the control over the speed of the machine provides indirect control over the speed of the workers. Marx argues that the success of the workers efforts to reduce working hours squeezed capitalist surplus value by reducing s/v provoking increased investment to raise c/v by utilizing more constant, fixed capital (machinery) and less labor. The speedup imposed by the capitalists utilizing the potential in machinery sapped more energy from workers —much as longer hours do— so it is not surprising that such speedup would lead to a renewal of the struggle for fewer hours, i.e. less work.

36. Machinery constitues a weapon for surpressing strikes simply by providing a substitute for pesky, uncooperative workers some of whom are thrown into the streets and the rest are terrorized by the possibility of following them into unemployment and destitution. As our analysis of class "decomposition" has shown, moreover, the introduction of new machinery also is used to break up workers’ shopfloor organization through the reorganization of work thus undercutting their ability to generate strikes and other forms of struggle.

37. Same answer as question 22. Different answers possible to question of current cycle of increased automation. I have argued that the problem of compensating for the ejection of labor in one industry through the development of other industries has become more acute lately because there has been accelerating mechanization even in the services which, since the 1960s, provided most of the new jobs. (see special issue of Scientific American on mechanization) See also the problems the Japanese are having finding in house replacement jobs for workers displaced by automation but guaranteed life-time employment. Those life-time contracts are now being broken.

44. Upper limit on the intensity of labor? Presumably set by the biological limits of the human body even when workers social power is so weak as to be unable to set lower limits. As a general rule we might expect that where capital has, or has had historically, the most power over workers it pushed that intensity to the biological limit, and even beyond given the cases of people being worked to death —either quickly, and these are the most notorious cases, or slowly in the sense of shortening workers’ lives. On the other hand, everywhere workers have been able to develop enough organizational force to resist effectively, the upper limit has been socially set and, like the working day, has probably been reduced over the long haul with occasional increases, often during periods of rising c/v and class decomposition. The lower limit? In the short term zero, no work at all. But in the medium term some social average below which capitalist profits sink below normal and they shut down operations.