Chapter 15: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry

Dear reader,

The lengthy chapters 14 and 15 are taking us on an historical journey, showing us the nature of the development of the capitalist mode of production from handicraft production in small workshops to manufacture in larger workshops to large-scale industry in factories. At the same time, we see the corresponding social revolutions - how innovations in technology and management led to exponential rises in productivity that, though they had the potential to satisfy all human needs whilst simultaneously reducing socially necessary labour time, actually imposed greater need and cruelty on greater numbers of people.

Chapter 15 in particular confronts us today in our informational age in such a way as to reveal Marx's unparalleled genius. Here is a man whose theoretical and empirical analyses of a society with a level of technology so primitive compared to our own were so accurate that, regardless of quantum leaps in technological development, his work continues to offer the most insightful, cutting-edge analyses of our present situation and critically hopeful visions for our future.

Chapter 15: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry

1. The Development of Machinery

Marx begins the chapter with a quote from the liberal political economist John Stuart Mill: 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.' Marx is quick to point out that this is not the object of invention under capitalism; it is, instead, to 'cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing'. In short, under the rule of capital, 'the machine is a means for producing surplus-value'.

One thing I like about Marx is that when he sets out to discuss a topic, he makes sure to really define it first in the full historical context. So, here, on machinery, he defines a machine as being made up of three main parts: the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and the tool/working machine. The tool part evolves from the old manual tools that workers previously used. First, the tool is replaced by machine and then human motive power is replaced by other: animal, natural, engine.

The mechanisation of one sphere of production leads to transformation of other spheres and, ultimately, to a 'revolution in the general conditions of the social process of production'. Take the mechanisation of cotton spinning, for instance. That demanded not just the invention of the gin for separation seeds from fibre, but greater quantities of cotton delivered far more quickly, i.e. a revolution in 'the means of communication and transportation'. The new ocean steamers and telegraph infrastructure required huge masses of iron, which, in turn, demanded the mechanisation of mining, forging, welding, cutting, shaping iron and, ultimately, the mechanisation of machine-manufacture itself. The revolution in large-scale industry reaches a pivotal moment when machines are produced by means of machines.

2. The value transferred by the machinery to the product

Since machines under capitalism are only considered relevant to exchange-value rather than use-value, the sole determinant of their introduction into a given production process is the difference between the value of machine and value of the labour-power replaced by it. If the capitalist can find workers to do the job cheaper than the machine, they will not be replaced.

'The Yankees have a stone-breaking machine. The English do not make use of it because the 'wretch' who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist.'

This is an ongoing consideration. As Paul Mason has recently pointed out, though carwashes at petrol stations still continue, they have largely been usurped by businesses offering hand-washed cars by poorly paid Eastern European and Middle Eastern immigrant men.

3. The most immediate effects of machine production on the worker

Marx then points out the most evident, widespread effects of large-scale industry. First, no longer dependent on the superior muscular power of men, the capitalist takes the chance to break the remaining resistance of men and lower wages by bringing women and children into the new factory. 'Now the worker doesn’t just sell himself, he sells his wife and child. he becomes a slave-dealer.

The next effect is that the capitalist is able to use the machine as a tool of control in order to lengthen the working day.

'If machinery is the most powerful means of raising the productivity of labour...it is also, as a repository of capital, the most powerful means of lengthening the working day beyond all natural limits in those industries first directly seized on by it.'

Whereas before the worker controlled the tool, now the tool controls the worker.

'In the first place, in machinery the motion and the activity of the instrument of labour asserts its independence vis-a-vis the worker. The instrument of labour now becomes an industrial form of perpetual motion. It would go on producing forever if it did not come up against certain natural limits in the shape of weak bodies and the strong wills of its human assistants.'

Watch how Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times can't even take the time to scratch himself without falling behind the pace set by the machine...

So, the machine is in charge and the machine becomes the embodiment of capital itself.

'Because it is capital, the automatic mechanism is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will.'

Perhaps the most famous and dramatic cinematic expression of machine-as-capital is the 'Moloch' in Fritz Laing's 1927 film Metropolis. Terrifying!

The structural incentive the capitalist has in putting his machine (and, therefore, his workers) to work to the max increases in the face of the machine's deterioration and, particularly, its 'moral depreciation' - the danger of its premature obsolescence in the face of constant innovation. Another motivation for extending the working day is the fact that mechanisation is a process that converts much variable capital (labour-power) into constant capital (machinery) and thus produces relatively smaller amounts of surplus-value.

By determining the speed of work, the introduction of the machine also enables the capitalist to achieve a greater 'density', 'condensation', 'compression' of the working process - 'an increased expenditure of labour within a time which remains constant, a heightened tension of labour-power, and a closer filling-up of the pores of the working day'. This occurs in two ways: 'the speed of the machine is increased, and the same worker receives a greater quantity of machinery to supervise or operate'.

Meet Joe! He's got a wife and three kids and he works in a button factory!

My own kids and I learned this song at sessions and camps with Woodcraft Folk (the progressive alternative to Scouts!). I was sat reading Capital the other morning with my 9 year-old daughter looking over my shoulder. When she asked me what it was about, instinctively, I explained it was talking about Joe and why he had to work ever harder in the button factory!

4. The Factory

As the factory system consolidates, a new division of labour emerges. There are the masses of undifferentiated factory workers, a smaller group of attendants and supervisors, and a smaller group yet of skilled technicians who maintain the machines. The historical process of deskilling reaches an advanced stage and this allows for the constant and rapid turnover of individual workers.

The worker's dependency is completed by mechanisation: enslaved to the machine, to capital, to drudgery. The machine, the embodiment of past, 'dead' labour confronts the living worker and 'dominates and soaks up living labour-power'.

Thought it precedes this period by almost two centuries, I am reminded of Rembrant's famous picture 'The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholas Tulp'.

David McNally in his amazing book Monsters of the Market shows how the picture symbolically captures the power of the emergent bourgeois class in unambiguous terms. See how the wealthy men are able to manipulate the very body of the generic masses. The face of the man's cadaver is in shadows. The machine has its 'master'; the master has his 'hands'...

The introduction of the machine is truly a 'decisive blow' against labour in favour of capital. It turns the working class into an 'industrial army' and institutes a 'barrack-like discipline'. It is, for example, 'the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital'. But, as such strikes suggest, in this dialectical historical struggle, the workers will always struggle for their freedom and their very lives...

5. The Struggle between Worker and Machine

This is such a wonderful, important passage. The worker confronts the machine - 'the material foundation of the capitalist mode of production'. For her, at first at least, the machine seems to be the very enemy itself.

Marx recalls how the Luddite movement in England grew in the early years of the 19th Century as workers united to destroy the power-loom that was kicking thousands out of work across the north of England, condemning many to starvation itself. The reaction was brutal, culminating in actions like the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819 where tens of thousands demanded parliamentary reform for greater voice, but the voice was to win better economic conditions.

Soon, workers come to recognise that it wasn't the machine per se that was their enemy:

'It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machine 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.'

6. The Compensation Theory, with Regard to Workers DIsplaced by Machinery

But what if it's all ok? What if there was proof that when a worker was dismissed from one job there was always another job for her to go to? This is, indeed, what a string of both thoughtful and apologist political economists were saying: 'that all machinery that displaces workers simultaneously, and necessarily, sets free an amount of capital adequate to employ precisely those workers displaced.' Marx dismantles this 'compensation theory' of displacement.

First, Marx points out that the capital is not 'set free', but instead is actually 'locked up' in new machinery, new constant capital. Second, the workers who are being 'set free' are also being set free of their ability to be consumers. Consequently, demand falls and can lead to production falls in other sectors, more unemployment, and so on. Next, workers are re-employed only by new capital. Finally, what does being set free really constitute? Even if they get new employment, it is invariably in lower-skilled, over-supplied, under-paid sectors. Many face starvation and death.

As Marx points out, because bourgeois economists can only consider the use of technology from the 'natural' perspective of capital, anyone critiquing technology and machines must be wishing to 'hurl us back into the depths of barbarism'. It is very sad that this is how we have come to understand and use the word 'Luddite' (see image below) when its real meaning is far more potent and political.

We are not raging against machines; we are raging against The Machine!

There's just so much in this chapter, sometimes located in just one or two small paragraphs. Look how revolutions in the means of production and social relations interact and change everything. Marx points out that the huge increase in demand for cotton from the mechanisation of its production in England lead to a corresponding huge increase in demand for slaves in the USA that 'made slave-breeding the chief business of the so-called border slave states'. Rather than population levels being 'naturally' determined (Thomas Malthus), they are being socially determined by the demands, booms, and busts of capital. Despite this, we still get prominent Malthusians telling us the primary problem today is not the social system we live in, but that we, especially the poor, are breeding too fast. David Attenborough is a good example of this continued Malthusian perspective.

Here's the obscene nature of capitalist development in a nutshell. Just at the same time that the demand for slaves was booming so too was the demand for luxury goods from a flourishing capitalist class benefiting privately from the gains made from this dramatic increase in social productivity and the growth of world markets through colonisation. This makes their demands also for domestic servant burgeon too. Marx calculates that the 'non-productive' servant class in England and Wales amounts to 1.2 million people compared to less than 1.1 million agricultural labourers and roughly 1.6 million industrial workers!!

7. Repulsion and Attraction of Workers through the Development of Machine Production. Crises in the Cotton Industry

Marx continues the colonialist critique by showing how this huge increase in productivity means that the home country soon runs up against limits to demand domestically, making the expansion of overseas demand a necessity. At the same time, the cheapness with which the colonising country can manufacture finished goods, alongside revolutions in transportation and communication, makes the colonising power swiftly able to conquer new territories and markets. Local manufacture in colonies cannot compete and local industry is destroyed. Workers are compelled, directly or indirectly, to work to produce the agricultural raw materials the colonising country requires. 'Thus, India was compelled to produce cotton, wool, hemp, jute and indigo for Great Britain'. Similarly, supernumerary workers in the colonising country are exported and used to settle new territories and turn them into raw material producers. Marx gives the example of Australia as a wool exporter.

While he's talking about dramatic shifts in global production and consumption and booms and busts in industrial cycles, in stark contrast to Economics textbooks, Marx never hesitates to emphasise how working people experience these revolutions: as 'uncertainty', 'instability', and 'violent disruption'. Workers are 'continually repelled and attracted, slung backwards and forwards, while, at the same time, constant changes take place in the sex, age, and skill of the industrial conscript'. He proceeds to give an in-depth example of these ordeals by documenting the development of the English cotton industry between 1770 and the 1860s.

8. The Revolutionary Impact of Large-Scale Industry on Manufacture, Handicrafts, and Domestic Industry and 9. The Health and Education Clauses of the Factory Acts. The General Extension of Factory Legislation in England

Marx starts to talk about legislation, about how when the exploitation of men, women, and children reaches (well, goes beyond) socially acceptable limits, ultimately parliamentary legislation is brought in. At first, this is easily avoided by the bosses, primarily because their parliamentary peers do not provide sufficient resources to police the new acts. However, ultimately, the legislation benefits the bigger sector players by imposing new costs for worker welfare that make smaller players uncompetitive. Hence, the ultimate outcome is a greater concentration and centralisation of capital. Consequently, factory legislation, 'that first conscious and methodical reaction of society against the spontaneously developed form of its production process, is...just as much the necessary product of large-scale industry as cotton yarn, self-actors, and the electric telegraph'.

With regard to the extention of education compelled under the factory acts, Marx has some interesting things to say about technical education and how it should form the basis of a future workers' education, supporting the father of the co-operative movement, Robert Owen's vision of combining productive labour with technical education, theory, and physical exercise as the 'only method of producing fully developed human beings'.

He also argues that, though she experiences it as suffering, the very variety of jobs that the modern factory worker must undertake also shows the variation of labour a human being is capable of and how this 'possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production; that the 'monstrosity' of the 'partially developed individual' must be transformed into the 'totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity he takes up in turn'. Similarly, however 'terrible and disgusting the dissolution of old family ties within the capitalist system may appear', 'large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organised processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons, and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes'. Again, the sheer scope and visionary power of Marx's analysis is breathtaking. In just one section, Marx identifies the emancipatory potential of the development of large-scale industry for human beings in general and women and children in particular.

10. Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture

Once more, the scale and depth of Marx's analysis shines so brightly. In this final brief section, Marx considers the effects of the advent of large-scale industry on agriculture. It 'annihilates the bulwark of the old society, the 'peasant' and substitutes him for the wage labourer'. Capitalist production 'collects the population together in great centres', leading to continued urbanisation. This is a process that continues, of course, to this very day, with a majority of the world's population living in towns and cities. The consequences are two-fold: the process 'concentrates the historical motive power of society', but it 'disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil'. Finally, the industrialisation of agriculture under capitalism directly destroys the soil's fertility:

'...all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility...Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the worker.'

Marx concludes this incredible chapter with an observation that, tragically, is proven true today. The World Wildlife Fund declares that 'half of the topsoil on the planet has been lost in the last 150 years'. The Soil Association laments that 'one-third of the world’s arable soils are degraded—and 75% of that is severely degraded. This leaves less than one-sixth of the land on earth suitable for growing crops.'

Fortunately, ancient and modern permacultural techniques show us how to take care of our soil and reap great yields at the same time. Unfortunately, capital remains king...for now!

If you're still with me, thank you for reading! I know it's a long blog. It's a long chapter. But, it's an incredible chapter; it's incredible to see how a chapter written 150 years ago can be used to analyse cutting-edge technologies in our information age. It's amazing to read an analysis that combines the power and humanity to combine descriptions of and explanations for global revolutions in technology, economy, politics, and social relations with the compassion for ordinary people and our natural world. But, above all, it's amazing to read because, I believe, it helps us see The Machine.

In Marx's day, the Machine was more visible because the machines that comprised it were more visible; not just visible, but touchable, smellable. Today, whilst for many the machines are just as painfully materially present in their lives (think, for example, the Foxconn plants where workers assemble Apple products), for those of us in the post-industrial consumer world, the Machine is invisible. Yes, we're on our smartphones and computers, but we are decentralised, plugging in to a network. But, the network is that of a factory that now spans the whole planet - a factory planet - and controls almost all areas of our lives. Ask yourself if you really set the pace, the rhythm of your own life? Is it not true that we feel out of control, continuously having to work harder, faster, longer? The consequence is stress, anxiety, depression, illness. The Machine is everywhere and nowhere, but it's no less real. Marx's analysis of the rise of machines here helps us see The Machine. But, when we remember that ours is a system of increasing powers of social combination, we remember that we have the power to crash The Machine and claim our freedom by working for ourselves and each other to produce not surplus-value, but social wealth - abundance and freedom for all! This is our historical destiny; a destiny we must forge right now!

Thanks for reading! Joel