Das Kapital

For the capitalist means of production, a large number of workers working cooperatively is required. This type of production creates a “fixed minimum of efficiency” (441), benefiting the capitalist. Such productivity does not just come from the organization of multiple workers, as the social nature of cooperative labor “heightens the efficiency of each individual worker” (443). Groups of workers also have their own managers and foremen. This is because capital production involves the capitalists reaching a point where they no longer have to participate in the actual labor themselves.

Marx compares the power a capitalist has over an organized mass of workers with the “power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings, of Etruscan theocrats, etc.” (452). However, unlike labor in ancient and medieval times, cooperation is a “historical form peculiar to, and specifically distinguishing, the capitalist process of production” (453).

From a historical standpoint, Marx traces the origin of capitalist cooperation to the rise of manufacturing in the middle of the 16th century. Manufacturing started in two ways. One way was when different artisans worked on different parts of a complex product like a carriage. With manufacturing, the different specialists were brought together in one workshop. The second way was when artisans who had the same skill were brought together in a workshop to produce a greater quantity of a specific product.

In a workshop, the work of a skilled artisan is broken down. Each individual worker in a manufacturing workshop does part of what was once entirely done by one specialist. The workers’ tools also come to serve one particular purpose. In Marx’s words, “a worker who performs the same simple operation for the whole of his life converts his body into the automatic, one-sided implement of that operation” (458).

Marx describes two types of manufacturing. The first is heterogenous and involves parts that are designed separately and then assembled. Marx gives the example of a locomotive (461-62). The second type is organic: This is when a product is made by workers through a series of steps, such as the manufacture of needles (463). Each worker in the collective uses specialized equipment for specific tasks. However, the importance and complexity of each workers’ tasks means some workers receive better wages than others. This creates a division between unskilled and skilled workers.

Traditionally, people in society have had different social roles because of the type of labor they performed. Workers have also historically had social roles based on the commodities they produce (such as tanners or shoemakers) and different types of industries they were employed in (such as agricultural versus urban work). Looking at ancient Indian history, Marx argues such divisions originated with the exchange of commodities (478). These divisions have also been replicated in the modern capitalist factory.

Marx asserts that capitalist production gives capitalists total control over workers and also creates a hierarchy among workers. The “knowledge, judgment and will” that had once been exercised by farmers and artisans is now only utilized by the collective workers in a workshop (482). After the workshop developed in towns and cities, eventually it helped to develop industrial machines. These machines, in turn, destroyed “the role of the handicraftsman as the regulating principle of social production” (491).

In traditional production, “labour-power” is the “starting point” (492). With industrial production, the machines are instead this starting point. Certain machines, like the machine that produces envelopes in Marx’s day (500), can take the place of as many as four workers. The tools used in a machine can be broken down by the tasks they perform, which once belonged to individual human workers.

Eventually, the process became more complex, as machines became needed to manufacture parts for other machines. Machines also allowed for more vast and complex forms of labor, which also requires cooperative labor from human workers.

About machines and the value they give commodities, Marx writes, “It never adds more value than it loses, on an average, by depreciation” (509). As a result, the more labor goes into making and maintaining the machine, the more value it gives to the product. From a capitalist’s point of view, the cost of the machine and its maintenance must always be less than human labor costs. This means that workers with low wages are the most likely not to be replaced by machines, even if machines could fulfill their labor, as long as the machines and their maintenance would be more expensive than using cheap, unskilled workers: “Hence we nowhere find a more shameless squandering of human labour-power for despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery” (517).

Marx contends that since they are physically weaker and more easily exploited than adult male workers, adult female and child workers are more likely to operate machines. This ruins the children’s time for play and education and women’s ability to support and care for their families. Industrial labor also creates high death rates for the children of workers, who, in the absence of their parents, suffer from neglect and malnourishment. Marx also refers to the “intellectual degeneration artificially produced by transforming immature human beings into mere machines for the production of surplus-value” (523). While the Factory Acts require children under the age of 14 to be educated, the schools are overcrowded and poorly run by teachers who are illiterate.

Instead of reducing the working day, Marx argues that in England, machines have prolonged it. This is because forcing workers to work longer days offsets the cost of repairing or replacing machines. Surplus value does not come from machines replacing workers, but from workers using machines. Also, machines allow capitalists to employ more workers doing more specialized work. This gives the capitalists more surplus labor because it is easier to extract more surplus labor from many workers than from a few. Machines also allowed capitalists to employ child and female workers for the first time. As a result, “surplus-value does not arise from the labour-power that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power actually employed in working with the machinery” (530). Contrary to what writers of antiquity like Aristotle and Antipater envisioned, machines have led to harder work and greater exploitation of workers, not less. Marx calls this the “economic paradox” (532).

Marx notes that in England, the lengthening of work shifts has coincided with an increase in the harshness of factory work. Marx notes that capitalists have responded to laws limiting the length of the working day by instigating such harshness in order to increase relative surplus value. They did this by more strictly overseeing workers, speeding up the machines, and requiring workers to operate more of the machines. Marx cites evidence showing manufacturers profited from the “more intensive exploitation of labour-power” (540). Although commenters in England “quite rightly” praised the Factory Acts (542), they also noted that employers have required more intense labor from their workers. Marx predicts that further reductions in hours from 10-hour shifts will become “inevitable” (542). 

Machine labor makes workers easily replaceable and allows for the use of unskilled workers, notably women and children, who are only trained in the use of the machine, creating a “special class of worker for exclusive employment by machinery” (546). In this way, workers themselves become “a part of a specialized machine” (547). Unlike artisans who use tools, these workers are used by machines. While the work is technically easier with a machine, it becomes more repetitious: “Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content” (548). This also physically harms the worker since they have less reason to exercise their entire bodies.

The facts that factory workers include children and women, that they are easily replaceable, and that they are part of a collective make it easier for managers to exercise absolute power over them. Managers impose strict rules over workers and punish them by fining them or deducting from their wages, which of course creates a profit motive for employers to punish workers. Workers suffer from poor working conditions, including dust, loud noise, heat, and risks from the machines themselves.

Revolts by workers against machines started in the 17th century. The most famous of these was the revolt by the Luddites in England by the 18th century. However, Marx argues that, over time, workers stopped blaming machines and instead focused on “the form of society which utilizes those instruments” (555). Still, machines do drive people out of work, or, in Marx’s words, they are “rendered superfluous by machinery” (557). Further, the use of unskilled and child labor in factories drives down wages overall and allows capitalists to “tread underfoot the growing demands of the workers” (562).

Marx argues against an argument put forward by some economists in his time: While machines cause some workers to become unemployed, it also creates capital that is used to employ those workers in another capacity. Marx instead suggests that unemployed workers are forced into other industries that are not at all using the capital that had been freed up by the machines that made the workers unemployed in the first place. If these workers do find new employment, the new fields of labor they enter are “over-supplied and under-paid” (568). Also, there is still a number who are unable to find any work and are left to starve.

Marx chides economists for arguing that the factory system “increases, rather than diminishing, the number of wage-slaves” and “grinds down more workers than it originally threw onto the streets” (575). In addition, Marx suggests this process affects economies across the world. Industrial production causes more workers to migrate to colonies that become producers of raw materials (i.e., Australia provided England with wool). It also leads to periods of rapid production and market growth, followed by economic busts: “The uncertainty and instability to which machinery subjects the employment, and consequently the living conditions, of the workers becomes a normal state of affairs, owing to the periodic turns of the industrial cycle” (581-82). Marx gives the example of the English cotton industry, which from 1815 to 1863 experienced 20 years of prosperity followed by 28 years of economic stagnation (587).

Citing examples of English manufacturing industries like the ribbon-making and needle-making industries, Marx notes that industrial production goes through three progressive stages: handicraft, manufacturing, and then factory (589). Industrial labor starts out in one field but spreads out to other branches of industry, bringing with them the use of unskilled labor and unsafe working conditions.

Marx discusses specific examples from England, such as lace manufacturing, employing children even below the age of five and working from eight in the morning to eight in the night in overcrowded rooms (596). Marx describes how opposition to the Factory Acts claimed that regulations would create “impossibilities” but, Marx notes, “within sixteen months every ‘impossibility’ had vanished” (605).

Marx criticizes the Factory Acts for doing little to address health. He notes how manufacturers bitterly opposed anything requiring them to protect the arms and legs of workers. Capitalists also bitterly opposed giving each worker at least 500 cubic feet of space. Marx cites this as an example of how “the capitalist mode of production, by its very nature, excludes all rational improvement beyond a certain point” (612). Marx also praises the clauses for the education of child workers in the Factory Acts, noting that the provisions for learning and gymnastics is the “only method for producing fully developed human beings” (614).

While previous modes of production were conservative, Marx views the capitalist mode of production as “revolutionary.” This is because “it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process” (617). In other words, it is constantly responding to technological and scientific change and adjusting its treatment of workers accordingly. The factory system is constantly incorporating existing handicraft and manufacturing industries into itself.

This process requires government intervention to stop abuses. However, when legislation like the Factory Acts or the establishment of the Children’s Employment Commission is enacted, such measures are still met with “hesitation […] unwillingness […] and bad faith” (626). Marx gives the example of the Mines Inspection Act of 1860. It raised the minimum age of children who could work in mines to 12, provided for the education of child workers in mines like for child workers in factories, regulated the employment of women, and implemented coroner’s juries to investigate the deaths of miners (626-34). Marx heavily quotes from the actual parliamentary questioning periods to show how much resistance even these regulations inspired.

Large-scale industry has also affected agriculture, replacing peasants with wage workers. It harms the natural process by which the fertility of the soil is replenished and forces rural workers to work in different areas over a large distance, harming their ability to resist exploitation.