Humanity’s First Exam1850–1940 ⇄ now

1867 · English translation

Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry

Karl Marx

3 selected passages and classifications

Passage 1

At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity. The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery.

Marx argues that factory machinery reverses the relation between worker and instrument: the instruments employ and dominate the worker. Capitalist ownership also separates intellectual powers from manual labour, producing exhaustion, loss of interest, deskilling, and diminished bodily and intellectual freedom.

Local word range 17396–17820 · source wording still to be checked

Passage 2

Here as everywhere else, we must distinguish between the increased productiveness due to the development of the social process of production, and that due to the capitalist exploitation of that process. In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.

Marx distinguishes the machine’s technical role from the capitalist social relation that turns it into worker dependence.

Capital, vol. I, ch. 15, §4, “The Factory”

Passage 3

It is an undoubted fact that machinery, as such, is not responsible for “setting free” the workman from the means of subsistence. It cheapens and increases production in that branch which it seizes on, and at first makes no change in the mass of the means of subsistence produced in other branches.

Marx separates machinery’s technical effect from the social organization responsible for deprivation.

Capital, vol. I, ch. 15, §6

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