Capital, Volume I

Answers

• Q13SUCCESSION

  Can machines undergo a process of evolution even when humans build and reproduce them?

  No. technology is made, not evolved. Calls for a critical history of technology on the model of Darwin's history of natural organs, but says with Vico that human history differs from natural history because we made it.

  Summary disputed by reviewer: Marx uses the Darwin analogy approvingly and cites Vico only to say such a history would be easier to write, so the passage does not deny that technology develops by a comparable process; the 'No' side is doubtful.

  A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical.

  OCR corrected

  Chapter XV, 'Machinery and Modern Industry', footnote in Section 1 · Footnote text confirmed via marxists.org and UT Austin study guide; Internet Archive Moore-Aveling copy listed. Chapter numbering is the English edition's.

• Q18LABOR

  Does operating machinery develop or diminish a worker's skill and judgment?

  This answer is hidden while the authors build this question’s position key.

• Q19LABOR

  Who should receive the benefits when machinery increases the amount a worker can produce?

  Under capitalism the capitalist takes it; this is the problem. Machinery is not meant to lighten toil; it cheapens goods so the worker's share of the day shrinks and the unpaid share taken by the capitalist grows.

  Machinery produces relative surplus-value ; not only by directly depreciating the value of labour-power, and by in directly cheapening the same through cheapening the com modities that enter into its reproduction, but also, when it is first introduced sporadically into an industry, by converting the labour employed by the owner of that machinery, into labour of a higher degree and greater efficacy, by raising the social value of the article produced above its individual value, and thus enabling the capitalist to replace the value of a day s labour-power by a smaller portion of the value of a day s pro duct. During this transition period, when the use of machinery is a sort of monopoly, the profits are therefore exceptional, and the capitalist endeavours to exploit thoroughly " the sunny time of this his first love," by prolonging the working day as much as possible. The magnitude of the profit whets his appetite for more profit.

  OCR corrected

  Chapter XV, Section 1: The Development of Machinery · Opened Internet Archive text of 1904 Moore/Aveling translation; confirmed opening of Chapter XV, Section 1.

• Q37EXTENSION

  Should tools used to perform bodily functions be understood as parts of the human body?

  No. the relation reverses, the body becomes part of the machine. In handicraft the worker uses a tool; in the factory the machine uses the worker, who becomes its living appendage.

  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 manu facture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the work man, who becomes its mere living appendage. " The miserable routine of endless drudgery and toil in which the same mechanical process is gone through over and over again, is like the labour of Sisyphus. The burden of labour, like the rock, keeps ever falling back on the worn-out labourer." 3 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. 8 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.

  Chapter XV, Machinery and Modern Industry · Marxists Internet Archive chapter 15 page; quotations confirmed via Autodidact Project quote collection.

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