Reading: Capital I, ch. 15, sections 1-4
In Marx’s time, large-scale machinery was the highest form of development of the means of production, relegating simple cooperation and manufacture to obsolescence. (We will bracket for now the question of how significant subsequent technological revolutions have been for the labor process.) It is characterized by a vast mechanical automaton that has a power source independent of the workers and that moves independently of whether the workers want it to. Therefore, the workers are made to fit into the machine’s movements as opposed to in manufacture, where the workers controlled their own tools.
Here is what I saw as his clearest description of this situation in this part of the chapter: “…it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. However, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the worker during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundation of machinery.” (548)
There are three items to unpack here. First, we have what I mentioned above, the inversion of control from the worker to the machine. Second, we have Marx’s persistent use of personification when describing capital: it confronts and dominates labor-power. I am still trying to wrap my head around how Marx’s persistent use of figurative language fits into his overall theory, but my sense is that his analysis resembles that of Freud, who used themes from literary theory to describe mental processes in a scientific way. I have not read a great deal of Freud’s work, but my limited knowledge is that he used literary theory because human minds tend to function in figurative terms.
For Marx, the factory is sort of like a dreamscape. Workers are thrown into brutal conditions of exploitation and confronted with massive mechanical beasts that appear all-powerful and dominant. Although he doesn’t state it here, it is not really the machine that dominates the worker—it is the capitalist. Like the Wizard of Oz, the capitalist is a slight man behind a curtain who controls a vast mechanical apparatus that spews fire and smoke. The worker is blinded by this illusion.
Third, there is the separation of the worker from the intellectual process of production. He is progressively deskilled by the rise of machinery to the point where he is interchangeable with any other worker. The point of this is that the capitalist is able to use the intellectual faculties to gain greater control over the production process and increase the degree of exploitation.
World of Lenidzky 