[The Factory as Automaton]

Karl Marx

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,
Volume One

Translated by Ben Fowkes,
Introduced by Ernest Mandel

Chapter 15: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry

4. THE FACTORY

[. . . . ]

In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker 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 workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages. ‘The wearisome routine of endless drudgery in which the same mechanical process is ever repeated, is like the torture of Sisyphus; the burden of toil, like the rock, is ever falling back upon the worn-out drudge.’[5]

Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity.[6] 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. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour process but also capital’s process of valorization, has this in common, but 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. The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labour embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with those three forces, constitutes the power of the ‘master’. This ‘master’, therefore, in whose mind the machinery and his monopoly of it are inseparably united, contemptuously tells his ‘hands’, whenever he comes into conflict with them: ‘The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the fact that theirs is really a low species of skilled labour; and that there is none which is more easily acquired, or of its quality more amply remunerated, or which by a short training of the least expert can be more quickly, as well as abundantly, acquired…The master’s machinery really plays a far more important part in the business of production than the labour and the skill of the operative, which six months’ education can teach, and a common labourer can learn.’[7] The technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour, and the peculiar composition of the working group, consisting as it does of individuals of both sexes and all ages, gives rise to a barrack-like discipline, which is elaborated into a complete system in the factory, and brings the previously mentioned labour of superintendence to its fullest development, thereby dividing the workers into manual labourers and overseers, into the private soldiers and the N.C.O.s of an industrial army. ‘The main difficulty’ (in the automatic factory) ‘lay…above all in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton. [. . . .]

SOURCE: Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One; translated by Ben Fowkes, introduced by Ernest Mandel (London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1990 [1976]), Chapter 15: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry, section 4, The Factory, extract, p. 548-549 (footnotes omitted).

For alternative translation & other quotes, see Karl Marx on automatons, machinery, capital & labor.

Karl Marx on automatons, machinery, capital & labor

Karl Marx on the Hegelian automaton: mechanism = teleology

Marx to Engels, 28 January 1863
(Letter on the origin of mechanized industry)

Ralph Dumain: Antaŭparolo al
Karlo Markso: La tiel nomata Fragmento pri maŝinoj
(elgermanigita de Vilhelmo Lutermano)
[in Esperanto]

Maŝinaro kaj granda industrio (Ĉerpaĵoj)
de Karlo Markso, trad. V. Lutermano
[in Esperanto]

Marx on Capital, Machinery, Universality, Descartes:
From Worship to Instrumentalization of Nature

Marx on technology & dehumanization (1856)

Marx on political economy vs reversion to Romanticism

Marx on Science, Religion, Historical Method

Intellectual and Manual Labor: Contents
by Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Karl Marx on Philosophy & Practicality