Rather than generating new value, the machine already has value which it transfers to the product: it ‘yield[s] up its own value to the product it serves to beget’ (Marx 1990: 509). The social function of fixed capital is to produce relative surplus-value, which it does by reducing necessary labour-time and, hence, increasing surplus labour-time, i.e. by ‘shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part … he gives to the capitalist for nothing’ (Marx 1990: 492). Increasing the productivity of labour means that the worker’s output is increased: more commodities are produced in less time, and consequently these commodities are cheapened because less value is objectified in each individual commodity.
Marx’s detailed explanation of machinery occurs in Chapter 15 of Capital, Volume 1, which concerns ‘Machinery and Large-Scale Industry’ (1990: 492–639). Here, Marx was concerned ‘only with broad and general characteristics’ of machinery (1990: 492). The genealogy of machinery is found in tools; the instruments of handicraft labour are turned into machinery, automation technology being ‘fully developed machinery’, which has three different parts: (1) the motor mechanism that is the driving force or motive power; (2) the transmitting mechanism that regulates, changes and distributes motion; and (3) the tool or working machine that uses this motion to modify the object of labour (1990: 494). A key component of any machine is its ‘emancipation from the restraints of human strength’ which occurs when it obtains a regular and controllable motive power; Watt’s double-acting steam engine being the first major ‘self-acting prime mover’ (1990: 502). Whereas with mere tools the process of production is adapted to the worker, the system of machinery is a ‘vast automaton’ which confronts the worker as a ‘pre-existing material condition of production’ (1990: 508).
The section on ‘The Struggle Between Worker and Machine’ in Chapter 15 emphasizes how capital’s technological dynamic is inseparable from class conflict. Marx examined the paradox by which, under capital, labour-reducing machinery creates a hell for labourers: the mechanical lightening of demands for physical strength catalyses the large-scale induction of women and children into factories; the capacity of machines to run indefinitely, and the need to pay for their purchase, leads to a prolongation of the working day; the ability to accelerate and multiply machine operations results in the intensification of work. Marx also addressed technological unemployment, describing how ‘[t]he instrument of labor strikes down the laborer’ in a process where machinery ‘act[s] as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous, and capital proclaims this fact loudly and deliberately, as well as making use of it’ (1990: 562). Indeed, Marx suggested ‘it would be possible to write a whole history of the innovations made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt’ (1990: 563).
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inhuman power