Notes
Chapter 9
Machinery
Machines may be defined, classified, and studied in their evolution according to any criteria one wishes to select: their motive power, their complexity, their use of physical principles, etc. But one is forced at the outset to choose between two essentially different modes of thought. The first is the engineering approach, which views technology primarily in its internal connections and tends to define the machine in relation to itself, as a technical fact. The other is the social approach, which views technology in its connections with humanity and defines the machine in relation to human labor, and as a social artifact.
As an illustration of the first approach, we may take the work of Abbott Payson Usher. In A History of Mechanical Inventions, Usher began with the nineteenth-century classifiers, Robert Willis and Franz Reuleaux, whose definitions he quotes. First from Willis:
Every machine will be found to consist of a train of pieces connected together in various ways, so that if one be made to move, they all receive a motion, the relation of which to that of the first is governed by the nature of the connection.
And Reuleaux:
A machine is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinate motions.
Following this approach, Usher himself describes the evolution of machinery in the following way:
The parts of the machine are more and more elaborately connected so that the possibility of any but the desired motion is progressively eliminated. As the process of constraint becomes more complete, the machine becomes more perfect mechanically. . . . Such a transformation results in the complete and continuous control of motion. . . . The completeness of the constraint of motion becomes in Reuleaux's analysis the criterion of mechanical perfection. Loosely adjusted and ill-controlled machines are supplanted by closely adjusted machines that can be controlled minutely.
From a technical standpoint, the value of such a definition is apparent. The precision of the mechanism, and the degree of its automatic or self-acting character, are determined by the success of the designer in eliminating “any but the desired motion” and achieving “the complete and continuous control of motion."\* But what is missing from this definition, or present only by implication, is a view of machinery in relation to the labor process and to the worker. We may contrast the approach taken by Marx, who singles out from among a great many possible criteria this very aspect of machinery:
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
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