It is of course this “master," standing behind the machine, who dominates, pumps dry, the living labor power; it is not the productive strength of machinery that weakens the human race, but the manner in which it is employed in capitalist social relations. It has become fashionable, however, to attribute to machinery the powers over humanity which arise in fact from social relations. Society, in this view, is nothing but an extrapolation of science and technology, and the machine itself is the enemy. The machine, the mere product of human labor and ingenuity, designed and constructed by humans and alterable by them at will, is viewed as an independent participant in human social arrangements. It is given life, enters into “relations" with the workers, relations fixed by its own nature, is endowed with the power to shape the life of mankind, and is sometimes even invested with designs upon the human race.\* This is the reification of a social relation; it is, as we have already noted earlier in this chapter, nothing but fetishism, in Marx's sense of the term. "In order . . . to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities."49 This fetishism achieves its greatest force when it attaches to those products of men's hands which, in the form of machinery, become capital. Acting for the master in a way which he plans with inexhaustible care and precision, they seem in human eyes to act for themselves and out of their own inner necessities. These necessities are called “technical needs,"“machine characteristics,""the requirements of efficiency," but by and large they are the exigencies of capital and not of technique. For the machine, they are only the expression of that side of its possibilities which capital tends to develop most energetically: the technical ability to separate control from execution.
In reality, machinery embraces a host of possibilities, many of which are systematically thwarted, rather than developed, by capital. An automatic system of machinery opens up the possibility of the true control over a highly productive factory by a relatively small corps of workers, providing these workers attain the level of mastery over the machinery offered by engineering knowledge, and providing they then share out among themselves the routines of the operation, from the most technically advanced to the most routine. This tendency to socialize labor, and to make of it an engineering enterprise on a high level of technical accomplishment, is, considered abstractly, a far more striking characteristic of machinery in its fully developed state than any other. Yet this promise, which has been repeatedly held out with every technical advance since the Industrial Revolution, is frustrated by the capitalist effort to reconstitute and even deepen the division of labor in all of its worst aspects, despite the fact that this division of labor becomes more archaic with every passing day.\* This observation may easily be verified by the fact that workers in each industry today are far less capable of operating that industry than were the workers of a half-century ago, and even less than those of a hundred years ago. The “progress" of capitalism seems only to deepen the gulf between worker and machine and to subordinate the worker ever more decisively to the yoke of the machine.\*\*
158 Labor and Monopoly Capital
Machinery
159
\* It is characteristic of bourgeois ideologists that although many of them take a positive view of the effects of machinery and some others adopt an attitude of horror at its effects, both attribute the results, whether hopefully or pessimistically interpreted, to "the machine." Thus Jacques Ellul, today a leader of the pessimists, waits no longer than the fifth page of his book on this subject before making his standpoint perfectly clear: “It is useless to rail against capitalism. Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did." A few lines further he says: "The machine took its place in a social milieu that was not made for it, and for that reason created the inhuman society in which we live." But what was that "social milieu" if not capitalism? And was it just by chance that the machine “took its place" in this social milieu? Was it an accidental confluence or was it the whole course of its history which made capitalism create the machine and use it as it does? The arbitrariness of this starting point is of a piece with Ellul's artificial view throughout, which is constructed on every level to exonerate capitalism; perhaps this accounts for its being so fashionable in liberal circles. 48
\* As Georges Friedmann says, for once clearly and unambiguously: “The theory of automation gives hope of the total disappearance of unpleasant work, the relocating of workers driven from industry by technical progress in other skilled occupations, and the transformation of the man at work into a sort of demiurge or creator, making and minding machines. But these are technicians’ abstractions which the actual evolution of capitalist societies since the beginning of this century has cruelly contradicted."50
\*\* One of Marx's comments on this score has so often been subjected to a flat misreading in recent years thtitis necessary to comment on it. The passage: “. . . Modern Industry . . . imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this