F.W. Taylor, the pioneer of ‘scientific management', would readily have concurred. For optimal operation of his system he sought workers of smaller calibre and attainments', of the type of the ox' (quoted in Braverman, 1974: 118, 108). Adam Smith thought the modern division of labour made the worker as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become'; a destiny he saw – in this case I presume with unintended irony - as inevitable, for the labouring poor, that is, the great mass of the people', ‘in every improved and civilizing society’ (Wealth of Nations, quoted in Marx, 1867a: 362).
But rather than multiply isolated quotations (which would not however be difficult in this instance) I think the argument best advanced by looking in detail at how Marx comprehends productive forces in the context of one substantial piece of historical analysis. The example I shall give is his study of the emergence of specifically capitalist productive forces. It is drawn, therefore, from the very centre of his intellectual and political concerns - the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. This example will also allow us some insight into how, in one empirical instance – but again, an absolutely central one in his work - Marx saw technological development and social change intersecting in the genesis of a new mode of production, thus clarifying the claims of the 1859 Preface on this point. The texts on which I mainly draw are the first volume of Capital, and its draft so-called ‘sixth chapter' (1866). This latter is a long manuscript entitled Results of the immediate process of production' which was written some time between 1863 and 1866, and published only in 1933 (and first translated into English in 1976). 'Results . . .' clarifies some of Capital's arguments in important ways. Marx originally intended it to follow the chapter on Wakefield with which Capital I as we know it closes.
In these writings, Marx distinguishes what he calls manufacture and machine industry as successive historical stages (though stages no more separated from each other by hard and fast lines of demarcation, than are geological epochs' (1867a: 371)) in the development of a specifically capitalist production process. These stages rest upon different historical forms of the labour/capital relation, which Marx refers to as formal and real subordination, subjection or subsumption of labour to capital respectively. To these two forms of the capital/ labour relation, and stages in the development of a capitalist production process, correspond two different modes of exploitation of labour. These are absolute and relative surplus-value. Marx details these in parts 3 and 4 of Capital I. Absolute surplus-value is obtained by extending the working-day, relative surplus-value by diminishing, through increases in productivity, the portion of it devoted to reproducing the labourer's wage-costs.
Formal subordination of labour to capital - the social basis of capitalist manufacture - involves, for Marx, simply a change in social relations. Workers previously in possession of their means of production, whether as peasants or artisan craftsmen, become wagelabourers, dependent for their livelihood upon the sale of their labour-power to capitalist employers. Real subordination, by contrast, comes into being only when ‘a technologically and otherwise specific mode of production – capitalist production – . . . transforms the nature of the labour process and its actual conditions’ (1866: 1034-5). Labour is said to be really subjected to capital when the production process itself, and above all the instruments of labour, have become transformed in such a way that they can only be operated cooperatively, by labour-power socially combined' (ibid.: 1040), or what Capital terms ‘the collective labourer'. At this stage of capitalist development - unlike in manufacture, where the power of capital remains a merely social requisite of production – the sway of capital develops into a requisite for carrying on the labour process itself, into a real requisite of production' (1867a: 330). The difference Marx is pointing to is that between, say, hand-loom weavers working under the putting-out system, where the actual mode of work is no different from that they would have pursued had they remained independent craftsmen, and power-loom weavers working in large factories.
Real subordination occurs with the development of machine industry. Thereafter, it is not merely their dispossession, but the concrete forms of the actual labour-process itself - large-scale, coordinated, mechanized productive processes - that prevent the labourers from working individually for themselves. The very technology of production is socialized. In its capitalist form, however, modern industry is a· palpable, material embodiment of the social power of capital and the expropriation of labour. This, for Marx, in contrast to merely formal subordination, represents the development of a specifically capitalist mode of production' (1866: 1021), 'a specifically capitalist form of production . . . at the technological level too' (ibid.: 1024), capitalist production proper' (ibid.: 1027).
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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