Crucially for my argument, Marx is adamant that the merely formal subordination of labour does not entail any immediate changes in the labour process, though it may (it also may not) lead to their adoption. Nor, equally importantly, does it in any way presuppose the prior development of a specifically capitalist technology, or indeed any technical advancements whatsoever on previous modes of production. Formal subordination of labour to capital, according to 'Results .. .’:
does not in itself imply a fundamental modification in the real nature of the labour process, the actual process of production. On the contrary, the fact is that capital subsumes the labour process as it finds it, that is to say, it takes over an existing labour process, developed by different and more archaic modes of production ... For example, handicraft, a mode of agriculture corresponding to a small, independent peasant economy. If changes occur in these traditional established labour processes after their takeover by capital, these are nothing but the gradual conseguences of that subsumption. The work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may become more continuous or orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist, but in themselves these changes do not affect the character of the actual labour process, the actual mode of working. (1866: 1021, final emphasis added)
There is no change as yet in the mode of production itself. Technologically speaking, the labour process goes on as before, with the proviso that it is now subordinated to capital. (ibid.: 1026)
In Capital, Marx extends these points. He distinguishes, within the manufacturing epoch, two successive regimes which precede the development of machine industry and capitalist production proper. These are 'simple co-operation' and 'detail division of labour'. In the first, workers are brought together, either physically under one roof or organizationally under the aegis of a single capitalist; in the second – as in Adam Smith's famous discussion of pin manufacture - existing crafts are broken down into detailed operations devolving on different individuals. In neither case, Marx makes clear, is the technological basis of the production process altered, though its social relations are already undeniably capitalist (1867a: ch. 24). Indeed eventually this ‘narrow technical basis' becomes a ‘fetter ... on the dominion of capital' (ibid.: 368).
Whereas, for Marx, the real subordination of labour to capital always supposes its formal subsumption – the wage relation being fundamental to all forms of capitalist enterprise1³ – the converse does not necessarily obtain' (1866: 1019). We may, in other words, find formal subordination in the absence of, or side by side with, the specifically capitalist mode of production based on real subordination. The latter arises out of the former only ‘if the historical circumstances are otherwise favourable, as they were for instance in the sixteenth century' (ibid.: 1022). There is no automaticity about the progression. But on one point the sixth chapter' is insistent:
absolute surplus-value always precedes relative. To these two forms of surplus-value there correspond two separate forms of the subsumption of labour under capital, or two distinct forms of capitalist production. And here too the one form always precedes the other. (ibid.: 1025)
Capital is equally emphatic. A greater number of labourers working together . .. under the mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting-point of capitalist production (1867a: 322).
Now, it is true that in this account capitalist production proper is only achieved with the real subordination of labour to capital. Only then does capitalism become a mode of production sui generis' (1866: 1035). It is true, also, that Marx at one point asserts that it is only at the latter stage that the corresponding relations of production between the various agents of production and above all between the capitalist and the wage-labourer, come into being for the first time' (ibid.: 1024). This is, on the face of it, somewhat mystifying - indeed contradictory - in the context of the overall analysis, for Marx is clear throughout that formal subordination is a capitalist relation, or 'form of capitalist production' (ibid.: 1025). The only sense I can make of this apparent inconsistency is to interpret Marx as saying that only with real subordination do capitalist relations achieve what he later calls their ‘adequate form' (ibid.: 1035) – only then, in the words of the Grundrisse, do they gain totality and extent' (1858a: 277; cf. 297), becoming obligatory and general, because materialized in the very forms of the labour process itself. This indeed does presuppose an industrial technology.
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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