notes on capital
chapter 15: machinery and large-scale industry
sections 1-5

(492): quoting john stuart mill on the dubious utility of technological innovation for "any human being," marx seems to approve of a thoroughgoing skepticism. this, it has to be stressed, is in direct contrast to left, center, right interpretations of marxist developmentalism which ally a misguided appraisal of marx's technological determinism to an alleged 'linear' view of history. against these understandings, both this introduction and the rest of the chapter make clear marx's dialectical ambiguity with respect to the introduction of technology: at once a source of unprecedented revolutions in productivity, but also simultaneously the means for the brutalization of the handicrafts, the exploitative employment of women and children in their place, etc. aside from asserting the generally contradictory nature of "progress," then, the specific morphology of capitalist deployment of technological innovation is critical: the profit-seeking that underlies prodigious advances in technology renders them useless from the point of view of human development. this disjuncture between technological development and human development, one thus understands, is left to be implicitly resolved in socialist society, where collective ownership of the means of technological discovery would orient advances in science towards the liberation of humanity. democratic control, in other words, is critical.

(499): the centrality of the story of the steam-engine to the modern geography of rural-urban relations is critical, both in the historical sense that it explains specifically a momentous revolution in human life, and in the theoretical sense that it affirms a historical materialism that identifies the importance of shifting structures of production in shaping the contours of social life. though, in a basic sense, cities remain parasitic on the agricultural economy (in the sense that their metabolic reproduction is rooted in rural areas), the urban economy, now, for the first time, stands to become a concentrated area of real productive activity. in this sense, cities in industrial england in the 19th century are clearly entirely different from urban formations in earlier centuries.

(508): marx here makes a critical point about the changing basis for the "organization of the social labor process." in pre-machine manufacture, he argues, the organization of labor "is purely subjective." as i understand it, this means that it depends not on the nature of the implements being used, but takes the form of progressive innovations, on the part of the merchants/small capitalists in charge, in the form of organizing the process of production. with the advent of the machine era, however (and particularly, it would seem, with the point at which machines begin making machines (504)), the progressively more alienating organization of the labor process becomes an objective necessity, grounded in the technical requirements of production by machinery. in other words, as man, in general, cedes his sovereignty to machines, in general, specific man, in the form of the labor, loses all possibilities of control over his specific workplace. the machine takes the reigns. (see also page 547.) this attempt to understand the morphology of the factory in terms of prevailing technologies is crucial: perhaps raymond williams et. al. would insist that this not become reified as one of many "moments" (such as the ill-considered argument that 'mental' and 'material' labor become irrevocably split at one point in history)--in other words, that this dynamic, the relation of the division of labor to extant technology, needs to be constantly assessed and re-assessed. yet it does seem indisputable, this notion that the machine era inaugurates something totally unprecedented, in requiring a particular form of bondage in the factory. (i suppose, though, that it's only the williams argument that would make room for emancipation, even if it's hard to anticipate.)

(524-525): much of das kapital is littered with examples of the fallacies of liberal narratives of the industrial revolution (i.e., the ways in which they (a) less sophisticatedly, discount the suffering of the subalterns in favor of extolling the gains; (b) more sophisticatedly, recognize the suffering of the subalterns, but subjugate it, as benjamin insisted, in a narrative of future progress. in other words, the past becomes irrelevant because we live in the future). against all this, marx recovers the timelessness of domination. it is with the persistence of this morphology in mind that one ought to engage capitalist anthropology, the struggles of the working-day, etc. not as moments when capitalism had yet to be civilized, but as examples of the emphatically present requirements of capital accumulation. moments that form as inextricable a part of our present experience as anything that happens today, precisely because they explain, both historically and theoretically, today.

(530): remember--the distinction between the individual pursuit of relative surplus-value, and the way in which it is acquired by capitalism in toto. namely, the distinction between the honeymoon period (which is all the neo-classicals see), which results from the successful implementation of a new technology by one capitalist, and the general cheapening of consumer goods, which benefits all capitalists by cheapening the price of labor-power (and thereby reducing the the amount of necessary labor in a day).

(531): the classic immanent contradiction, which leads to the formulation of the declining organic composition of capital.

(542): 1780s, beginnings of unrest; 1833, 12 hr day; 1847, 10 hr day. needless to say, the presentation of these pieces of legislation as amenable to bourgeois aspirations is a revision, in a sense, of the polanyi picture of a capitalism being tamed (if i remember that right). in other words, these are not quite the fetters on bourgeois rapacity that orthodox explanations of them might attest. while of course it's true that these were welcome gains for workers, it is important not to forget that they were co-opted, in one way another, to fit the enormously plastic tactics of capitalism. to give marx's example, the shift to the 10-hr day, he argues, led to an "intensification" of the working day, which concentrated more labor-time in it than had previously been expended in 12 hours.

(548): a specific use of sisyphus to explain the laborer in machine-production. marx and engels as apologists for liberal modernity? please!

(548): here a reflection on the separation of intellectual labor from manual labor (i.e., the former becomes the duty of capital, and latter the bitter fate of labor). in other words, we see, with machines, the consolidation of alienation. yet, as williams would suggest, perhaps we need to remember that more is going on here? yet is that truly the case? i find it hard to see ways in which mental labor is not being detached from the lives of laborers everywhere. we, of course, need ranciere's reminders here, always. but this should not obscure, i don't think, the emphatically true suggestions that alienation intensifies with the ascent of the machine over handicraft/manufacture.

(549): a reminder, again, of foucault's debt to marx. aside from the talk about disciplining an entire population to accept the dictates and routines of industrial production and urban life (teaching workers to consume, for example), here marx writes of the implementation of specific intra-factory codes. the formation of an autocratically-administered army at the site of production, in the name of discipline and diligence (and, of course, as marx makes explicit at the top of 550, in defiance of the representative 'democratic' tradition laid claim to at the time).

(557-559): marx formulates briefly an argument about how the implementation of machinery creates (and re-creates, as time progresses), an reserve army of labor. specifically, he writes of english hand-loom weavers, and--critically to the caricatures of marx as colonial apologist--of the weavers in india who were devastated by english innovation. these examples, and this general history, is his explanation for luddite rejoinders to machinery. yet, of course, it's not that these open up revolutionary possibilities; in that sense, they are, however regrettably, only birth-pangs of the new order.