Rage Against the Machine: Marx on The Struggle Between Worker and Machine
‘Only since the introduction of machinery has the worker fought against the instrument of labour itself, capital’s material mode of existence’ — Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1.
We are often told that capitalist technology “creates” jobs. As a matter of fact, the creation of jobs (or their eradication) is a necessary evil for the capitalist. They are on the one hand ready to employ workers as they see in these workers the means of increasing the mass of surplus value their business accumulates. On the other hand, all workers cost a certain amount of money, and workers take a certain amount of time to produce a commodity, and the capitalist is eager to reduce both.
Technology (machinery) provides the capitalist with a means to do this. If a new machine can replace multiple workers and produce more than what they produced previously, the capitalist will invest in it. Doing so will create a temporary “competitive advantage” for that particular capitalist. (Competitive advantage is what Marxists describe as a capitalist’s striving to be lower than the average-socially-necessary-labour-time required to produce a commodity).
Technology also provides capital with a solution to its difficulties associated with hiring skilled labour. Acquiring skills costs time and effort. It therefore costs money. It costs the worker time and labour to become skilled in any area. Higher-skilled workers are less abundant than lower-skilled workers. Because of these factors, higher-skilled workers cost the capitalist more to hire. However, if a new technology can replace the work of skilled workers, or de-skill the work so that it is possible for more workers to do it without acquiring the previously necessary skill level, then the price of labour can be further lowered as demand for the skilled work is diminished. Marx:
The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the worker himself. The self-valorization of capital by means of the machine is related directly to the number of workers whose condition of existence have been destroyed by it. The whole system of capitalist production is based on the worker’s sale of his labour power as a commodity. The division of labour develops this labour-power in a one-sided way, by reducing it to the highly particularized skill of handling a special tool. When it becomes the job of the machine to handle this tool, the use value of the worker’s labour power vanishes, and with it its exchange value. The worker becomes unsaleable…
An abundance of workers from whom lower skills are required are therefore now available to the capitalist, which also lowers the cost of hiring them.
The section of the working class thus rendered superfluous by machinery, i.e. converted into a part of the population no longer directly necessary for the self-valorization of capital [the “unemployed”], either goes under in the unequal conquest between the old… production and the new machine production, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour market, and makes the price of labour-power fall below its value.
This “flooding” of higher skilled and more experienced, older workers into the labour market was visible post 2008 crash as they took up part-time and generally low-paid positions in areas such as retail.
Incidentally, it can also be said that having a certain number unemployed in society increases the bargaining power of the capitalist against the worker. If there is general fear of unemployment, the position of the worker in their relationship to the capitalist is weaker; essentially, they will sell their labour for less to keep their jobs or gain employment. Capitalist technology, the “machinery”, is used to enhance this fear in the working class
…machinery… is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital… the steam-engine was from the very first an antagonist of ‘human power’, an antagonist that enabled the capitalists to tread underfoot the growing demands of the workers, which threatened to drive the infant factory system into crisis.
A capitalist will reduce the workers employed if new technology can increase production, surplus value and competitive advantage. Marx quotes Nasmyth, ‘the inventor of the steam-hammer’.
‘What every workman has now to do, and what every boy can do, is not work himself but to superintend the beautiful labour of the machine. The whole class of workmen that depend exclusively on their skill is now done away with… Thanks to these new mechanical combinations, I have reduced the number of grown-up men from 1,500 to 750. The result was a considerable increase in my profits’.
We can see in Nasmyth’s quote an element of the confusion which often accompanies bourgeois commentary around machinery, that the ‘boy’ does ‘not work himself’, that superintending ‘the beautiful labour of the machine’ somehow does not involve work. The lost limbs of girls and boys who had to ‘superintend’ machines of the sort testify otherwise. Such children were only able to work 12-hour days, because the “advantages” of machine production eradicated the skills previously required to do such manufacturing, and so allowed children to enter the workforce en masse. The skilled adult craftsmen gave way to the machines and the children of the working-class.
There is an adage that ‘we work for the system, the system doesn’t work for us’. In this section of Capital, Marx has a take on concept from another angle. Whilst enslaving women and children, the machine “freed” the capitalist from the ‘intolerable bondage’ of skilled workers. In this regard, Marx refers to Ure,
‘At length capitalists sought deliverance from this intolerable bondage [i.e. their contracts with workers]… in the resources of science, and were speedily re-instated in their legitimate rule, that of the head of the inferior members… The combined malcontents [striking workers], who fancied themselves impregnably intrenched behind the old lines of division of labour, found their flanks turned and their defences rendered useless by the new mechanical tactics, and were obliged to surrender at discretion’.
Regarding inventions of the time, Ure said they confirm ‘that when capital enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility’.
A “Temporary Inconvenience”
Marx commented about the supposed “temporary inconvenience” of workers being replaced by machinery (nowadays, this is sometimes referred to as the Luddite Fallacy by capitalist apologists).
It is supposed to be a great consolation to the pauperized workers that, firstly, their sufferings are only temporary (‘a temporary inconvenience’) and, secondly, machinery only gradually seizes control of the whole of a given field of production, so that the extent and the intensity of its destructive effect is diminished. The first consolation cancels out the second. When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the workers who compete with it. Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and is felt by great masses of people… but in any case, since machinery is continually seizing on new fields of production, its ‘temporary’ effect is really permanent.
In England, the process of redundancy was gradual, producing chronic suffering as workers competed against machines for decades:
World history offers no spectacle more frightful than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers; this tragedy dragged on for decades, finally coming to an end in 1838. Many of the weavers died of starvation, many vegetated with their families for a long period…
In India, the process was acute, ‘temporary’:
In India… the Governor General reported as follows in 1834-5: ‘The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the planes of India’. Of course, in turning the weavers out of this ‘temporal’ world, the machinery caused them a ‘temporary inconvenience’. But in any case, since machinery is continually seizing on new fields of production, its ‘temporary’ effect is really permanent.
Some concluding thoughts:
If capitalism must pay a worker at least the cost of their ability to reproduce their labour day after day, what does it mean if capital is eager to replace this “cost” with machines? It shows the grotesque indifference of capital to human life after it has been exploited to the maximum for profit. Ironically, it is the humans who have developed a branch of capitalist industry into a thriving one who are thrown on the dustheap by new technologies invading that area, either by their own employer or by competitors.
Capital does not necessarily strive to create jobs but rather endeavors to keep employment to a minimum in order to gain a competitive advantage (i.e. they endeavor to lower their production time below the average-socially-necessary-labour-time through the use of technology). If a business employs 800 new staff, this is not the maximum “job creation” that the business can manage, but it is the optimum for profit. i.e. the 800 workers are the least capital can employ to achieve its profit goals.
A last point, which leads to a bigger issue: A worker is not hired for the good of her health, but to produce surplus value for her employer (generally at the expense of her health). Paradoxically, capital cannot eradicate jobs completely as labour is required to generate value (see the labour theory of value). Essentially, job “creation” is an necessary pre-condition for the pursuit of profit, but not necessarily a desirable one for the capitalist; as mentioned above, it is a necessary evil.
Originally posted at Eschewing Barbarism 01 July 2021: https://thousandwordworker.wordpress.com/2021/07/01/rage-against-the-machine-marx-on-the-struggle-between-worker-and-machine/
