![Francis Picabia's Fille née sans mère [Girl Born without a Mother] (about 1916–1917, National Galleries of Scotland) was made by painting over an illustration of a steam engine torn from a railway-engineering journal, reworking the machine into a figure — a mechanism imagined as a self-generated, motherless offspring, half-mocked by the gilded ground of a Renaissance Madonna. A touchstone of New York Dada, it turns the machine into an ironic emblem of human life, which makes it a fitting cover for the part of Capital in which the tool passes out of the human hand and the worker, in Marx's phrase, becomes the appendage of an automaton that seems to move and breed on its own.](/images/posts/reading-capital/cover_picabia.jpg)
Part Three ended at a wall. Surplus-value can be enlarged by lengthening the working day, but the day has only twenty-four hours, the body claims many of them, and the organized working class, armed at last with the Factory Acts, fixes a ceiling capital cannot simply break through. So capital turns down its other road, and Part Four follows it. If the day cannot be made longer, the worker can be made more productive — so productive that he reproduces the value of his wage in four hours rather than six, leaving more of an unchanged day as unpaid surplus. This is relative surplus-value, and the chase after it drives the entire technical transformation of production. Marx tells that transformation as a history in three acts: cooperation, the division of labour, and machinery. Each raises output prodigiously, and each does something to the worker — narrowing him, fragmenting him, and at last binding him to a mechanism that runs on its own. It is here that Capital becomes, in stretches, a history of technology and a meditation on what machines do to the people who tend them.
The Second Road
Marx begins, in Chapter Twelve, by defining the new method precisely, and the definition turns on a distinction the individual capitalist never actually sees. No single employer installs a faster loom in order to lower the value of labour-power across society; he could not think on that scale if he tried. He installs it to undersell his rivals. By producing cloth with less labour than the social average still requires, he can sell at the going price while spending less, and pocket the difference — a temporary super-profit Marx calls extra surplus-value. That windfall is the carrot.
But it never lasts. As competitors copy the improvement, the labour now socially necessary to make the cloth falls, the market price sinks toward the new lower value, and the super-profit melts away — until some further innovation starts the chase again. This is what Marx means by the coercive law of competition: no capitalist can stand still, because standing still means being undersold, so each is whipped forward into a permanent revolution of technique that none of them chose. And the social by-product of all this private racing is the one that matters for the theory. When the cheapened goods are things workers consume — bread, cloth, housing — the value of labour-power itself falls, the necessary part of the working day shrinks, and the surplus part grows, for the whole capitalist class at once. Relative surplus-value is thus extracted behind everyone’s back, the unintended aggregate result of a thousand firms each grasping at a super-profit that always slips away. The restlessness diagnosed back in the chapter on capital’s general formula now has its engine.
Many Hands
The simplest way to raise productivity needs no new machine at all: put many workers together in one place. Chapter Thirteen examines this bare fact of cooperation, and finds more in it than meets the eye. A gang labouring together is not merely a sum of individuals. Their combination creates a new productive force — they can raise a beam no one of them could lift, bring in a harvest before the weather turns, spur one another by emulation, keep the work flowing without the gaps and waste of solitary labour. The collective worker can do what the same number of isolated workers never could.
Two consequences follow, and Marx draws both with care. First, this extra power is a free gift. The productivity of combination costs the capitalist nothing beyond the wages he already pays — it is a natural force of social labour, like steam or water — yet because the workers are combined under his command and with his capital, the power appears as a power of capital itself, one more turn of the fetishism that makes the social productivity of labour look like a property of the money that hires it. Second, cooperation on any scale requires coordination, a directing will to harmonize the many into one effort. That much is true of an orchestra or an army in any age. But under capital the directing function takes a particular shape: it becomes command, the authority of the owner over the labour he has bought, enforced by overseers and discipline, aimed not merely at coordination but at squeezing the maximum from the combined workers. Marx is careful to separate the two — the conductor’s baton is a real necessity; the foreman’s whip is a social form laid over it — and the distinction will matter when the critics arrive.
The Fragment of a Man
Chapter Fourteen turns to the era Marx calls Manufacture — the period, roughly from the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, when production was reorganized not by machines but by the minute division of labour among hand-workers. Adam Smith’s famous pin factory is the emblem: instead of one artisan making a whole pin, one man draws the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts, a fourth points, a fifth grinds the head, and output multiplies many times over. The detail labourer, repeating a single operation all day, grows uncannily fast and dexterous at it, and the combined workshop becomes formidably productive.
But Marx insists on the cost, and here his prose sharpens. The skill the collective worker gains, the individual worker loses. Narrowed to one endlessly repeated motion, stripped of the all-round competence of the craftsman, he is made, in Marx’s phrase, into the automatic motor of a fractional operation. Manufacture, he writes, converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, forcing one detail dexterity to flower by suppressing a whole world of other capacities; it mutilates the worker into the fragment of a man. The division of labour that enriches the workshop impoverishes the person inside it.
Marx then plants a barb that economists have squirmed on ever since. There are, he notes, two kinds of division of labour. Inside the workshop it is planned, deliberate, despotic — the capitalist assigns each worker his fraction by design. Across society as a whole it is anarchic — no one plans how many bakers or weavers a nation needs; the market sorts it out after the fact, through the blind pressure of competition. And the same bourgeois economist who marvels at the order of the planned workshop recoils in horror at the thought of planning the division of labour in society, denouncing it as an assault on liberty. The contradiction is left to glint. One last point closes the chapter and opens the next: manufacture, for all its productivity, still rests on human skill and the human hand. The detail worker remains a worker, with a craft, a body, and therefore a foothold of resistance. To break that foothold, capital needs something that does not depend on the hand at all.
The Machine Makes Use of Him
Chapter Fifteen — the longest in the book — is where that something arrives, and where the whole argument of Part Four reaches its climax. The revolution in production now begins not with the worker but with the instrument. In manufacture the workman still wielded the tool; the machine takes the tool out of his hand and fits it into a mechanism. John Stuart Mill had wondered aloud whether all the mechanical inventions ever made had lightened the day’s toil of a single human being; Marx quotes him and answers that lightening toil was never the point — machinery, like every rise in productivity, is a means of producing surplus-value, and under capital it is bent to that end.
He anatomizes the machine into three parts — a motor, a transmission, and the working machine that actually grips the material — and shows how, once the tool is mechanized, it is freed from the limits of the human body: a hand can guide one spindle, a machine thousands. The factory becomes a vast connected system, an automaton, in Marx’s image a mechanical monster whose demon power, veiled at first in the slow motion of its giant limbs, breaks out into the furious whirl of its countless organs. And at the heart of the chapter is the inversion that crowns the entire part:
In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him.
The relation of human to instrument is turned upside down. Where the craftsman set the tool in motion, the machine now sets the pace, and the worker must follow — reduced to a mere living appendage of a lifeless mechanism, feeding it, watching it, correcting it, governed by its rhythm. The dead labour stored in the machine commands the living labour that serves it. This is the literal, mechanical realization of everything Marx has been arguing about capital’s inversion of people and things.
From that core Marx draws out the consequences, and they are bleak. Because the machine dispenses with muscular strength, it lets capital reach past the adult man to his wife and children; women and children are drawn onto the labour market in their multitudes. This does not lift the family — it depreciates it. The value of a man’s labour-power had been reckoned to cover his household; now that the whole family works, that value is spread across four people, four wages barely matching the one before, four lives now owing surplus labour to capital instead of one. The worker, Marx says with cold precision, has become a slave-dealer, selling his wife and child. Machinery becomes, too, capital’s most effective weapon against the worker’s resistance: it breaks strikes, since the struck operation can be mechanized, and it throws workers out of employment, building up a disposable reserve of the unemployed whose mere existence disciplines the wages of those still inside. The early machine-breakers, the Luddites, smashed the machines themselves; it took time, Marx notes, for workers to learn to aim not at the instrument but at the social use to which capital put it.
Against the economists’ soothing “theory of compensation” — the claim that machinery, though it displaces workers here, automatically re-absorbs them there — Marx enters a sharp dissent. Re-absorption is neither automatic nor painless; the displaced are not gently rerouted but cast out, and the suffering of the transition is real and borne entirely by labour. Yet the chapter does not end in pure darkness. Modern industry, Marx argues, is by its nature revolutionary: it never rests, constantly overturning its own methods, constantly shifting workers from trade to trade, and in doing so it batters down the narrow specialization of the old division of labour and calls, despite itself, for a worker of all-round capacity — pointing, beyond capitalism, toward the fully developed individual that a rationally organized society might cultivate. The machine that cripples the worker under capital could, under another arrangement, free him. That double face — liberation and domination wearing the same iron body — is the chapter’s deepest note, and it is exactly the irony Picabia would later paint: the machine as a self-moving, motherless creature, an emblem at once of human possibility and of human subordination.
The Objections
The sharpest objection to Part Four is that its gloom about machinery has been refuted by two centuries of history. Marx suggests that mechanization throws up a growing reserve army of the displaced; the record shows the opposite — relentless mechanization accompanied by enormous growth in total employment and a transformation of living standards no previous age came near. The economists’ compensation theory that Marx dismissed looks, in the long run, vindicated: machinery destroys particular jobs but, by cheapening goods and expanding output and demand, creates more jobs than it kills, in trades no one could have foreseen. The fear that there is only so much work to go round — that machines must mean mass idleness — is the hardy perennial economists call the lump-of-labour fallacy, and Part Four can seem to commit it.
A second objection targets the portrait of the worker as a degraded appendage. Modern work, critics say, has not been uniformly deskilled; mechanization abolished much of the brutal muscle-labour of the past and generated whole new strata of skilled, educated, technical, and professional work. The lament for the maimed “fragment of a man” can read as nostalgia for a craft idyll that never was — pre-industrial labour, in field and workshop, was often more crippling and far shorter-lived than anything in a modern factory.
A third objection defends the directing function Marx codes as despotism. Coordinating a complex production process is genuine, value-adding work, not parasitic command. The manager who organizes the flow, the entrepreneur who bears the risk and decides what to make, perform a real economic service; the modern theory of the firm explains that firms exist precisely because some coordination is done better by conscious direction than by the market. To call all of this domination is to mistake the necessary work of running an organization for mere oppression.
The Replies
On technological unemployment, the defenders draw a careful line. Marx did not, in fact, deny that displaced labour can be re-absorbed; he denied that the re-absorption is automatic, costless, or owed to the displaced. His reserve army is not a prophecy that work will run out but a claim about a standing pool of the unemployed and precarious whose function is to discipline the wages of those in work — and that pool has not vanished. The long-run growth of employment is real, and the defenders grant it; but it came through wrenching dislocation borne by particular people in particular decades, and through the rise of new sectors, not through any smooth mechanism of compensation. And the question is, conspicuously, open again: the spread of automation and artificial intelligence has revived, in boardrooms and finance ministries, the precise worry Part Four raised, and whether this time the displaced will be re-absorbed is no longer obviously answerable in the optimists’ favour.
On deskilling, the reply concedes the counter-tendency and insists on the tendency. New skills are created; that is not in dispute. But a powerful line of twentieth-century work, above all Harry Braverman’s study of the labour process, argued that capital exhibits a recurring drive to separate the conception of work from its execution — to concentrate knowledge in management and reduce the worker to a monitored executor — and that scientific management, the assembly line, and now algorithmic scheduling are its successive instruments. The decisive issue, on this reading, is not the average skill level but who controls the labour process, and there Marx’s diagnosis has aged well. As for nostalgia, the charge misfires: Marx is emphatic that the detail worker of manufacture was himself crippled, and he holds no brief for the guild. His view is dialectical, not sentimental — modern industry both degrades the worker and forges the conditions for his all-round development, so the rise of skilled work is part of the contradiction he described, not a refutation of it.
On the despotism of the workshop, the Marxist concedes the premise and contests the conclusion. Of course coordination is productive and necessary; Marx says so, comparing the director of cooperative labour to the conductor of an orchestra, a role that would exist in any society that produced in common. His claim is about the form that direction takes under capital: command over labour exercised by the owner of capital, backed by the power to dismiss, and bent toward the extraction of surplus rather than the mere harmonizing of effort. The modern theory of the firm explains handsomely why some coordination is pulled inside a hierarchy rather than left to the market — but it does not explain why that hierarchy must be owned and commanded by the suppliers of capital rather than by the associated workers themselves, a possibility the long tradition of cooperative and democratic firms keeps stubbornly alive. The argument, in the end, is not about whether organizations need direction but about who holds the authority and to what end.
Toward the Combined Method
With Part Four complete, Marx has both of capital’s methods of enlarging surplus in hand. Absolute surplus-value lengthens the working day; relative surplus-value shortens the necessary part of it by revolutionizing production — through the massing of workers, the splitting of their tasks, and finally the machine that takes the tool from the hand and binds the worker to its rhythm. The mechanism of exploitation is now fully assembled, in both its crude and its sophisticated forms.
What follows knits the two together. Part Five treats absolute and relative surplus-value as a single combined process and refines the formulae for measuring the rate at which labour is exploited; Part Six turns to wages, the form in which the value of labour-power finally presents itself to worker and employer alike, the form that makes all labour look paid and hides the unpaid surplus from view. And beyond them waits the great culmination, the part on accumulation, where Marx asks what happens when surplus-value is thrown back into production to breed more capital, and arrives at his bleakest and most contested thesis about wealth gathering at one pole and want at the other. Whether one reads Part Four as a prophetic account of what machines do to human beings or as a brilliant, one-sided indictment that undervalues the deliverance mechanization also brought, it is among the most vivid stretches Marx ever wrote — and, in an age learning once more to fear its own machines, perhaps the most current. The motherless automaton Picabia would paint, self-moving and serenely indifferent to the lives appended to it, is the figure at its centre.