Machinery

Reading Capital: The Production of Relative Surplus-Value

The ninth entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, covering the whole of Part Four — Chapters Twelve through Fifteen. Having found the lengthening of the working day blocked by the body and the Factory Acts, capital turns to its other road: raising productivity so that the worker covers his own wage in less of the day, leaving more of it as surplus. Marx tells the story as a history in three acts — cooperation, the division of labour, and machinery — each lifting output and each transforming the worker, from craftsman to detail-fragment to appendage of the machine. The objections run from technological unemployment to deskilling to the nature of the firm.