Introduction to a Marxist History of

Technology

The Development of Capitalism as Precursor to the Production

of the Machine

This paper is not simply an attempt to evade taking up

the necessarily longer view that such a Marxist account

would require; instead this is meant to introduce such a

history. The purpose of this work in the larger sense is to

identify, explain, and ultimately predict or contribute to

an understanding of the trajectory of machinery and

technological development in a (increasingly) capitalist

world. It is a tentative made in order to understand the

way the form of technology becomes determined by the law of

value and eventually produced by it.

To be truthful, this paper doesn't stand as an

introduction to a specifically Marxist history of technology

so much as a capitalist history of technology, and Marxism

stands out as the most appropriate method to understand this

history in terms of historical materialism and as a critique

of the political economy of machinery. This analysis is

concerned with the form of value and the relational

framework of capital (or capital as relation/form).

The beginnings of capitalism, while in certain ways

prefigured in early Dutch mercantilism and the commercial

families of early Italian city-states, truly begins when the

economy becomes autonomous from the rest of social and

political life. This trajectory is synonymous with the

Enlightenment. The real development of capitalism, of

industrial capitalism, takes place uniquely in Britain.

This is not the case out of any sense of Eurocentrism, but

simply a matter of a particular dynamic of social relations

that lends itself, rather by chance, to the development of

capitalist relations of production in particular.

In her book Democracy Against Capitalism Ellen Meiksins

Wood makes a compelling case for what is pejoratively called

"political Marxism" but what might be better seen as a

theory of transition from feudalism to capitalism that's

become known in academic circles as the "Brenner thesis".

It is important here to follow her argument against other

academic Marxists involved in the transition debates (like

Perry Anderson, among others). The argument she makes clear

in her book on the transition The Origin of Capitalism

recapitulates the argument made by Robert Brenner himself in

his article "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic

Development in Pre-Industrial Europe". While I won't go

through the entire argument here it's important to

understand that capitalism was not simply a conscious choice

among feudal lords to develop it - this is a tautology:

capitalism develops because people decided to develop

capitalism.

We are dealing with more than mere primitive

accumulation. Even Marxists who uphold primitive

accumulation are split in regards to the exact nature of the

transition from one mode of production to another. However

here I side with Wood and Brenner: rather than play around

with tautologies and explaining the nature of the transition

by its endpoint, or rather than solve the problem by simply

explaining the transition by positing its endpoint as if

capitalism is the natural conclusion to a historical

process. Historical materialism then is interested in

demystifying the appearance of history as viewed from the

present as natural development.

Capitalism is more accurately seen as a chance

development, which according to its own specific and

particular circumstances comes out as the "winner" during a

historical period owing to its productivity. Britain

emerges as the local origin of capitalism owing not to some

eurocentrism but merely out of the matrix of relations that

were specific to it owing to, among other things, a

centralized state and a hierarchy between the conslidated

state (there are no struggles amongst nobility and land is

centralized), property-owners, and tenant farmers. The

separation between the economic and the political is, for

Wood, what "sets the agenda"(Wood 1995:12) for the

development of capitalism.

The immediate consequences of the emancipation of the

economic from direct political control means the regulation

of rents by the market instead of custom law. The

possibility for extra-economic forces to exert themselves

over social life is however also predicated on the existence

of a strong state which is able to secure private property.

Direct coercive force becomes a necessary stage in ensuring

the possibility of the operation of mere economic forces.

What allows, then, for the supposedly "natural" growth of

capitalism is instead an adequate force capable punishing,

among other things, poachers (who violate the Game Laws

which prohibit hunting, gathering, fishing, collecting wood

on what were heretofore but now privatized common lands) and

coin-clippers (who threaten the foundation of the monetary

system of value).

Crucial here is the difference and dynamic of taxes and

rent. Under the conditions of the emergence of capitalism

there are three classes: the aristocracy, the landowners,

and the tenant farmers, this last which can no longer

sustain itself from the land (due to the Enclosures) but

must instead seek work from the landowners. The landowners

obtain the farmers' surplus (beyond the requirements of the

reproduction of their labor) in the form of rent, and then

the aristocracy obtains income through direct pressure in

the form of tax. Given the abundance of tenant farmers

(again, divorced from any direct means of subsistence) rent

becomes regulated by competition.

The separation between the economic and the political

is important in order to understand the market as a distinct

zone in which landowners are able to "force" tenant farmers

to compete amongst each other for work. The divorce between

the tenant farmer, previously the peasant working the land,

brought under competition among other fellow farmers, is

encouraged by levies to increase the productivity of his

work and therefore the productivity of his land, in order

ensure a larger part for himself. This is expressed in John

Locke's reasoning that the land belongs to whoever mixes his

labor with the land in order that he may improve it.

This drive to improve the land provides an

understanding of the conditions that undergird the British

Agricultural Revolution. The 3-field system in which crops

are grown on two fields and one is left fallow is augmented

to a 4-field system in which the fallow field itself is made

to yield crops, primarily various legumes, which are able to

be consumed while enriching the soil by fixing nitrate. The

development of tools (which will go on to serve as the basis

for the machine) in order to increase the property of land

(plows, threshers, seed drills) plays a central role in the

development of capitalism. And further, increasing the

productivity of land produces for the first time the free

worker.

The secret of the factory is motive power. Science

becomes absorbed in the production process as thermodynamics

and gravity are harnessed for their ability to making things

move. One of the first factories utilized water-power,

something that would be untenable in a cottage industry or

putting-out system, but requires a certain level of

centralization. Due to cost and their localization (the

fact that in order to harness water-power, one has to be

near a flowing body of water), and due to their efficiency

over cottage work we see the centralization that is

characteristic of the factory system (at that time).

Factories often become located in cities and tend to draw

freed up labor, the efficiency and productivity gained by

the agricultural revolution able to feed this newly emerging

working class with its surplus (sold through the market).

However due to the inability for this free worker to

provide for himself directly from property he hasn't got he

is forced to submit to the emerging factory system which

provides work and a wage to sustain himself as well as

housing that the first factories builds for its workers (for

rent, of course). And within the mills in which the worker

toils we have the first example of motive power in the form

of water, which lends itself to the development of the first

machines.

Rise of the Machine

The machine alters its motive power, being able to

retain its distance from direct sources of such power in the

utilization of animals. The emerging capitalist uses the

factory to centralize labor, to bring handicraft into the

larger factory system where multiple workers can work

together. Initially it was because machines were able to

produce at a lower cost that drove workers from cottage

industry into the factories. As it had driven the worker

from house and home it necessarily had to provide

accommodation.

Part of what I am interested in tracking is the

development of the tendencies of machinery through history.

What will become clear quite later is the modulating size of

machinery and its tendency to miniaturization. But here I

am concerned with the form of machinery in the first place,

and the necessary role it occupies. It does not occupy a

vacuum, it is not produced "from itself", it is and needs to

be seen as the necessary outgrowth of a form of value which

capital comes to impose as exchange-value, with its

increasing autonomy, comes to dominate all of social life.

A particular understanding of machinery and its

relation to the form of value comes through Hans-Dietrich

Bahr. Capital dominates, and out of its domination comes

the machine, the "purpose-built basis of the specifically

capitalist mode of production" (Bahr, 97). Machinery spawns

through a specific dynamic - the dynamic of class struggle.

As the workers rebel against their rule, against low wages,

they use their necessity to produce the commodity to band

together and sabotage production, either directly or through

alternate forms of refusal. They fight for a shorter

working day and this becomes a pivotal moment in the

development of the machine.

The evolution of surplus into surplus-value is

necessary to understanding the dynamics in play in class

struggle in this particular period. In feudalism the farmer

worked his crops (or what he hunted for, etc.) and gave the

surplus beyond what was necessary for his immediate and

simple survival to the landowner. The dynamic remains the

same in capitalism but its appearance changes shape. Now

the surplus(-value) produced by the worker is never seen,

but his wage reflects the means solely for the reproduction

of his labor-power. Surplus-value is the gap between the

money laid out for capital in the form of material resources

and labor-power (capacity to labor), and the value of the

commodity realized in consumption (frequently but not always

expressed in price, but always in money).

The capitalist has two ways to augment surplus-value

which help illustrate the dynamics of the capitalist use of

machines. Before the introduction of machinery the

capitalist is able to accrue increased surplus-value by

augmenting absolute surplus-value, that is, in maximizing the

length of the working day. As it stands, however, the

capitalist is limited by the limits of the working day. As

the workers rebel and protest often violently for a

shortening of the working day the capitalist is force to

seek the augmentation of surplus-value and therefore profit

through other means: hence the machine.

The machine operates at multiple levels with multiple

consequences, but it's emergence is steeped in class

struggle, as the reaction of capital to the law regulating

the working day.

It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made

since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against

working class revolt (Capital, 563).

Through the machine the capitalist finds the means to

augment his share of surplus-value while often reducing the

share of his capital he has to set aside for wages.

Machinery increases the productivity of labor, therefore

cheapening commodities and therefore the commodities needed

for the reproduction of labor-power, lowering the value of

its reproduction. Let's lay out the working day borrowing

Marx's schema (Capital, 340):

a) A------B-C

b) A------B---C

c) A------B------C

The line that moves from A to B represents necessary

labor, the labor that produces the value of the worker's

wages. Line BC in all three cases is surplus labor, labor

beyond the value of the worker's wages and therefore the

labor that produces surplus-value. In all examples the

value of labor-power is constant, the productivity of labor

is constant. All that changes from (a) to © is the length

of the working day. In (b) the worker works 3 hours instead

of 1 and produes more surplus-value, but an equal amount of

necessary labor. Same case in © when the worker works 6

hours instead of 3 or 1. Machinery allows a flexibility of

the working day - it increases productivity and thereby

lowers the value of labor-power by shortening the line AB,

shortening necessary labor. Our series of working days thus

looks like this instead:

a) A--B-----C

b) A--B-------C

c) A--B----------C

As machinery develops it can reduce the value of labor-

power in cheapening the commodities of consumption as it

produces more of commodity x per hour. Instead of 5 workers

making 5 chairs per hour, now with the aid of machines 1 man

can make 5 chairs per hour, and therefore now 5 workers make

25 chairs per hour. The machine can in many (but not all)

aspects replace the worker, heralding a certainly

superfluidity of human labor, breaking the back of labor and

its ability to resist and refuse. Where there once was the

mass of workers now the machine confronts the worker with

his superfluidity in the production process, and therefore

the threat against his only means of sustaining himself,

much less his family, too.

More than breaking the worker's ability to intervene in

the production proces, to bring a halt to production, the

machine destroys the possibility of handicraft and skill,

increasing the rate of the expansion of the division of

labor (a division we see in its primary form in the division

between town and country). To bring back the example of

chairs, the carpenter cannot keep up with the power drill

and the automatic saw. One worker making one chair by

himself, all parts, driving all nails, fixing all supports,

versus the assembly line (granted a far later development) -

the outcome is obvious. John Henry is the worker's myth.

To take a contemporary example, rather than one worker per

commodity we have one factory which produces bristles,

another factory which produces handles, and a third where at

last the toothbrush is assembled. The production process

becomes reduced into components, preventing any sort of

"whole craft proficiency". There is no longer the chair-

maker, much less different types of chair-makers, there is

only the one whose job it is to assemble the chair no longer

from its natural constituent parts, but in a uniformity of

production such that the pieces from which the worker

"builds" the chair emerge ready-made from the factory itself

- "the production of commodities by means of commodities"

(Sraffa).

In the early stages of the development of capitalism,

it is the capitalist who lays hold of present production

methods. The capitalist brings the individual basket-

weavers into the factory, centralizes production. The

subsumption of these currently existing types of (cottage,

guild, handicraft) labor according to the dictates of

capital (i.e. surplus-value production, accumulation) is

"formal subsumption" (Capital, 645). Formal subsumption

occurs when capital or the capitalist makes the worker work

beyond what's necessary to sustain himself, it is capital's

grasping hold upon production in general.

Once capital lays hold of production, however, it

becomes the constant revolutionizing of production that is

real subsumption. Machinery is invented according to the

form of value and is therefore constrained to be a machinery

which produces primarily surplus-value. The development of

machinery follows the capitalist form of value. While

specific periodizations of the development of capitalism are

not the intention of this author, the real subsumption of

labor means the production of what is primarily relative

surplus-value through the productivity and perfection of the

efficiency of machines.

The machine breaks the class solidarity of the worker,

destroys their skills. Harry Braverman coins what he terms

the "Babbage principle", by which the production process is

broken down into its most elementary elements. Capitalism

devalues the value of labor-power through the division of

labor within the factory, breaking the workers former skill

and ability into miniscule operations which require no skill

at all. Here we need to understand Braverman's reading of

F.W. Taylor:

1) Reduction of knowledge to "rules, laws, and

formulae" (77)

2) The separation of execution, the application of

labor, and the knowledge or "brain work" which comprehends

the holistic process (e.g. Planning) (78)

3) The establishment of a "monopoly over knowledge to

control each step of the labor process and its mode of

execution" (82)

The breaking up of the labor process into constituent

parts, the product of the division of labor is the

diminished value of labor-power and therefore augments the

surplus-value generated by the production process. In

minimizing the worker's contribution he minimizes his

expenditures. Rather than laying out enough variable

capital to pay for a "Jack of all Trades", the capitalist

seeks out rather the "Master of None". Capital, by

employing machines, produces no longer simply the free

worker, but the mass or collective worker, the worker that

cannot comprehend the production process in its immediate

totality. A worker that no longer produces a totality but

merely a component part. A "deknowledging" accompanies the

worker's deskilling.

Further the machine induces a uniformity of labor and

produces identical results, a product of the standardization

and making-routine of simplified movements, comprehensible

in some cases in the "therblig" which takes into

consideration each necessary movement and perception of the

worker in the production process. As Bahr notes of the

mechanized production process, language no longer conveys

and communicates knowledge, but instead issues orders,

asking from the proverbial pound of flesh merely its manual

dexterity (Slater, 107). The uniformity of production on

the other side becomes the fetishization of heterogeneity,

many products in our current time marketed "each one

unique"or "no two are the same".

In the experience of the machine the accumulated

products of past labor, dead labor, rules over the living,

active worker. Where the machine once served man, man now

serves the machine, often as mere "watchman and regulator"

(Grundrisse, 705). So whereas the tool and hence the

machine are to play a role in alleviating the labor of the

individual, of the individual worker, instead the individual

or the human being becomes subordinate not simply to the

machine as such (within a capitalist class relation), but

subordinated primarily to the production of surplus-value

above all. The Luddites, among others, took this as a

consequence of the machine, and not a consequence of

capitalism. This would be their mistake, and one that Marx

would admonish:

It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish

between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks,

not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in

which they are used. (Capital, 454-455)

The Luddites, however, did not wholly miss their mark.

There is a certain iron law of capitalist production, a

"general law of capitalist production" (Capital, 762) which

cannot be ignored, and that is primarily and above all the

production of a surplus-population. The most powerful

weapon of the capitalist class against the workers is the

simple abolition of their necessity, or the necessity of

their labor. As the machine shortens the necessary labor

through the use of the productivity of the machine, it

produces a population increasingly superfluous to the

production process. If we have 10 people and a machine is

capable of replacing 9 of them, there are, over a secular

timeline, only a portion of those 9 unemployed to be re-

inserted back into the production process. The production

of a reserve army of labor reduces the wages paid out to

workers by increasing the competition for jobs, allowing the

capitalist to in many cases set aside less in variable

capital by paying out for the worker less than the value of

labor-power (the value of the reproduction of that labor-

power). Even as unemployed and unnecessary the surplus-

population "belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the

latter had bred it at its own cost" (Capital, 784). The

deskilling which accompanies the introduction of the machine

also increases competition by homogenizing the level of

skill. The overcoming of labor by the machine, the

replacement of variable capital with constant capital in the

form of machinery and the increasing use of machinery

relative to labor is what Marx refers to as the "organic

composition" of capital (Capital, 761).

As capitalism progresses the three classes of

landowner, aristocracy, and farmer gradually becomes reduced

to the struggle between two - worker and capitalist.

The more or less favourable circumstances in which the wage-working class

supports and multiplies itself, in no way alter the fundamental character of

capitalist production. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the

capital-relation itself, i.e., the relation of capitalists on the

one hand, and wage-workers on the other, so reproduction

on a progressive scale, i.e., accumulation, reproduces

the capital-relation on a progressive scale, more

capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more

wage-workers at that. The reproduction of a mass of

labour-power, which must incessantly re-incorporate

itself with capital for that capital's self-expansion;

which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement

to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual

capitalists to whome it sells itself, this reproduction

of labour-power forms, in fact, an essential of the

reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital

is, therefore, increase of the proletariat" (Capital,

763-764).

The demand for hire wages and the demand for fewer

hours culminate in a crisis in capitalism for which the

machine is the response and the solution. The accumulation

of capital is notably increase of the superfluous proletariat.

In aiding the accumulation of capital the working class does

away with its means of subsistence in producing itself as

utterly surplus to the production process. The increasing

ranks of the surplus-population become itself a "lever of

accumulation" (Capital, 772). The mass of unemployed

becomes as well a form of natural resource fo capitalism.

This reserve army becomes what Marx terms a "lazarus-layer".

The figure of Lazarus is here noteworthy - the worker 'dies'

to the production process only to be resurrected when his

labor once again becomes necessary according to the dictates

of capitalist accumulation. For Marx, "The concept of the

free labourer contains the pauper" (Grundrisse, 604). The

worker is always the "virtual pauper", at any moment able to

be cast out of production once their labor-power is no

longer required. Marx distinguishes between different

segments of what he refers to as "the lowest sediment of the

relative surplus population" (Capital, 797):

1) Those able to work

2) Orphans and Pauper Children

3) The demoralized and ragged

This third is important to understand. In the third

case we are dealing specifically with those who "succumb to

their incapacity for adaptation". In the rapid and constant

revolutionizing of capital certain people are simply left by

the wayside. So not only can we think of a relative surplus

population, but perhaps possibly even an absolute surplus

population who can never be re-inserted into proccesses of

valorization but are instead reduced to the "informal

economy", of which the chiffonier is the prototypical example.

In our days we should become accustomed to people forced to

filter through scraps in order to find whatever precious

minerals from discarded junk (i.e. smartphones, computers)

or wiring might be able to be sold in order to merely

survive.

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy

of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the

proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater the industrial

reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital,

also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the

industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth.

But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the

greater is the mass of consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in

inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour.

The more extensive, finally, the pauperized ('lazarus-layer' in some

translations) sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army,

the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law

of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws, it is modified in its

working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us

here.

The capitalist is him or herself just as much the play-

thing of the law of value as the worker. The machine is not

the capitalist's choice. The machine is the capitalist's

necessity given capitalism as the dominant social relation.

It is in the capitalist's interest to maximize surplus-value

- it is precisely in maximizing the surplus-value that he

expropriates that he is and maintains his existence as

capitalist. Competition drives the capitalist to reduce the

value of his commodities in order to corner the market, in

order to maximize profits (through paradoxically lowering

the value). Likewise the capitalist might rely on

regulations which can push out the lesser profitable

capitalists in order to further be able to monopolize.

The "immediate aim" of the capitalist is not the use-

value of the commodities produced (Capital, 254), but the

surplus-value that is produced, and to that effect the

machinery produces above all surplus-value (Capital, 492).

The use-value of what the capitalist produces is secondary

to the capitalist's ability to valorize capital and

therefore to produce surplus-value and hence profit.

The capitalist need to press larger amounts of surplus-

value from smaller numbers of workers presents its own

problems which further push capitalism into crises. As (up

to now only human) labor-power is capable of furnishing the

capitalist with surplus-value, the use of machinery to

diminish labor-power devalues or "devalorizes" the value of

the commodity. So while the capitalist is capable, through

increasing his productivity, of producing larger masses of

profit, the rate of profit diminishes. So subjecting labor-

power to the dictates of supply and demand coupled with

competition between capitalists induces them to increase the

organic composition of value to the detriment of their

ultimate acquisition of surplus-value. This becomes what is

referred to primarily in Capital vol. III as the "law of the

tendency for the rate of profit to fall". As labor is

continually kicked out of production, and often due to the

fact that the value of commodities necessary for the

reproduction of labor have fallen, less labor and therefore

less value become involved in the production process.

"Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it

presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits

labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source

of wealth" (Grundrisse, 706).

The crisis arises then as a central crisis of

profitability which is manfested in multitudes of catalysts

(i.e., financial). However this crisis of profitability

introduced by the productivity of machines is the central

contradiction of capitalism. And while we have encountered

here perhaps more firmly the capitalist history of machines,

it is precisely the viability of a capitalist future of

machines with which I am concerned. What happens, and more

importantly, what is to be done when labor has become

completely superfluous to production but we still have

capitalism? Technology will not turn capitalism to

socialism, but rather we will still be required to sustain

ourselves via the wage despite there being no avenue in

which we can employ our labor-power, or more importantly sell

our labor-power in order to merely survive. So the question

remains, are we going to witness a future in which human

life is subsumed to the dictates of capital, or will capital

self-destruct, or will it in fact be a burden which falls

upon humanity to abolish capital and capitalism once and for

all in the single blow of socialism.