Machinery and Modern Industry
1) The Development of Machinery
The aim of capital in introducing machinery is to reduce the value of
commodities, to reduce the portion of the day devoted to reproducing
labour-power, and thereby increase surplus value.
Under manufacture, the revolution in the mode of production starts
with labour-power via co-operative labour and the division of labour.
In modern industry, it starts with the changes wrought in the means
of production.
In what way do machines differ from tools such as those used by the
handicraft worker? At what point does a tool become a machine?
“We are only concerned here with striking and general
characteristics; for epochs in the history of society are no more
separated from each other by hard and fast lines of demarcation, than
are geological epochs.” (p 351)
According to Marx,
“All
fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different
parts, the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and finally
the tool or working machine. The motor mechanism is that which puts
the whole in motion. It either generates its own motive power, like
the steam-engine, the caloric engine, the electromagnetic machine,
&c., or it receives its impulse from some already existing
natural force, like the water-wheel from a head of water, the
wind-mill from wind, &c. The transmitting mechanism, composed of
fly-wheels, shafting, toothed wheels, pullies, straps, ropes, bands,
pinions, and gearing of the most varied kinds, regulates the motion,
changes its form. where necessary, as for instance, from linear to
circular, and divides and distributes it among the working machines.
These two first parts of the whole mechanism are there, solely for
putting the working machines in motion, by means of which motion the
subject of labour is seized upon and modified as desired. The tool or
working machine is that part of the machinery with which the
industrial revolution of the 18th century started. And to this day it
constantly serves as such a starting-point, whenever a handicraft, or
a manufacture, is turned into an industry carried on by machinery.”
(p 352-3)
In essence the tools used in handicraft become part of the machine
even if in changed form. For example, a lathe or milling machine
contains a cutting or shaving tool similar to that of a chisel, but
it is adapted to the particular motion and operation of the machine.
A drilling machine continues to use a drill-bit, a mechanical saw a
saw blade and so on.
Originally, these tools continued to be made by handicraft or
manufacture, and were then fitted to the machine, which was itself
machine made. From around 1850, the making of the tools themselves
transferred to machine production, tool-making becoming an industry
itself. Even in modern times, the job of toolmaker has been a
specific skill within engineeering.
“The machine proper is therefore a mechanism that, after being
set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations that were
formerly done by the workman with similar tools. Whether the motive
power is derived from man, or from some other machine, makes no
difference in this respect. From the moment that the tool proper is
taken from man, and fitted into a mechanism, a machine takes the
place of a mere implement. The difference strikes one at once, even
in those cases where man himself continues to be the prime mover. The
number of implements that he himself can use simultaneously, is
limited by the number of his own natural instruments of production,
by the number of his bodily organs. In Germany, they tried at first
to make one spinner work two spinning-wheels, that is, to work
simultaneously with both hands and both feet. This was too difficult.
Later, a treddle spinning-wheel with two spindles was invented, but
adepts in spinning, who could spin two threads at once, were almost
as scarce as two-headed men. The Jenny, on the other hand, even at
its very birth, spun with 12-18 spindles, and the stocking-loom knits
with many thousand needles at once. The number of tools that a
machine can bring into play simultaneously, is from the very first
emancipated from the organic limits that hedge in the tools of a
handicraftsman.” (p 353-4)
It is generally those tasks that required manual dexterity that
continued to be undertaken by workers and their tools, whereas those
things which required humans merely to provide motive power were
transferred to other sources.
For example, a potter uses his hands to create and shape the ware,
but his feet to power the wheel. Similarly, for the spinner and
weaver. What first provides the alternative motive power depends on
conditions. In England, water wheels are employed to power mills
because of ample sources of rapidly flowing water. In the
Netherlands, the lack of such leads to the employment of windmills.
The introduction of steam, hydraulic, internal combustion or electric
forms of power merely enable capital to operate free of the
restrictions that natural sources of power impose. However, the
introduction of these other forms of motive power does have another
consequence. That is that production must proceed on the basis of a
much greater scale than where purely human motive power is provided.
Without that machine production is not rational.
“Increase
in the size of the machine, and in the number of its working tools,
calls for a more massive mechanism to drive it; and this mechanism
requires, in order to overcome its resistance, a mightier moving
power than that of man, apart from the fact that man is a very
imperfect instrument for producing uniform continued motion. But
assuming that he is acting simply as a motor, that a machine has
taken the place of his tool, it is evident that he can be replaced by
natural forces. Of all the great motors handed down from the
manufacturing period, horse-power is the worst, partly because a
horse has a head of his own, partly because he is costly, and the
extent to which he is applicable in factories is very restricted.
Nevertheless the horse was extensively used during the infancy of
modern industry. This is proved, as well by the complaints of
contemporary agriculturists, as by the term “horse-power,” which
has survived to this day as an expression for mechanical force.” (p
355-6)
And, to this day, motive power is still measured in horse power,
though it is far removed from the actual power provided by horses.
Marx refers to the way this process has a dialectical interaction
with scientific discovery. For example, attempts to power additional
millstones, using water power, foundered, leading to further
scientific analysis into the laws of friction. Similar investigation
led to the discovery of the fly-wheel.
The development of the steam engine also meant that the motive power
and, therefore, location of industry was urban rather than rural.
“As
soon as tools had been converted from being manual implements of man
into implements of a mechanical apparatus, of a machine, the motive
mechanism also acquired an independent form, entirely emancipated
from the restraints of human strength. Thereupon the individual
machine, that we have hitherto been considering, sinks into a mere
factor in production by machinery. One motive mechanism was now able
to drive many machines at once. The motive mechanism grows with the
number of the machines that are turned simultaneously, and the
transmitting mechanism becomes a wide-spreading apparatus.” (p 357)
Marx notes
that machines do not proceed on the same basis as division of labour.
The latter divided a process into a series of functions to be
undertaken by different workers serially. However, machines tend to
incorporate this series of processes into a single operation. For
example, Marx quotes the production of envelopes that had been
undertaken by four different workers, but for which, “one
single envelope machine now performs all these operations at once,
and makes more than 3,000 envelopes in an hour.” (p 358)
What we meet
again here then is factories in which a large number of the same kind
of machines churn away, day after day, in the same production. The
rhythm of these machines, throughout the factory, is now determined
by the simple motive power.
“Just
as a number of tools, then, form the organs of a machine, so a number
of machines of one kind constitute the organs of the motive
mechanism.” (p 359)
“A real machinery system, however, does not take the place of
these independent machines, until the subject of labour goes through
a connected series of detail processes, that are carried out by a
chain of machines of various kinds, the one supplementing the other.
Here we have again the co-operation by division of labour that
characterises Manufacture; only now, it is a combination of detail
machines. The special tools of the various detail workmen, such as
those of the beaters, combers, spinners, &c., in the woollen
manufacture, are now transformed into the tools of specialised
machines, each machine constituting a special organ, with a special
function, in the system. In those branches of industry in which the
machinery system is first introduced, Manufacture itself furnishes,
in a general way, the natural basis for the division, and consequent
organisation, of the process of production.” (p 358-9)
Under
manufacture, the process of production is geared to conform with what
is possible for the artisans. With machine production, the machine
is designed on the basis of resolving how to most efficiently perform
each detail of the production process. This also requires the rise
of science and experimentation as well as the application of
accumulated knowledge, on a large scale.
In
manufacture the co-operation of the detail workers establishes the
proportion of each to be employed to ensure material flows from one
process to another. The same applies with machine production as each
set of machines acts to supply the next in the process so that the
outputs of the process are continuously and simultaneously the inputs
of the next.
In the same
way that the co-operative labour turned the workers into a single
collective worker, so the detail machines operate as part of one
single, collective machine.
“The
collective machine, now an organised system of various kinds of
single machines, and of groups of single machines, becomes more and
more perfect, the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous
one, i.e., the less the raw material is interrupted in its passage
from its first phase to its last; in other words, the more its
passage from one phase to another is effected, not by the hand of
man, but by the machinery itself. In Manufacture the isolation of
each detail process is a condition imposed by the nature of division
of labour, but in the fully developed factory the continuity of those
processes is, on the contrary, imperative.” (p 359-60)
Machines
frequently required human involvement, but increasingly, that too was
removed as new inventions fully automated the machines, and thereby
opened the potential for their continual improvement. This reduced
the worker to the function of mere machine minder for when it broke.
The
increasing number of inventions could only take off because there
existed skilled workers, from the manufacturing period, to bring
these inventions to practical reality. This leads to the development
of machine making as a separate industry in its own right.
“Here,
then, we see in Manufacture the immediate technical foundation of
modern industry. Manufacture produced the machinery, by means of
which modern industry abolished the handicraft and manufacturing
systems in those spheres of production that it first seized upon. The
factory system was therefore raised, in the natural course of things,
on an inadequate foundation. When the system attained to a certain
degree of development, it had to root up this ready-made foundation,
which in the meantime had been elaborated on the old lines, and to
build up for itself a basis that should correspond to its methods of
production. Just as the individual machine retains a dwarfish
character, so long as it is worked by the power of man alone, and
just as no system of machinery could be properly developed before the
steam-engine took the place of the earlier motive powers, animals,
wind, and even water; so, too, modern industry was crippled in its
complete development, so long as its characteristic instrument of
production, the machine, owed its existence to personal strength and
personal skill, and depended on the muscular development, the
keenness of sight, and the cunning of hand, with which the detail
workmen in manufactures, and the manual labourers in handicrafts,
wielded their dwarfish implements.” (p 361)
The growth
of machine industry, especially into new areas was limited both by
the constraints of expanding the number of skilled workers, capable
of building machines, and by the limited nature of manufacture as a
mode of production.
“The
increasing size of the prime movers, of the transmitting mechanism,
and of the machines proper, the greater complication, multiformity
and regularity of the details of these machines, as they more and
more departed from the model of those originally made by manual
labour, and acquired a form, untrammelled except by the conditions
under which they worked, the perfecting of the automatic system, and
the use, every day more unavoidable, of a more refractory material,
such as iron instead of wood-the solution of all these problems,
which sprang up by the force of circumstances, everywhere met with a
stumbling-block in the personal restrictions, which even the
collective labourer of Manufacture could not break through, except to
a limited extent. Such machines as the modern hydraulic press, the
modern power-loom, and the modern carding engine, could never have
been furnished by Manufacture.” (p 362)
Necessarily,
the introduction of machines, in one sphere, brings their
introduction elsewhere. A huge increase in demand from weaving
raises prices for spun cotton and wool, promoting the need for more
mechanised spinning. Similarly, the revolution of dyeing and
bleaching, combing etc. promotes mechanisation.
In like
manner, these developments made necessary a revolution in
communication and transport.
“Hence,
apart from the radical changes introduced in the construction of
sailing vessels, the means of communication and transport became
gradually adapted to the modes of production of mechanical industry,
by the creation of a system of river steamers, railways, ocean
steamers, and telegraphs. But the huge masses of iron that had now to
be forged, to be welded, to be cut, to be bored, and to be shaped,
demanded, on their part, cyclopean machines, for the construction of
which the methods of the manufacturing period were utterly
inadequate.
Modern industry had therefore
itself to take in hand the machine, its characteristic instrument of
production, and to construct machines by machines. It was not till it
did this, that it built up for itself a fitting technical foundation,
and stood on its own feet. Machinery, simultaneously with the
increasing use of it, in the first decades of this century,
appropriated, by degrees, the fabrication of machines proper. But it
was only during the decade preceding 1866, that the construction of
railways and ocean steamers on a stupendous scale called into
existence the cyclopean machines now employed in the construction of
prime movers.” (p 363)
Having
solved the problem of controllable power via the steam engine, this
still required the need to replace the skill of the artisan in order
to produce accuracy and precision, for straight lines and angles.
That was first resolved by Henry Maudslay with the slide rest,
originally designed for the lathe.
“This
mechanical appliance replaces, not some particular tool, but the hand
itself, which produces a given form by holding and guiding the
cutting tool along the iron or other material operated upon. Thus it
became possible to produce the forms of the individual parts of
machinery
'with a degree of ease, accuracy, and speed,
that no accumulated experience of the hand of the most skilled
workman could give.'” (p 364)
“In simple co-operation, and even in that
founded on division of labour, the suppression of the isolated, by
the collective, workman still appears to be more or less accidental.
Machinery, with a few exceptions to be mentioned later, operates only
by means of associated labour, or labour in common. Hence the
co-operative character of the labour-process is, in the latter case,
a technical necessity dictated by the instrument of labour itself.”
(p 364-5)
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