Marx describes the process set out above by which the expansion of the market drives the expansion of production, via the workshop, and where the manual labour employed is insufficient, capital turns to machines. But, the introduction of machines, thereby, does not at all signify the kind of philanthropy that Proudhon claims.
“The automatic workshop opened its career with acts which were anything but philanthropic. Children were kept at work at the whip’s end; they were made an object of traffic and contracts were undertaken with the orphanages. All the laws on the apprenticeship of workers were repealed, because, to use M. Proudhon’s phraseology, there was no further need for synthetic workers. Finally, from 1825 onwards, almost all the new inventions were the result of collisions between the worker and the employer who sought at all costs to depreciate the worker’s specialized ability. After each new strike of any importance, there appeared a new machine. So little indeed did the worker see in the application of machinery a sort of rehabilitation, restoration – as M. Proudhon would say – that in the 18th century he stood out for a very long time against the incipient domination of automation.” (p 130)
Marx quotes Ure's account of Arkwright's introduction of spinning machines, the main problem of which was not the creation of a self-acting mechanism, but, “in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton. But to devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence” (p 130)
The division of labour within the factory makes possible the introduction of machines. Machines release capital and labour, also releasing revenue, as Marx explains in Theories of Surplus Value. In so doing, they make possible the application of capital and labour in new types of production, and provides the revenues for their consumption. It, thereby, creates an expansion of the social division of labour. Marx describes the way this process had led to a complete transformation, since the time of Adam Smith, in both the division of labour, and the transition to machine production. He quotes extensively from the work of Ure to that effect.
The new social division of labour creates narrow specialisation, and so what Marx calls “craft idiocy”. That is the worker becomes a blinkered specialist in this one field at the expense of other activity. Marx quotes Lemontey,
““We are struck with admiration,” says Lemontey, “when we see among the Ancients the same person distinguishing himself to a high degree as philosopher, poet, orator, historian, priest, administrator, general of an army. Our souls are appalled at the sight of so vast a domain. Each one of us plants his hedge and shuts himself up in his enclosure. I do not know whether by this parcellation the field is enlarged, but I do know that man is belittled.”” (p 132)
But, machine production destroys that specialisation, and along with it craft idiocy. The worker becomes a seller of homogeneous factory labour-power that can be employed as easily in producing cloth as shoes, or automobiles.
“M. Proudhon, not having understood even this one revolutionary side of the automatic workshop, takes a step backward and proposes to the worker that he make not only the 12th part of a pin, but successively all 12 parts of it. The worker would thus arrive at the knowledge and the consciousness of the pin. This is M. Proudhon’s synthetic labour. Nobody will contest that to make a movement forward and another movement backward is to make a synthetic movement.” (p 133)
In fact, post-Fordist production, based on modular production and work groups, does act to raise productivity by allowing each work group to operate semi-autonomously, and its members to rotate tasks to alleviate boredom. But, the tasks are still based on this same machine production, and homogeneous factory labour, and the work groups themselves have, increasingly, been replaced by robots.
“To sum up, M. Proudhon has not gone further than the petty-bourgeois ideal. And to realize this ideal, he can think of nothing better than to take us back to the journeyman or, at most, to the master craftsman of the Middle Ages. It is enough, he says somewhere in his book, to have created a masterpiece once in one’s life, to have felt oneself just once to be a man. Is not this, in form as in content, the masterpiece demanded by the trade guild of the Middle Ages?” (p 133)
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