William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
The System of Manufacture
Manufacture in its early stages simply incorporates a greater number of workers in one shop than the guild-master used. It is merely, then, a change in the quantity of labor employed on a given task. But it has an effect, since twenty workmen in one shop working for one master can be counted on to turn out an average production different from that of two workmen, each brace working for ten masters. In the latter case one master will do much better than others owing to the uneven quality of labor. But in the grouping of twenty men together, the differences of each man begin to be canceled out, and the master can rely on an average quantity and quality of production upon which he can base his calculations. The role of the individual is diminished, that of social productivity becomes increasingly significant. But there is a further advantage.
It costs less to build one shop for twenty workmen than ten shops for two each. Less capital is invested per man employed. This primitive improvement is not as yet important. It teaches the masters a simple lesson. Twenty men working together actually produce more than twenty times as much as one man working singly. By pitching together, by dividing tasks, by joining forces for lifting and heavy work, the efficacy of total labor becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Even where all the men employed do the same thing and pass the work from hand to hand, their speed is greater than if each has to go through a whole series of routines each time afresh. Wherever time is a factor, as in the harvesting of crops, shearing of sheep, etc., co-operation is decisive. Co-operation, in the first stages of capitalism, may in any case show one or all of the following advantages:
(1) It increases the mechanical force of labor as a total.
(2) It enables it to operate over a larger space with the same total energy as was formerly used by separate workers.
(3) It reduces the space required to produce a given article by bringing the tools and instruments of labor together.
(4) Where time is essential, it mobilizes labor quickly.
(5) It excites competitive attitudes in workers who can see each other’s contribution, where formerly they were alone and did not properly compare results.
(6) It enables a greater continuity of production, eliminating the need of interrupting an activity so as to do associated tasks, or attend to other aspects of production.
(7) Men learn the many-sidedness of production when they see complex jobs done socially, all around.
(8) A group of men can perform certain jobs simultaneously, whereas with the individual worker, each operation had to be concluded before he could go on to the next step.
(9) The use of means of production in common means that less of them are available for more labor: for example, twenty carpenters need twenty lathes, whereas ten might do for twenty together, in view of the fact that lathes can be used for only a part of the time.
(10) It enables the total production of a group of men to be more accurately estimated, that is, it creates social labor.
For this reason Marx says “when the laborer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality and develops the capabilities of his species.”
The Need for Industrial Management
Since laborers are combined, in the early stages of production, in one place in order to realize the benefits of their co-operation, it follows that the employer who takes on so many workers must have far greater capital than the cobbler with his solitary apprentice. He must have money to pay wages. He must have a large amount of raw material. He must have costly workshops. Lastly, it requires that a division of labor takes place. Whereas the cobbler both labors with and commands his one apprentice, the capitalist, commanding say fifty men, must direct them all to one common task, distribute their parts and, himself, do none of the routine work alongside them, for he has no time for that function, and further it would be a waste of his energies. Hence the capitalist becomes the entrepreneur, that is, he is a “captain of industry,” as well as a capitalist. He must exploit, that is, use, labor, for his good. Unless he does so to the full, he will not obtain profits. Hence the new form of co-operation begins with a strange contradiction.
Production becomes social, appropriation of profits individual. Men work together, but a small class, owners of capital and directors of enterprise, exploit,1 that is, stand apart from the co-operators in order to use their activities with the sole object of producing a profit for themselves (the employers).
The workers co-operate but not in tasks willed by themselves. They are not interested in what they produce. The requirements of the capitalists, and the workers’ own pressing need to sell their laboring power, effects the combination. The direction of industry becomes authoritarian. It develops further as the employer ceases directing the actual conduct of work every day. He hires foremen, who supervise the work, and engineers, or managers, who plan the schedule of activities and the rhythm of purchases as well as direct the efforts of selling the product.
Two Objects of Management
Hence there are two forms of control and direction: One, to enforce the co-operative benefits of labor, and the second, to assure that this co-operation yields a profit. From this comes the celebrated challenge of Marx to the theory that the capitalist is entitled to his reward because he directs production:
“It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist, on the contrary he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist.”
He points out that the leadership of industry was as natural to a capitalist as the leadership of armies to a feudal lord. By this observation Marx does not mean to imply that, say, a particular workman, gifted with inventive powers, cannot become a capitalist. But unless he is a capitalist he will never be a leader of industry but merely an ingenious person selling his talents to a capitalist.
The class of capitalists are the class of leaders of industry, for the reason that they have the capital, and for no other. In other words, they are praised and claim a reward for the necessary shepherding of their fortunes since, under the system of society they have inaugurated, no other class can possibly do what they do.
Marx states further that since the labors of a hundred men are more than a hundred times as great as the labor of each individual, the capitalist pays for the services of a hundred workers but not for the surplus of production due to their co-operation. As labor did not develop this co-operation without having previously sold its services to capital, it appears that capital, by nature, has a special productive quality, so that an attribute of labor appears as one of the capital that profits from that attribute.
Two Forms of Co-operation
Simple co-operation soon develops into large manufacture. Until about 1770 this took two forms: by the grouping in a single workshop of workers, each of a different craft, but each of whom makes parts of a finished article. Quite soon, after devoting his talents to this activity, each of the craftsmen becomes less complete, even in his own work. For example, a saddler confines himself to making carriage-straps and not to the whole range of saddlery. The second form of manufacture is simpler. It consists of the fabrication of single articles (say a nail), in which there are many operations but no special skill, no separate crafts. Here, although the labor is simple, each person is assigned a separate operation, and only that. In this way each operation is done more speedily.
The manufacturing epoch, then, unites men of different crafts and reduces the range of their special activities, or it takes men of one craft and reduces the number of their operations. In any case, there is created a mechanism of which the men are merely parts. Hence the descriptive name of “hands.” But as yet there is one limitation to great progress. Each man, however circumscribed, still is a handcraft-worker. He uses no mechanical power.
The Specialized Toolmaker
But, as labor is most productive when its tools are best adapted to special tasks, so, as the manufacturing period advanced, tools became more varied, more adapted to one special need. Instead of a hammer being used for all the purposes a hammer is needed for, different kinds of hammers were developed, since they would be used constantly and advantageously by one worker for one special task. This resulted in a skilled group of toolmakers, a branch that had not flourished before. As machinery is a combination of simpler elements, including tools, a new generation arose whose training prepared them to conceive of mechanical appliances.
Division of Labor
Marx cites the watch trade as a perfect example. (Watchmakers were outstanding in sleight-of-hand and magical tricks!)2 In the Alpine and Jura valleys by the eighteenth century, before machinery was employed, the following division of labor took place: Mainspring-makers, dialmakers, spiral-spring workers, jewel-hole makers, ruby-lever makers, hand-makers (as distinguished from the dial workers), casemakers, screwmakers, gilders, brass and steel wheelworkers, down to teeth cutters in wheels only, and twoscore others, all subtle, delicate labor requiring perfect adjustment of hundreds of units to turn out a good timekeeper, with an easily opened cover and a perfectly functioning stem.
On the other hand, the manufacture of wires, before machinery, was effected by threescore workers, dividing the detail of a comparatively simple product.
The Necessity for Large Capital
A further consequence of the division of labor was the ascertaining of the proportion of laborers required for each process. If one process took two hours and another one, then it was necessary to employ twice as many laborers for the first process as for the second. When, as in the wire trade, threescore were required, the division of labor came to be so calculated that, say, a works would have to employ two hundred men to obtain the maximum co-operation of workers doing their tasks at unequal speeds. Any factory that had fewer was relatively inefficient and costly and lost out in the competitive race. This fortified the tendency to larger and larger capitals in manufactures.
Capitals become larger, labor perfectly adapted to acting like a machine. Toolmaking becomes mature, mechanical talent developed. There are hundreds of thousands accustomed to working in mass instead of a few scattered guildmasters and servants.
Encouragement to Science
In the meantime, the bourgeoisie, in thrall to the need of more profit, sought any devices that would encourage the saving of labor, the greater efficiency of manufacture. They encouraged ingenuity. Abundant capital, made out of colonial profit, sought investment in these factories. Proper use of labor, technical development, abundance of capital, fluidity of social organization, need for constant change in modes of production in order to compete, caused the capitalist to become friendly to innovation.
Whereas previously the whole of society had been identified with an everlasting king, church, landlord, now the whole interest of the newly rising burghers required advancement in the technique of production.
Science, previously disdained, was now courted. Galileo’s telescope, Pascal’s hydraulic jack, Descartes’ diver, Guericke’s Magdeburg spheres, the microscope of Malphigi and Swammerdam, Newton’s currency mill, were eagerly welcomed. Mathematics and physics became elaborate disciplines. Chemistry developed later, but by 1780 Lavoisier had laid its imperishable foundations. Crude experiments with steam engines became common.
Charles II, a Stuart and reactionary, nevertheless created a RoyaI Society for Science. The manufacturing system thirsted for improvements.
The Worker Precedes Scientists
Yet it was from handicrafts, from artisans and workmen and foremen, versed in the manufacturing arts, rather than from science, that the first great triumphs of machinery came about. The worker did more to create capitalism than capitalists or savants. Science came into its own, rather, in the nineteenth century with the work of Faraday and men of his generation. That is not to say that the difference of scientific knowledge between 155o and 175o during the epoch of manufacturing had not organized the perceptions of manual workers. But the first direct applications came rather from them. The discoverer of latent heat did not invent the steam engine. The theoretician of mechanics, Lagrange, invented nothing. But men trained in the workshops, steeped in the new spirit, gave an impetus to machinery.
The Rise and Fall of Localization
The localization of manufactures at first assisted the development of machinery. The division of town and country became greater as large agglomerations of workers were centered in what were formerly small towns. Then again, subdivision of labor encouraged efficiency and, in turn, workshops were located where that large number of workers might be used to best advantage. Silk mills were established in the cocoon lands of the south of France, linen factories near the flax fields of Ulster. Transport was expensive and difficult. But for the finished articles, which were more compact, the new colonies and the recently acquired Indian Empire furnished world markets. The returning ships brought rare and strange raw materials and so manufacture was ever more diversified. Its dependence on location diminished.
The End of the Guilds
The restrictions of guilds were completely swept away. A merchant with capital could employ labor, where formerly only a master could do so. With labor excluded totally from the land, especially in England, by the enclosures,3 and with the laborer completely divorced from his means of production, the great era of “liberalism” set in. The craftsmen still insisted on apprenticeship rules. These were the last barrier. The machine finished that in one generation.
The Machine
The machine era is not distinguished from the manufacturing by any hard and fast line. The water-wheel, mother of all machines, was known in antiquity. Levers, catapults, pulleys, lifts, were part of an immemorial tradition. Unutilized machines piqued curiosity long before the eighteenth century. But not until the spinning machine was made practical about 1735 does machinery enter production as an important factor. Only two centuries separate us from the handicraft era. By 1770, the invention of the spinning jenny and, above all, by 1784 with the innovation of the steam engine by James Watt, the machine age in Europe commences. In the United States the cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, not only showed the advance of Yankee ingenuity to parallel the old country, but it also created a new abundance of raw materials for industry. For the first time in human annals a machine built a new empire, the Cotton South, and changed the face of the earth. Without the invention of Whitney’s cotton gin, even the most ingenious contrivances for looms in the old country would have lacked raw material for giant expansion.
Fall in Value of Goods
The machine is an entirely new phenomenon in history. It changed the place of labor in industry, not merely quantitatively but qualitatively. It changed the whole social meaning of production. There is no use, for all practical purposes, in equating machine industry even with its immediate predecessor, manufacturing. The change in labor arose from the fact that the amount of labor time embodied in the production of any commodity fell by an astounding amount. In Marx’s expression, as we shall see later, in the chapter on “Value,” the values of all goods fell to unrecognizable levels.
“Cheap and nasty” was the epithet hurled at machine industry by idealists like the poet Southey. They were right, at least as far as cheapness was concerned. A mortal blow was dealt to the old workshop system. Labor-power, embodied in the machine-produced goods, cost but a tithe of that of the old hand-loom, or even the pedal and shuttle devices worked by direct labor-power. What was the essential social difference?
What is a Machine?
A machine consists of three parts: the motor mechanism, such as a steam engine that generates motive power, that is, puts the machine in motion; a transmitting mechanism whereby that motive power is made available, for example, flywheels, belting, gears, which not only transmit power but regulate its availability as to time or as to motion (rotary or direct), or, better still, distribute the availability of power to specialized machines; and the working tool, usually a heightened carryover from the manufacturing tool, which is enabled to operate speedily by reason of the co-operation of the motive and transmitting sections.
At first sight, it does not seem that this triple device constitutes a revolution in production. After all, motive power, outside of man, was available from windmills, waterfalls, oxen. The basic tool, lever, screw, hammer, etc., existed among the medieval craftsmen. Since mechanical power, outside of man, was old, since some transmission, as with the pulley, was known, and since no matter how clever an inventor is the tool he utilizes must embody the principles, however complicated, of inclined planes, wedges, etc., why is not the old definition correct that a tool is a simple machine, or, rather a machine no more than a complex tool?
The Special Marxist Approach
Here the special approach of Marxism enters, because it is historically different. The quantity of motive power embodied in the steam engine as against the windmill, as well as its continuity, the varied and speedy availability of the transmitting part, and the complexity of the working tool, as well as its fantastic speed, combine, as a totality, to create new class relations, and thus, by reason of the transport, more solid materials, more abundant materials. Once spinning was mechanized, it was seen that weaving had to be adapted to it. But once weaving too became mechanical, the printing of cloth, its bleaching, its dyeing, could no longer be done at an infinitely slower rhythm by hand.
For were that discrepancy to continue, once the spinner and weaver had saved time in production, they would have to slow down until the finishing process was complete. At first this difference was compensated by employing more labor in the costly and backward parts of the process. But soon not only mechanical physics but even chemistry were called into the service of industry. With chemical adaptation, it is not merely the transmitting mechanism, but the use of the sleeping processes of nature itself that man, the magician, made to waken so as to illuminate the world by gas or to replace the colors of plant juices.
The Modernization of Transport
Nor could industry be bottle-necked by means of transport far behind that of industry. The sailing vessel was made swifter, the clipper ship foreshadowed. The canal craze of the 1820’s, the railroad before the steam engine, the use of the steam mechanism on boats as a subsidiary force and after 1820 more and more as the primary force and, at last, the locomotive, used locally in a few industrialized areas of England and America, after 1840 seriously displaced the stagecoach and the wagon.
Criticism Begins
By 1800 Fourier, the French economic genius, saw the whole problem of the infinite social differences that the machine made compulsory; he saw that it was forced to create a new world to keep up with its insatiable appetite. For him, only a utopian socialism could save mankind from the machine’s disastrous threat. When, in 1825, for the first time capitalism gave rise to a worldwide industrial crisis (not to be confused with the credit panics such as the South Sea Bubble and Mississippi panics of 1720-30), it was seen that the machine had brought new forces into play but had not created a social situation to correspond therewith. When after 1840 the railway and the telegraph came into common use, Marx had before him the fully developed capitalist system, and by 1847 had adumbrated his economic system, which he practically completed by 1859.
The machine industry required, in a certain way too, as Marx pointed out, an even more delicate artisanship than that of the most subtle craftsmen. The precision tool required a fineness of measurement and reliability hitherto unknown. Without it even the steam engine remained erratic and obstructed. This led to the development of a class of mechanicians and engineers, a new group of highly skilled workers, and the manipulation and design of these new, delicate instruments required a greater diffusion of education. The complex bookkeeping and correspondence required by business, the need for a multitude of credit and banking operations to cope with increased trade due to amazingly increased production, required the universal diffusion of literacy and mathematical knowledge so as to provide engineers, foremen, and clerks. As the production of machine parts and precision tools became more accurate, science itself benefited through a new scope in its laboratories. Then staffs of these laboratories were often recruited from sons of the more highly skilled engineers and mechanicians. Thus was developed a salaried middle class, also divorced from ownership of the means of production, but better compensated than the workers by reason of the length and costliness of their special training.
World Diffusion of Capitalism
The vast profits of manufactures were as nothing compared to the new profits of machine industry. The scramble for colonies became a necessity for the further investment of surplus money. Britain conquered a fourth of the world, and loaned out immense sums to build up its erstwhile colony, the United States, and also the former Spanish empire, especially the Argentine. France built up the second colonial empire.
The revenue from abroad came to be larger than the profits of trade itself. The need for cheap raw materials led to an abandonment of home farming in Britain and the introduction of the policy of free trade, by which food came from America and the cost of living was kept low at home. In this way money wages were kept low as well, and so Britain was enabled for fifty years to outdistance all competitors.
For all that competition gained and soon became serious. By defeating the French nobility, the English had unwittingly brought about a transfer of power to the bourgeoisie there. They proceeded to build up a machine industry, paralleling Britain’s. So did Germany, after 1870, but more effectively.
But all industrial achievements in Europe paled beside the immense development of the United States. Free of feudal trappings, pure capitalism reigned from the foundation of the Republic. Hamilton was more thorough in his understanding of the system than any European.4 In a century population gained fifteenfold. The annals of mankind contain nothing resembling it. Land was nearly free, some of it wholly free. Capital, advanced by Europe, was lavishly given.
Immigration was the greatest since the primitive folk-wandering of the Teutons. By 1870 the fortune of a Vanderbilt, hastily acquired, surpassed that of the centuries’-old accumulation of swollen rent-rolls of the Duke of Westminster. By 1900 the amount of mechanical power per man employed in America was twice that in Britain
A pure industrial plutocracy, given an unlimited chance to show what capitalism could do, had gone beyond the accumulations of centuries of mercantile, colonial, rentier, and factory profits combined in the old country.5
To sum up, the Marxist theory deals with the capitalist system. This is historically recent. It was preceded by the manufacturing and mercantile economies. These laid the specific technical and intellectual foundations without which the machine economy would be inconceivable. The manufacturing economy, in its turn, arose through the breakdown of the feudal (including ecclesiastical) system of land tenure, and also the breakdown of the rigidly organized guilds. The extension of the market, the consequent rise of towns and the extension of the known world beyond Europe played a decisive part in antiquating and ultimately wrecking these older forms.
Once they were wrecked, their dependents were at the free disposal of capital. Capital, at this time, was immensely fortified by outright plunder. Colonial robbery, piracy, land enclosure, were basic. Immense sums of money accumulated. Unlike previous empires, such as the Roman, this plunder was directed toward a higher level of productivity in the manufacturing epoch. Through the confluence of these factors, wealth increased out of all recognition to that of the feudal period.
The capitalist system is nurtured in the form of money and credit. It develops the machine, which enables it to employ labor to far greater advantage than before by reducing the value of goods, that is, by incorporating less socially necessary labor-time to produce each commodity. With the machine economy, the place of labor in society is changed. It is a part of the total mechanical production, instead of, as previously, a set of artificers whose labors were strung together in a workshop. A new man is born, the proletariat.
NOTE: Consult Appendix III for bibliography.
1. Exploitation is used wrongfully as the equal of robbery. What Marx means by this French expression is the use of labor to obtain profit from it. Robbery without such use, or cheating, is not exploitation. Nor is employment exploitation, unless used for a profit. The laborer, says Marx, is exploited, even when he is paid in full for his work. It is the enjoyment of a surplus over and above that compensation, by the capitalist, that constitutes exploitation. A drayman exploits a horse even if he gives him all the hay he can eat.
2. And in homemade, quaint science. A considerable number of what Augustus de Morgan called "paradoxers" were watchmakers.
3. For a defense of the enclosures see the comment of J. H. Clapham in Vol. I of Victorian England (N. Y., Oxford University Press, 1938).
4. His theories on manufacture are Marx in reverse.
5. By 1895 European investments in America were partly replaced by the export of titled husbands, at stud, to the daughters of American millionaires