William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
Machinery reduces the amount of muscular strength required for work. The employment of women and children was immediately sought by the first factory owners. The entire family worked. This became universal and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hood had to give expression to the rising social protest.
“For Oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
and we cannot run or leap. . . .
Oh, all day we drive the wheels of iron
in the factories, round and round.”
And
“They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
in the country of the free.”
And for female labor, Hood’s “Song of the Shirt”:
“Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
in poverty, hunger and dirt. . . .
“Oh, God! that bread should be so dear,
and flesh and blood so cheap.”
By making a man’s family work, this scheme reduced the wages of the father. Father, mother, and two children reduced the labor-time required by each to sustain the family, and the rate of surplus-value was stupendous. The revolutionary gains in production caused the population to increase as never before and to be yoked to toil as never before. It was the heyday of profit, the golden age of the capitalists.
The classic book of Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), is the most complete, damning picture of the dreadful era of early capitalism. Its record of family enslavement and the destruction of all the decencies of life was a potent factor in bringing labor to demand legal safeguards.1
But, as everyone knows, in sections of the United States a stubborn rearguard action is still being fought for the employment of Appalachian families as an entirety, children and all.
In Japan the factory system is based on family employment. All young capitalisms learn the secret that many machines require little day-to-day strength. All cheap-labor economies come back to it, no matter what their slogans. The Germans under Hitler pompously proclaimed the place of woman in the kitchen and nursery only, but they restored her in the factories in ever greater numbers as their need to incorporate labor-power into armaments went beyond their economic possibilities.
We shall later review the discussion which has raged between Marxists and their opponents as to whether labor conditions have improved at all, taking present-day capitalism as a worldwide field of labor exploitation. The chief statistical expert on their side, Kuczynski, decidedly holds pessimistic views.
The Relation of Machine-Use to Labor-Power Utilization
Machinery is a perpetual mover. Unlike a tool, which requires the motive power of the arm, machines can go on forever. The machine is a Frankenstein creation that despises its servant, Man, that feeble being that actually gets tired. Since the productiveness of the machine is inversely proportional to the value transferred by it to the product, the longer the life of the machine, the less is the portion of that value added to each commodity produced. The active lifetime of a machine depends on the length of the working day, or rather on the amount of daily labor multiplied by the number of days that that process carries on.
Although the wear and tear of a machine is not proportional to its use, even assuming that it were, a machine working twenty hours a day gets as much done in five years as one working ten hours in ten years. Now a machine wears from use or from disuse. But more than that it undergoes, in Marx’s strange phrase, a moral depreciation.
From the moment it is installed it loses exchange value, because better or cheaper machines may come on the market at any moment. Its value is determined not by what it costs to produce but by the labor-time required to reproduce it, or even a better machine. The shorter the period in which it can replace its value the less is the threat of loss. The longer the working day the shorter is the period of anxiety.
This is most often seen when a new machine is introduced, for it is as yet in the experimental stage and is often quickly superseded. Since the longer working day requires no alteration in plant or machine investment, there is an increase of surplus-value and the outlay to obtain it is less. The machine-and-factory form means that its value is both admirably equipped for expansion through high productivity and its exchange-value imperiled if it is not served by living labor.
A manufacturer said, “When any of our men leaves the mill, he renders worthless an investment of $500,000.” In addition to its other services machinery, when it is a monopoly of one or a few concerns, enables them to produce below the social value. They seek to use this differential for all it is worth by using labor to the best advantage.
But a more serious effect is that of machinery itself versus the worker. The machinery, by employing a lesser number of workers for a given capital (by increasing their productivity), converts variable capital, once invested in labor-power, into machinery, which being constant capital produces no surplus-value. It is impossible, though, even with the best machines, to squeeze as much surplus-value out of a hundred men as out of a thousand. Even if each man should produce his labor-time in one hour where he once did it in eight, it would not be possible to equal the former surplus-value. Machinery applied to the production of surplus-value (its only reason for existing) implies a contradiction in its very nature.
It can increase the rate of surplus-value only by replacing workmen. As soon as machinery becomes general in an industry, the value of its products is the same as the value of all similar commodities, and so the capitalist, his advantages canceled, tries to lengthen the working day so he may compensate the decrease of workers employed through an increase in absolute surplus-value. The advantages of relative surplus-value are not “all that glisters.” For the rate of surplus-value has to be multiplied by the labor-time of workers from whom it is extracted, to get a mass of surplus-value.
The Effect of Machinery on Quality of Labor
Machinery not only makes its own compulsions toward increasing the working day, but it opens up whole strata of the population —the weak, the unskilled, the ignorant, even the feeble-minded—for certain jobs. To turn a screw all day long on a conveyer belt requires a type of man who is best pictured by A Nous la Liberté, the superb French film, or its American counterpart, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
Its greatest service is to throw millions of men out of work. For years this was denied, because there were countervailing tendencies. But in the last two decades, “technological unemployment,” as forecast by Ricardo and Marx, has become a universal problem.
For a long time the displaced workers found some other employments, in distribution trades or superfluities, but whenever the volume of profits declines, the underlying surplus population created by the machine becomes the “industrial reserve army.”
It is the merit of Marx that by his theory of relative surplus-value he has given an economic and not a mechanical argument as to why this occurs. The dream of Aristotle, that if every tool could do its own work men would be free, meant there would be neither slaves nor lords. It was the Golden Age, anticipated. He never understood, says Marx, the economic theory that machinery was turned into a weapon for increasing the working day, limited only by social resistance, not by economic law.
Effect of Shorter Working Day on Types of Machinery
The employers have been thwarted in lengthening the working day. We now turn to the still further intensification of labor. The worker, apart from the contribution of machinery, can be compelled to exert more strength in his limited number of hours. The speed of the machinery can be increased as a pace-setter. The workman can be given more machinery to tend. The machinery itself must be better built to stand up under this extension of use and the shorter working day means that the capitalist must watch his costs more carefully. Heavy shaftings, for example, are replaced by more compact, lighter shaftings. Since Marx wrote, the intensity of labor has increased by about 80 per cent per capita in England (from 1867 to 1932).
The Effect of the Factory System
The factory system itself is an admirable mechanism for extracting surplus-value. Since Marx wrote, the factories he described have been dwarfed by such monsters as the Ford River Rouge plant, the Krupp plant in Essen, Germany, the Creusot works in France, and others.
The factory is a vast automaton of mechanical and intellectual organs working in concert, all being regulated by a single moving force. This central, automatic, moving force is an autocrat that none can disobey, his rhythms are theirs.
Apart from rhetoric, what are the economic consequences? That since the capabilities of the tool are freed from the restrictions inseparable from fallible human labor-power, the division of labor is swept away.
In the Ford plant, it has been alleged that 43 per cent of the workers require one day’s tuition, 36 per cent up to eight days, 6 per cent up to a fortnight, 14 per cent from a month to a year, and only 1 per cent require more than a year, that is, are equivalent to the old-time “skilled mechanic.”
Instead of the elaborate hierarchy of workmen in the guild and manufacturing system, and even in early capitalism, the tendency is toward a giant collection of level workers. Men like William Morris and John Ruskin foresaw this with horror, as did the American idealists like Thoreau. Workmanship was man’s Godlike heritage. He too fashioned worlds, if small ones. But now the designing and beauty of machines is confined to a few highly trained engineers.
Workers are trained now to tend certain groups of machines, hence their co-operation is as primitive as that which built the Pyramids. The division of labor is technical, not craftsmanlike. Since the movement proceeds from the machine and not from the man, it creates a group of operatives trained to a set of motions rather than to a skill.
The expenses of the reproduction of labor-power are made minimal on the training side. Millions of Polish and Italian peasants, fresh from the farm, were hurled into American heavy industry and were paid at a rate consistent with that training. Their millions of children, trained to the same routines, have formed the background of the revolt against trades unionism (survival of the manufacturing epoch), and have joined the C. I. O., organ of the mass-production system.
The annexation of masses of workers to the machines, as a detail of their production, increases the dependence of workers on capitalists. The worker is exhausted by the constant repetition. The play of his mind and muscles is reduced. The whole man is ended. There is no personal initiative, whereas the factory is animated by a class that has all the social initiative, the owners.
They alone are outside the detail function; they alone have a comprehensive view of what they are undertaking. They regard the worker not as a fellow human being but as a comparatively uninteresting appendage of their machines. For such robots, a barracks discipline is considered necessary since they cannot “think for themselves.” “The place of the slaveholder’s lash is taken by the foreman’s book of penalties.” The large factory has a code of its own, parallel with outside law. It becomes increasingly political, that is, a state within the state. In some of the United States the factory owners are permitted, in effect, to have a private militia.
The organs of sense are dulled, the accidents of industry read like those of a civil war. Casualties are normal and expected. There is no longer any carryover from older social forms. Labor, as Marx’s analysis pointed out, in its very beginning, becomes abstract labor, the commodities increasingly exemplify the laws of value.
Why Workers Resisted the Machines
At first the workers resisted because they sensed this development. Displaced handicraft workers attacked the machines.2 Not until 1850 did attacks on new machinery cease in Western Europe and America, and as late as 1905 the army in Romania had to protect new grain elevators against the mass assault of thousands of displaced workers. Because the first machines could be seen as his direct competitors, the workingman had no patience with their introduction. The masters plead that the sufferings of the workers are temporary and that by its immense productivity the machine will create more employment than it takes away. This plea becomes an axiom in political economy. Unfortunately men cannot eat axioms. In countries such as India the introduction of the power loom ruined hundreds of thousands of spinners, who actually died of starvation. Long before the machines could employ more labor they killed whole sections of the workers, and these the most skilled, the longest trained, the most resourceful and intelligent. They replaced this excellent breed by the people driven off the land, the unskilled peasants.
The Calvary of the working class is the manner in which relative surplus-value makes its historic commencement. As Marx puts it, since the machines go from one trade to another, always displacing more and more people, and since machines displace other machines, the “temporary inconvenience” they cause really becomes permanent.
Every time the workers fight through strikes the capitalist finds a new economic motive for introducing further mechanical improvements, since the cost of these strikes is itself part of the cost of labor-power, by aiding the depreciation of plant investment.
Are the Workers Compensated with New Employments by the Machine?
This question is central for the cost implications of the drive for relative surplus-value. Marx begins with a common example.
A capitalist employs 100 workers at $500 a year each in a carpet factory. His variable capital, the cost of labor-power, is $50,000 per annum. He buys machinery for $25,000 and discharges half his staff. (Let us put to one side, for this purpose, his expense for fuel.) Suppose that the raw material costs him $50,000 both before and after the installation of the machine. How much capital is set free by this innovation?
Before the change, variable capital and constant capital were equal, but afterward capital consisted of $75,000 constant (machinery and raw materials) and $25,000 variable (labor-power cut in half). Capital is not set free; rather, it is increasingly locked up. Hence a total capital of $100,000 can now employ only half the men it did before. With each improvement it will employ still less. If the machine had cost only $10,000 and still replaced the $25,000 in variable capital, it would have set $15,000 free. This sum of $15,000 set free could still employ 30 men out of the 50 who were discharged. But it would employ still fewer, for in order to use these 30, some of the amount saved would have to be put necessarily into constant capital. By no calculation could machinery here do anything but diminish the employment of labor.
But the making of this machinery for the carpet factory employed mechanics. This is scarcely compensation for displaced carpetworkers. But even as a quantity it must employ fewer than the carpet-workers it displaces. For the $25,000 that formerly represented the wages of carpet-workers who were discharged now represents:
(a) The value of means of production that were put into the machinery.
(b) The wages of the mechanics who built it.
(c) The surplus-value of their employer.
That means that variable capital is displaced by much less variable capital. The machines take time to wear out. For that reason, if the machine-maker is to keep his workers going, he must displace one set of carpet-workers after another.
The Difference between Social Use and Labor Displacement
Now what the theorists mean is not that this machine uses less as variable capital than that it displaces. They mean that the $25,000 formerly paid in wages to the displaced workers must seek investment and it cannot rest until it employs fifty men. So that, in short order, a demand must rise for an equivalent amount of labor somewhere else.
Before studying that reinvestment let us see what has really happened to the discharged laborers. They are no longer buyers of commodities. Their lack of demand tends to reduce the price of these commodities.
The labor employed in making the machine must always be less than that displaced by its employment, otherwise it would not be used. So there is a net decline in demand for the means of subsistence. If this goes on for some time there is a discharge of workmen engaged in producing the means of subsistence, because of the lessened demand.
Some of the capital that was used in producing these means of subsistence is itself looking for other investment. The unemployment of the displaced workers induces unemployment of those who make their means of sustenance.
The men thrown out of work are on the labor market. They add to the number of men at the disposal of the capitalists. They must seek work in another branch of industry. They can find this employment only because there is new capital seeking investment, additional capital that has been converted from the surplus-value of other workers. But not that of the capital that formerly employed them, for that was converted into machinery. It cannot be employed twice over.
The laborer is now in a trade he does not know. He is forced to take any work and his tendency is to accept lower wages in less skilled employment. Further, every branch of industry, as machinery is improved in it, is sending its rejected men to the same labor market. Badly-paid work is the best that can happen even if they are employed. But often they are not, for long periods.
Now it is true that machinery cheapens and increases the production of goods. At first that effect is not felt because of the reduction of the means of subsistence in other branches, due to lessened demand of the discharged help. Society has just as much, if not more, goods for the supply of the workers. It is not machinery that has injured the workers, it is its social use. Machinery, in itself, shortens hours, lightens labor, is a victory of man over nature, and increases the wealth of producers. In the hands of capital, Marx holds, it increases hours, makes labor more burdensome, makes man the slave of the machine and brings about pauperism. But the economists see it as a physical amelioration, and confound this with the economic contradictions in which that amelioration is made manifest.
Increased Demand for Raw Materials
What the apologists mean is that the total quantity of products made by machinery far exceeds what has been made before. If the product is trebled, then the raw materials used must be trebled. But as regards the other instruments of production, these can only be increased up to less than the difference between former production and machine production. Otherwise the economies of introducing the machine would have been canceled.
The use of machinery assists employment in the industries that supply the means of production to that industry. This is a genuine increase in employment. The amount of new employment in the trades furnishing raw materials, however, depends on their working day and intensity of labor, to take the two factors of surplus-value, and on the ratio of constant and variable capital. Where machinery is simultaneously spreading in those trades (it usually does), the benefit is less than the number displaced by the machines in the trade served by the raw-material industries. Where it usually gives much employment is in a colonial country or a primitive country where machinery is little used.
But sometimes the reverse takes place even here. The enormous development of woolen manufactures in Britain turned the countryside into pastures to supply the wool. Farmers were displaced by the million. Ireland was depopulated. The compensation of Australian pastoral employment may not have equaled the loss in the old country. So it is by no means certain that even the enormous increase in production, requiring more raw materials, will increase a corresponding use of labor in those supply employments.
Temporary Advantage to Backward Trades
There are temporary advantages to some classes of labor. For example, the development of cotton spinning supplied yarn so cheaply to the hand-loom weavers that for a few years they did very well. But in a decade or so, the 800,000 weavers who were employed because of the spinning jenny, throstle, and mule were decimated by the power loom. So too at first the abundance of woolen and cotton cloths called forth great numbers of needleworkers until the sewing machine got rid of most of them. The advantages, then, of machinery, in every instance cited above, where they have been found, have been short of duration and have been manifested in industries with still more primitive techniques.
What the increase of productivity of machinery does do is to split up industry into more branches than ever. It concentrates more and more on specialized production, calls forth great reserves of raw material, makes necessary new means of transportation and power, and so, by reason of its very quantity of production, carries further the social division of labor.
Increase in Luxury Employments
Since machinery greatly augments surplus-value, and the mass of products in which that surplus-value is embodied, it leads to an increase of luxury. Fewer men are wanted in the factories and more as servants and as retailers’ assistants to supply the needs of the rich. The luxury trades require elegant goods from abroad, etc., and so the carrying trades do well. Here the effect of machinery is to shift employment from production to transportation and distribution of goods, and also personal service. For every few workmen displaced there is money to hire either a journalist or crystal-gazer or jockey or artiste.
More Public Works Required
On a more serious basis, the greater productivity of goods also employs more workers in public or semipublic undertakings such as roads, electric works, gas works, turbines, railways, etc. Nearly all such persons are those of the crudest labor levels, the poorest paid.
The new industries rarely employ as many men as those they displace. A good example appears in the United States where since 1914 electric refrigerators, radios, etc., have employed trifling numbers of people.
Since 1900 the automobile, a mass production article, which displaced a small industry, carriages—not by new machinery but by a wholly new intervention of capital—has accounted both directly and indirectly for almost the total increase of employment in the twentieth century, due to its collateral effect on steel, aluminum, railway freights, petroleum, garages, supplies, rubber, etc.
Summary of Displacement and Types of New Employment
To sum up, the effect of machinery is that the displaced workers are permanently eliminated in their own trades, that their unemployment causes other unemployment in the means-of-subsistence industries serving them, that they are re-employed by new capital only at lower rates.
The increase in production stimulates employment in raw-material industries but mostly in colonial countries with a small capital investment. It is not completely true even for this instance.
The persons employed in making new machines, plants, etc., must always be fewer than those they displaced, or there would be no reason for superseding labor.
It is true that sometimes more primitive industries, whose rate of production has not yet caught up with those of the mechanical industries supplying them, temporarily benefit. But machine industry soon catches up and makes their rhythm of consumption rival the other’s production, thus increasing unemployment.
Displaced labor is constantly being thrown on the market by this nearly simultaneously increasing mechanization. The social division of labor and specific needs of greater production bring about some, but not enough, employment in the public works industries.
But the major part of new employment is in the superfluous or luxurious trades arising out of the expenditure of the surplus-value by the capitalists themselves. Thus the three effects of machinery are a tendency to form masses of unemployed, to increase their capricious assimilation, and to augment the less productive trades.
This analysis of Marx explains why there has been a constant increase, over a period of years, of labor, despite its displacement by machinery. He denies that there is an automatic reinvestment of capital. He notes the astonishing waste of industrial unemployment. He sees the gain in distribution trade and in odd jobs as against industrial work.
But it is well known that certain trades have, at given times, actually increased the total number of their employees even after they have introduced machinery. What is the basis in these special instances? Marx has considered the theory of replacement as a social average, as he does all economic questions.
Cases Where Machinery Increases Employment
Suppose a business employs $5,000 a week, $2,000 constant and $3,000 variable capital. The $3,000 is the wages of 200 people at $15 a week each. Machinery is introduced. Wages are cut to $1,000, that is, one-third of the workers remain. The constant capital is increased to $4,000. The ratio of variable to constant falls from 3 to 2 to 1 to 4.
But suppose the business to expand enormously. Suppose the total capital to grow to $20,000 a week. Even if variable capital is as 1 to 4 it is still $5,000, and can employ 166 people in place of 100. Relatively to what the variable capital would have been without the machinery—that is, relative to the constant capital—there is a decline, but not in absolute number of persons employed, only, so to speak, in persons that might have been employed.
It is more than probable that the proportion of constant capital would constantly gain, for the factory system keeps on, according to its own laws, replacing variable by constant capital to increase relative surplus-value. Until it again follows its laws, though (and during a period of rest), a gross expansion in business may lead to a relatively smaller increase of employment, but an increase nevertheless.
Now Marx defines the limits of this type of growth. Written in 1867 his analysis has proved uncanny in prophetic power. He says that:
(1) The first period in which machinery conquers, produces extraordinary profits, since the difference between handicrafts and machinery is fantastically large.
(2) These profits not only form an accelerated accumulation of new capital but attract into this favored sphere new capital hungry for this immense rate and mass of profits.
(3) The special advantages of this first period of fast and furious activity is felt in every branch invaded by machinery.
(4) So soon as the factory system is widespread and machinery is replaced by better machinery, and as soon as the power industries have begun to catch up with the productive industries (such as coal and metals) and means of transport correspond in development, this mode of production has a capacity for sudden extension by leaps and bounds, with only two limits:
(a) supply of raw materials.
(b) markets for goods produced.
The Limits of Increasing Production
Thus the development of industry operates on the one hand to increase production of raw materials and food in the colonial and backward lands, and on the other, compels the search for wider markets, which is the real reason why the factory system for a long period could expand, despite the labor it displaced at home.
International division of labor replaces national. Britain no longer grows wheat, the Argentine does it for her. The United States grows her cotton. Australia is a wool colony. English farmers and sheep-raisers are injured. The cheapness of the means of subsistence imported into England under the system of Free Trade was the real reason why the variable capital could expand. It took less time for a worker to reproduce his sustenance.
On the other hand, British home markets being inadequate for the production of the country (largely due to the appalling poverty of the people), the salesman of Empire appeared everywhere and soon the export trade became vital. As it increased, British ships carried their coal abroad so as not to be in ballast on the outward trip to the lands from which they brought back gold and wool and wheat and cotton.
Coal was mined as never before and fuel became “cheap as dirt.” Each hand washed the other. At last the capitalists of every country were dependent on world conditions for prices and markets. This struggle for markets forces a still greater need for cheap goods to be produced, and this is a new spur to replacing labor by machinery.
Employment Becomes More Irregular
When this does not suffice there is a lunatic competition in every country to reduce wages below value so as to crush the foreign competitors. The worker now is worse off than in the early epoch of capitalism in that he is thrown out of a job not merely by machinery but by crises as well.
So that a dynamic way of living takes the place of static labor. True, employment is increased by the world market, but the instability of that market causes interrupted cycles of that employment. It is doubtful whether the total of hours worked has seriously increased, once this periodical employment is counted in. Labor is alternately repelled from employment and attracted into employment exactly as in an electrical field. Certain of the workers lose jobs because of machinery, others are admitted to new employments brought about by new capital, others go into the old trades that have gained by acquiring a world market, these in turn lose their jobs in crises, and so a whirling wheel goes about shaking its human constituents irregularly.
According to Marx, as capitalism advances the periods of expansion tend to grow less and those of stagnation and crisis to become longer and more acute. The shrinking of new markets, as more and more are conquered, must diminish progressively the escapes which society has been given from the deadly tendency to reduction of variable capital inherent in the machine.3
NOTES: Marx points out that the protection of labor by factory acts, or industrial relations laws, and industrial inspection by the state helps to reduce isolated little industries and home employments that can live only by “sweating” their workers, because of their insanitary conditions or their long hours, or their lack of investment, as in home-work. It accelerates the concentration of capital and leads to monopoly of the factory system. It destroys the ancient and traditional forms of production (as cigar rolling by hand, by one master and two men) and replaces it by the direct and open sway of capital. In each factory, this system of government regulations forces uniformity, regularity, order, and, therefore, economy.
It helps intensify, despite its humane service, every inherent tendency in capitalism. By destroying the petty and domestic trades, it takes away the last refuge of the redundant population, so putting everyone “on relief” in a crisis. It matures the conditions for an explosion due to the antagonism of classes, by abolishing the safety valve, small, insanitary, inefficient, overworked production.
Marx points out that capitalism, by combining men more in cities, increases social and economic instability, disturbs the circulation of matter (such as human waste) between man and the soil; by the mechanization of agriculture makes it more capitalistic, increases hired and tenant farmers, etc. But the union of town and country must be restored, but in the higher degree that science and technology now permit. Capitalistic agriculture robs the soil, for it seeks a maximum return in a minimum time, whereas the soil is a non-temporal reserve, it requires tilling and care on a long-term basis, on a permanent basis, in fact.
If a country starts on a high industrial plane, it will to that extent treat its farming in the same way. The United States (Marx wrote during the Civil War) will most sharply, therefore, exhibit the erosion and waste of the soil. In industry it harnesses man to the machine and makes him a function of an automaton, in agriculture it injures the permanent heritage of the race for an immense, temporary, impressive gain in production of raw materials required by capitalism to reduce the labor-time of the workers by making food cheap and so develop the accumulation of capital out of surplus-value. One problem leads into the other.
1. Plus the lifelong crusade of Leonard Horner, the humane Factory Inspector.
2. The Luddite Riots of 1811 were the most celebrated. The eloquence of Lord Byron to his unmoved peers is one of the highest expressions of pathos, justice, and understanding on behalf of the workers.
3. The United States is somewhat different, for up to 1890 it was a high-wages country due to free land, and machinery was introduced for that reason. Until the World War the need to explore its resources, and the addition of millions of immigrants, gave it an expanding home market. It shared in the employment created by Europe’s need of raw materials and it used Europe’s money. The triple combination negatived the effects of machinery. But since 1919 machine employment has declined absolutely.