Chapter 13: Cooperation
Marx Tweetz:
- Even when the laborer has been exploited as an individual acting as part of a group, capitalist forces will urge them to collaborate, and as a group they can produce more than the sum of their parts, and thus there is extra surplus to be extracted by the capitalist.
- There is a tension between the fact that capitalism urges individual worked to act as group, to cooperate to generate even greater surplus, and the fact that on discovering the group, the worker has more power to resist capitalist forces.
"Co-operation: In this chapter Marx looks at co-operation in its specific capitalist form. Co-operation is extremely important because it comprises the basis of capitalist production – i.e. capital’s ability to bring workers together, realising their powers as collective labourer whilst still benefiting from them as producers independent of each other. We are thus edging closer to the implications of that which was discussed in the previous chapter on the social relations of production. In this chapter, some of us may have picked up a distinctively emergentist perspective; for example, Marx emphasises the importance of the simultaneity of the bringing together of workers under whichever arrangement happens to suit the capitalist best at a given moment and in a particular society1 . There is, therefore, a “social character” to labour, as Marx calls it, which increases the total productivity of the workers brought together: “Not only do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one” (443); “the time necessary for the completion of the whole work is thereby shortened” (445). In simple terms, bringing workers together under a particular arrangement awards the collective of workers with additional properties – a power through which, Marx argues, the worker “strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species” (447)2 . Once again, we need to look at what is politically salient about this, since here Marx gives us notable insights regarding class struggle and alienation:
“Concentration of large masses of the means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is a material condition for the co-operation of wage-labourers…
The extent of co-operation, or the scale of production, depends on the extent of this concentration” (448)
The capitalist’s planning, command and surveillance of production becomes a necessary condition of the production process (448-449)
Here Marx also asserts that “the greatest possible production of surplus-value” is basically equivalent to “the greatest possible exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist” (ibid.)
“As the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and, necessarily, the pressure put on by capital to overcome this resistance” (ibid.)
Given this, there is an “unavoidable antagonism” inherent to the capitalist production process (ibid.)
Furthermore, as we are here concerned exclusively with capitalist co-operation, Marx notes that when workers are brought together as labour-power purchased by capital, they become increasingly unable to enjoy the fruits of their own and reciprocal labour through other mediations. That is, their respective labour comes to gain a social character exclusively insofar as it conceals the planning and authority of the capitalist. Workers therefore “enter relations with the capitalist, but not with each other” (450-451).
The additional productive power of a collective of workers labouring in unison for the capitalist becomes a “free gift to capital”. This power which belongs to the collective of workers thus comes to appear to the individual worker as the property of the capitalist, i.e. as something external to the worker and outside her control (451). On page (452) Marx also gives us a few points about pre-capitalist forms of co-operation, before moving on to looking at the development of co-operation alongside the development of manufacture.