Chapter 14: The Capitalist Character of Manufacture

Marx Tweetz: Under capitalism, cooperation taken to it's extreme results in the social division of labour, under which the worker becomes merely part of a machine and looses their individual productive power.

"the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him."

Social division of labor - workers specialize in one task and work together to produce commodities such that no one person is responsible (or eventually able to produce) for the final product). This is typically thought to be more efficient than to have each person make a whole product, and it is considered to be an important aspect of the industrial revolution. The division of labor is a specifically capitalist form of social production; it creates even more surplus-value at the expense of the worker (a more refined way to exploit workers) but is also a necessary part of civilization's progress.

The impact of cooperation or the division of labour between workers to create more value (surplus value) for the capitalist drives the social division of labour which in turn contributes to separation of town and country, the disintegration of communities, the specialisation of certain areas of a country according to the social division of labour, the homogenisation of tasks, workers becoming mere appendages of the workshop; the need to discipline indispensable highly-skilled workers and the introduction of large-scale machinery into production.

"In this chapter Marx completes his discussion of co-operation by tracing its bearing on the development of tool-making in manufacture as the historical precursor of the invention, development and introduction of large-scale machinery into the factory. We are looking here at the period between the mid-16th and late 18th centuries, when the capitalist social division of labour enters the picture with all its political implications.

Manufacturing grows out of two processes of handicraft: (1) the thorough specialisation of labour to the extent that the production of a particular commodity depends on the combination of independent tasks; (2) the splitting of a trade into minute tasks and operations within a group of co-operating craftsmen. The result is a division of labour and, eventually, a wage hierarchy between skilled and unskilled workers3 . “The different stages of the process, previously successive in time, have become simultaneous and contiguous in space” (464), allowing the capitalist to make production even more cost-effective by increasing the intensity of labour.

Once the most efficient arrangement is discovered by the individual capitalist, all that is left for her to do is to increase the scale of production accordingly. This plays to the advantage of the capitalist, for whom the value of labour-power falls and, conversely, the rate of surplus-value increases. We thus begin to delve deeper into how workers’ labour is regulated by and appears exclusively through the exchange of commodities. When exchange becomes the sole means of bringing together different branches of production, the social division of labour arises.

The consequences of this are many: the separation of town and country; the disintegration of communities; the specialisation of certain areas of a country according to the social division of labour; the homogenisation of tasks; workers becoming mere appendages of the workshop; the need to discipline indispensable highly-skilled workers; the introduction of large-scale machinery into production4 . The full consequences of this on the heightening of the antagonism between workers and capitalists in the stage of large-scale industry will appear in later chapters. But we can already see that the activity of the individual worker who forms part of a highly defined technical division of labour in the manufacturing period is beginning to be reduced to that of tending to the machines – stultifying workers and resulting in the general de-skilling of a large portion of the workforce."

Taylorism

Fordism:

Academic division of labour

Different department vc project based learners, poly maths. This is the the danger that capitalism poses. it separates our forms of knowledge.