Modern Mechanical Industry

The third stage of the development of the capitalist productive forces, i.e., the capitalist industry that replaced hand tools with machines and manual labor with mechanical labor. Since the last 30 years of the 18th century, the major capitalist countries in Western Europe have gradually transitioned from manufacture to modern mechanical industry through industrial revolutions.

The advent of the stage of modern capitalist mechanical industry means that the material and technical basis on which the capitalist mode of production was built has been solidified, and capitalist production has acquired its mature or typical form. Such a revolution in the mode of production begins with the labor-power, in modern mechanical industry, it begins with the instruments of labor, especially with the mechanical tools or machines, which was “a revolution in the instruments of labor”. The implements of labor, in the form of machinery, necessitates the substitution of natural forces for human force, and the conscious application of science, instead of rule of thumb. In manufacture, the organization of the social labor-process is purely subjective; it is a combination of detail laborers; in its machinery system, modern Industry has a productive organism that is purely objective, in which the laborer becomes a mere appendage to an already existing material condition of production. In simple co-operation, and even in that founded on division of labor, the suppression of the isolated, by the collective, workman still appears to be more or less accidental. Machinery, with a few exceptions to be mentioned later, operates only by means of associated labor, or labor in common. Hence the co-operative character of the labor-process is, in the latter case, a technical necessity dictated by the instrument of labor itself. It was not till it did this, that modern industry built up for itself a fitting technical foundation.

On the other hand, this revolution in the instruments of labor was undoubtedly the most powerful means for increasing the productivity of labor, i.e., for shortening the labor-time required in the production of a commodity. However, under the capitalist system, the machine, as the carrier of capital, brought a series of serious consequences to the working class. (1) The machine became a means for producing surplus-value, thus for exploiting wage-labor. In capitalist society, the machine is not designed to lighten the labor burden of the wage-laborer, but to shorten the necessary labor-time and lengthen the surplus labor-time, and become the most powerful means for lengthening the working-day beyond all bounds set by human nature in order to squeeze more surplus-value. It is the limitation of the use of machinery under capitalist conditions that capitalists use them only when the value of the machinery is less than the value of the labor it replaces. (2) The labor of women and children was the first thing sought for by capitalists who used machinery. This is because machinery simplifies the labor-process and puts all men, women and children under the direct control of capital. (3) The use of machinery, especially with the spread of the assembly line mode of production, has increasingly made the worker an appendage of the machinery, and the relation of wage-labor to capital has been transformed from a formal subsumption to the real subsumption. (4) The use of machinery in capitalist production has also created a vast industrial reserve army, thus intensifying the contradictions and the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.