Thread by @adnanahusain

#WeeklyMarx Instalment 12, #GoodMorningMarx Day 90, Capital v.1, pp. 467-494, 14 secs 3-5, start of Chp 15.

As we learned in Chp 13 Co-operation, many hands make light work; many working together produce more than their individual capacity aggregated. It is a social process!

One outcome of that social aspect of the labor process is the increased resistance to the domination of capital and the pressure of capital to overcome this resistance. A despotism of the capitalist. But special kinds of wage-labourers must be developed to manage and control the

labour process of coordinating the army of workers, officers or foremen, like the overseer on the plantation. So the capitalist now without the obvious coercion wields the power that the Pharaoh had of coordinating the coerced labour of so many to produce the wonders of pyramids.

This new form of co-operation is specific to the capitalist mode of production's transformation of the labour process into a social process. This form of cooperation involves a specific division of labour and manufacture, to which Marx turns in Chp. 14. He describes the ways in

manufacture changes and the commodity "from being the individual product of an independent craftsman becomes the social product of a union of craftsmen, each of whom performs one and only one, of the constituent partial operations." In section 2 he describes the process by which

the body becomes a tool, a machine of a particular operation. Craft knowledge, specialized labor, often was hereditary precisely to preserve this labour process knowledge. Marx gives a great example here of Indian weavers that reminds us of Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton (it

took the plantation slavery system and colonial control to make the English weaving competitive with Indian weavers). Marx illustrates how the new forms of cooperation and division of labor rework the labor process and the worker with the effect of maximizing the efficiencies

of labour time and surplus value and always reducing the value of labour power. This division of labour in manufacturing has its corresponding consequences on the division of labour in society that Marx calls the foundation of all commodity production in the capitalist mode.

Marx engages in a sociological analysis suggesting the first stage involved is the separation of town from country. The density of population and the infrastructure of communication is a precondition for reorganizing production with the armies of workers invisibly united to

produce commodities-herdsman, tanner, shoemaker. But the specialized worker produces no commodity, which is the product of collective labor. So there is a very contradictory relationship between the division of labor in the factory and that of society in liberal political

where the despotism of production and anarchy of market society mutually inform each other. Where do you want your autonomy and "freedom"?!? Alas, Marx, succumbs here to a view of the unchanging "Asiatic" society despite the ceaseless revolving of dynastic power, one to another,

which made me wonder--did Marx know Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah?! Marx concludes, " While the division of labour in society at large, whether mediated through the exchange of commodities or not, can exist in the most diverse economic formations of society, the division of labour in

the workshop, as practised by manufacture, is an entirely specific creation of the capitalist mode of production. What is the capitalist character manufacture: the transformation of the social means of production and subsistence into capital MUST keep extending; it creates a

hierarchical structurre among workers; it converts the worker "into a crippled monstrosity" as an appendage of the workshop and a fragment of himself. The capitalist mode is the first to "provide the materials and impetus for industrial pathology." It is a more refined and

civilized means of exploitation. No longer an artisan and creator, the worker is debased into a tool of capital. A biological machine. The question of machines is the subject to which Marx now turns. Keep reading, comrades!