workers and groups of workers” results in “a special kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen, overseers).” A certain structure of supervision of the workers emerges which is both authoritarian and “purely despotic.” In this, the capitalist acquires a distinctive role as orchestrator of the labor process in all its aspects. “It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an attribute of capital” (450–1). Only by way of command over the labor process can capital be both produced and reproduced. Laborers, on the other hand,
enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with each other. Their cooperation only begins with the labour process, but by then they have ceased to belong to themselves. On entering the labour process they are incorporated into capital. As co-operators, as members of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital.
Workers lose their personhood and become mere variable capital. This is what Marx means by the real subsumption of the laborer under capital.
The socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital which places them under these conditions. Because this power costs capital nothing, while on the other hand it is not developed by the worker until his labour itself belongs to capital, it appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature—a productive power inherent in capital. (451)
An inherent power of labor, the social power of cooperation, is appropriated by capital and made to appear as a power of capital over the workers. Historical examples of enforced cooperation abound—the Middle Ages, slavery, colonies, slave labor—but under capitalism the connection of organized cooperation to wage labor is manifest in special ways. This had a key role in the rise of capitalism.
The simultaneous employment of a large number of wage-labourers in the same labour process … forms the starting-point of capitalist production. This starting-point coincides with the birth of capital itself. If then, on the one hand, the capitalist mode of production is a historically necessary condition for the transformation of the labour process into a social process, so, on the other hand, this social form of the labour process is a method employed by capital for the more profitable exploitation of labour, by increasing its productive power. (453)
This originary status of a certain form of cooperation is perpetuated throughout the whole history of capitalism.
Simple co-operation has always been, and continues to be, the predominant form in those branches of production in which capital operates on a large scale, but the division of labour and machinery play only an insignificant part … Co-operation remains the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production, although in its simple shape it continues to appear as one particular form alongside the more developed ones. (454)
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
