Machinery, Productivity, and Relative Surplus Value
Module 6 of Capital and Political Economy: distinguish machinery's technical capacities from its capitalist use and trace how productivity reorganizes necessary and surplus labor.
- Time
- About 92 minutes
- Activities
- Read, retrieve, compare, apply
- Concepts
- Relative surplus value, machinery, and labor-process control
Completion and recall are different.
Completion records what you finished. Recall records what you attempted from memory and when it should return for review.
- Pathway completion
- 0 of 14 steps
- Checkpoints rated
- 0 of 2
- Next review
- Not scheduled
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
- Explain how productivity gains in wage-goods sectors can reduce necessary labor time.
- Distinguish the technical capacity of machinery from the imperatives governing its capitalist employment.
- Analyze automation through displacement, work intensity, deskilling, coordination, and control.
Commit to a first explanation.
If a machine lets workers produce twice as much in the same time, list three different ways the resulting time gain could be used.
Follow the causal sequence.
Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry
Karl Marx
Read with a scope
Read Chapter 15 with four columns in your notes: productivity, employment, intensity, and control. Record how the effects differ at the firm, industry, and social levels.
Keep one question in view: Why can a technology capable of reducing labor time instead lengthen, intensify, or destabilize work under capitalist competition?
Explain the method without the source.
Watch the analytical operation.
Barcode picking cuts the time per order in half, so warehouse workers should work half as many hours.
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Identify technical capacity
The system can produce the previous order volume with fewer direct labor hours.
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Add the competitive objective
Management may use the gain to expand volume, lower unit cost, or win market share rather than shorten shifts.
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Track intensity and control
Scanners can set pace, measure pauses, redistribute knowledge, and make performance continuously visible.
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Distinguish levels
One firm may displace workers while lower costs and expanded output change employment elsewhere in the industry.
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Recover the contested alternative
Shorter hours are technically possible but depend on ownership, bargaining power, regulation, and collective priorities.
Complete the missing steps.
The opening steps are supplied. Finish the analysis in your own words, then compare your reasoning before trying the independent case.
In a hypothetical economy, generalized milling machinery halves the value of flour, so it must also halve necessary labor time.
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Locate flour in the consumption bundle
Assume flour initially accounts for one fifth of the value of workers' customary subsistence bundle. The bundle's quantities and every other component's value stay fixed.
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Fix the starting working day
Before the change, necessary labor takes four hours of an eight-hour day. Assume the lower bundle value fully lowers the value of labor power.
Apply the structure to a new case.
Rate both checkpoints, then record this pathway step.
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