'Machinery and Modern Industry'

1) Volume I Group: 'Machinery and Modern Industry'


The previous Volume I reading session introduced by Dan Swain on 'Relative Surplus-value, Co-operation, the Division of Labour & Manufacture' is available here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/455178841/KCLReadingCapital_28_Mar_2011.mp3

Our next session will be on Chapter 15: 'Machinery and Modern Industry'. The discussion will be introduced by Tony Phillips - All welcome!

Wednesday 11th May
6:30pm
Room C16, German Dept.
Strand Campus
King's College London


N.B. We will be reading Vol.I chapter 15 for this session.


"In manufacture, the revolution in the mode of production begins with the labour-power, in modern industry it begins with the instruments of labour. Our first inquiry then is, how the instruments of labour are converted from tools into machines, or what is the difference between a machine and the implements of a handicraft?"


"The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution, supersedes the workman, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools, and set in motion by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power may be. Here we have the machine, but only as an elementary factor of production by machinery."


"An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automaton, is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, in the place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs."


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2) Upcoming events:


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