1. After scattered handicraft production, Marx identifies two further stages of development of capitalist production prior to machine industry. How are each of these three stages defined?
The stages are:
a) Handicraft production, often in workers' own homes, with the capitalist supplying the materials to be worked on and then collecting the products to sell.
b) Simple cooperation, where large numbers of workers are gathered together in a single workshop, though they may all be doing the same work side by side.
c) What Marx calls 'manufacture' (the usage in his day was different from today, and he means something different from what 'manufacturing' means today). Here, large numbers of workers are assembled in a workshop, but the work is divided between them so that each specialises in a partial task.
2. Increased productivity of labour is, on the face of it, a good thing. Why is it not as simple as that for the workers?
Simple cooperation, manufacture, and machine industry all boost productivity. But they also boost the power of capital over the workers. For the workers, increased productivity may well mean increased production of the wealth and power which dominates them.
3. Does capitalism promote or hinder routine large-scale cooperation in social production? Does that cooperation promote or hinder capitalism?
Capital promotes large-scale cooperation in social production. In fact Marx argues that routine large-scale cooperation in social production - as distinct from 'the sporadic application of cooperation on a large scale in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, and in modern colonies [which] reposes on relations of dominion and servitude, principally on slavery' - this cooperation 'appears to be a historical form peculiar to, and specifically distinguishing, the capitalist process of production'. Cooperation promotes capitalist production, but also promotes forces subversive of capitalist production. 'As the number of the cooperating labourers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital'.
4. Why do the creative powers of the collective worker appear as the property of capital?
Because the workers, instead of consciously organising as a collective, are brought together - in the first place at least - by being hired, individually, one by one, by capital. Capital thus appears as the owner, and even the producer, of the extent to which the whole is more than the sum of its parts - the extra productive power arising from cooperation, division of labour, and science.
5. How can those creative powers come to appear as the workers' own property?
By the workers consciously organising themselves as a collective and doing away with the capitalist as intermediary.