1. What is the difference between a tool and a machine?
A worker uses a tool to do a job. A machine does the job, and under capitalist production the machine 'uses' a worker to mind it, feed it, regulate it, or even to provide the motive power for it.
2. In his analysis of 'manufacture', Marx argues that it creates a workforce of narrowly specialised workers. Does modern machine industry do the same?
No. It tends to produce a less specialised crowd of machine-minders and helpers, and since machinery is changing the worker must get used to moving from one machine to another.
3. How does modern machine industry make 'abstract labour' a social reality rather than just one way of looking at labour?
What the working class as a whole, or even one particular worker over a length of time, does, is 'abstract labour' - expenditure of labour-power in various different ways, but defined not by the different ways but by the abstract expenditure. Machine industry makes labour more and more 'abstract' for the working class. At the same time it makes it more 'concrete' - more productive of a rich variety of wealth - for the capitalists.
4. If machinery enables less labour to produce more products, how is it that machine industry also enables and drives capitalists to lengthen the working day (as we saw in week 5) and intensify it?
Once the work process is centred round a system of machines, the capitalist can keep production going at a set pace for a set period simply by keeping the machines running, whereas with hand work it is difficult to stop the workers slowing down after a while. The capitalists are driven to keep the machines running as many hours as possible in order to speed up the transfer of value from those machines to the product.
5. In any social order, new technologies would devalue old skills, and cause difficulties for the workers specialising in those skills. So what is so special about capital's use of new technologies that under it 'the instrument of labour strikes down the labourer?'
Capital uses science not to lighten labour and increase free time, but to increase capital, squeezing harder those who remain in jobs and making others jobless. The displaced workers are not retrained or helped to adapt their skills, but trashed. Marx writes: 'By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is... finally completed by modern industry... The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the 'master'.'
6. In chapter 14 (in a passage not included in Rühle) Marx writes sarcastically against free-marketeer opponents of labour protection laws that: 'It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organisation of labour in society than that it would turn all society into one immense factory'. Does Marx himself want to turn all society into one immense factory?
No! Marx wanted to do away with the oppressive relations in the various factories that existed - by democratic reorganisation of production and by shortening working hours - not to extend them to the whole of society. He wrote in Capital volume 3:
'The realm of freedom... begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production... With... development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of... wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite'.
7. Of modern industry Marx writes that: 'By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the processes of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one'. Which elements? which forces?
The elements: technology, productive powers, a multi-skilled and multi-faceted working class. The forces: that working class, increasingly moulded into a collective force by the workings of capitalism itself.