1. What is the difference between a tool and a machine?
Crib-sheet
2. In his analysis of 'manufacture', Marx argues that it creates a workforce of narrowly specialised workers. Does modern machine industry do the same?
Crib-sheet
3. How does modern machine industry make 'abstract labour' a social reality rather than just one way of looking at labour?
Crib-sheet
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?
Crib-sheet
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?'
Crib-sheet
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?
Crib-sheet
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?
Crib-sheet