Karl Marx - Capital Ch 24 Sec 1 Ch 25 Sections 1-4 - Essay Example

The Role of Evolution in Marx’s Labor Process For Marx, the labor market was a static model by which such theoriesas the law of capitalist accumulation and the theory of labor power could be developed and given theoretical substance. This labor force was a 19th-century phenomenon, a product of the industrial revolution and a natural, historical extension of the expropriations of a wealthy and rapacious upper class. Marx’s laborer was a kind of industrialized serf, a functionary who provided labor value that helped drive the capitalists’ ongoing endeavor to acquire greater wealth and capital.

The worker is purely the actor through whom the means of production acquire value. In Chapter 25 of Capital, Marx states that, “The mass of the means of production which (the worker) thus transforms, increases with the productiveness of his labor” (Marx, 682). The “mass” in question – to use Marx’s own example, the raw material labor transforms into yarn – represents a fundamentally industrial process that is ossified, a carefully preserved scenario to which Marx failed to ascribe the eventuality of progressive change.

Darwinian theorist though he was, Marx appears to have reckoned without the process of evolution, which is surely as pervasive and dynamic in the field of economics as it is in the anthropological study of man’s development. Industrial revolution has given way to industrial evolution, yielding a far more complex and sophisticated labor paradigm than could possibly be accounted for in Marx’s Name 2 equation. Marx does address the “division of labor in manufacture,” proposing that “with the use of machinery, more raw material is worked up in the same time, and, therefore, a greater mass of raw material and auxiliary substances enter in the labour-process” (682).

He explains that this is part of the enhanced productivity with which labor is endowed by mechanization, as are the attendant conditions of increased productivity. But over time, the very nature of productivity may be radically altered as labor evolves, acted upon by technology and other factors unanticipated by Marx. Assuredly, not all influences can be anticipated but as a “scientist” grounded in the concept of evolution, in the maxim that the power of change is exponential, not sequential, Marx omits an important factor: ultimately, the very nature of labor is altered.

Evolution, driven by exponential growth in technology, doesn’t just increase productivity by enhancing the means of production. It allows the laborer to control his or her own means of production. Rather than remaining a link in a chain necessarily controlled by an overarching source of capital, the worker, his means of production and the acquisition of capital have become one. Marx refers to “change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass of means of production, as compared with the mass of the labour-power that vivifies them…(682).

Technology in the strictest sense is a means of production, but its evolution has “evolved” the laborer. Growth in the means of production has come to mean growth in the efficiency of labor, the acceleration of productivity and the simultaneous reduction of masses of raw materials once thought indispensable to the acquisition of wealth. Name 3 Works Cited Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Random House, 1906. Marx did not just disregard the many different forms in which workers could be remunerated (although he acknowledged their existence) but he provided no comprehensive analysis of the labour market.

Thus, while he might have provided an analysis of capital, his analysis of capitalism is deficient because the labour market is a very important part of it. It is argued that the trade in human labour is much more complex than Marx makes out.