CAPITAL DRAWING CLUB
at BERGEN ASSEMBLY
5.9.–10.11.2019

POSTERS AND SLIDE TALK

Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 15: Chapter name: Machinery and Large Scale industry: ‘John Stuart Mill says in his Principles of Political Economy: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the days toil of any human being”. That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism’.

‘Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value’.

Posters by Andrew Cooper, Dean Kenning, Enda DeBurka and John Russell


‘For instance , the pumps with which the Dutch emptied the Lake of Harlem in 1836-7 were constructed on the principle of ordinary pumps…the only difference being that their pistons were driven by Cyclopean steam-engines, instead of by men’.

Chapter 15: Chapter name: Machinery and Large Scale industry

‘We have first to investigate, then, how the instruments of labour are converted from tools into machines, or what the difference is between a machine and an implement used in a handicraft’.

‘On a closer examination of the working machine proper we rediscover in it as a general rule, though often in highly modified forms, the very apparatus and tools used by the handicraftsman or the manufacturing worker*; but there is a difference that instead of being the tools of man they are the implements of a mechanism, mechanical implements’.

‘The machine therefore, is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with his tools’.

‘When in 1753 John Wyatt announced his spinning machine, and thereby started the industrial revolution, he nowhere mentioned that the donkey would provide the motive power instead of a man, yet this is what actually happened. In his programme it was called a machine “to spin without fingers”’.

‘We have first to investigate, then, how the instruments of labour are converted from tools into machines, or what the difference is between a machine and an implement used in a handicraft’.

‘On a closer examination of the working machine proper we rediscover in it as a general rule, though often in highly modified forms, the very apparatus and tools used by the handicraftsman or the manufacturing worker*; but there is a difference that instead of being the tools of man they are the implements of a mechanism, mechanical implements’.

‘The machine therefore, is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with his tools’.