Das Kapital

The historical and logical starting point of capitalist production lies in co-operation — the simultaneous employment of many workers by one capitalist on a common task. Co-operation is not merely addition. Twelve workers together for twelve hours do not simply produce what twelve isolated workers would produce separately. They produce more. Individual differences in skill and pace average out across a large group, smoothing production toward the social norm. Tasks that require many simultaneous hands — building a wall, hauling a barge — become possible. Workers stimulate each other through the social character of the labour. Shared use of tools, workspace, and materials reduces per-unit costs. The working day of the group, taken as a whole, is a single combined social labour-day. This new productive power — generated by combination itself, not by any individual worker — belongs entirely to capital. Workers are hired and paid as individuals. Their combined force is something none of them contributed as individuals. It emerges from their association. And since it is the capitalist who organises and commands that association, the surplus power of co-operation appears to be a natural attribute of capital — a gift of capital to the production process — rather than what it actually is: the social power of combined labour, appropriated without payment. Co-operation also requires coordination, which requires hierarchy. The capitalist becomes a commander of industrial labour — and like military commanders, they require lieutenants: overseers, managers, foremen. This layer of supervision is not neutral administration; it is capital's instrument for maintaining discipline over a workforce whose collective power could, if directed otherwise, challenge the conditions of its own exploitation. Historically, capitalist co-operation began simply by enlarging the master's workshop. What distinguished it from guild production was scale, and from that quantitative difference, qualitative ones followed.