Machinery completes the revolution manufacture began. Marx starts from the machine as an organized system of tools driven by a motor mechanism, not a single improved implement. The factory replaces the worker as regulator of tools with the worker as appendage of the machine.
Machinery transfers less new value per product if it lasts longer and works faster, but it also displaces living labour and intensifies work. Capital uses machines not only to cheapen goods but to lengthen the day, widen employment of women and children, and raise the pace inside set hours. The famous compensation argument, that machines create as many jobs as they destroy, collapses under evidence of displacement, deskilling, and periodic crises.
Modern industry overthrows handicraft cooperation, sucks populations into factories, and then exports misery through the world market. Domestic industry survives as a degraded form where middlemen drive piece rates into home workshops. Against this spontaneously developed system, factory legislation emerges as society's first conscious, methodical reaction. Marx treats the law limiting hours not as charity but as a forced adjustment when capital's own development makes unbounded exploitation socially unbearable.
Machinery concentrates pace-setting in capital's hands, turns workers into appendages of equipment, and expands output without granting proportional control or pay, which is why automation debates still turn on who owns the machine and the schedule.
Coming Up in Chapter 16
Part V closes by comparing absolute and relative surplus-value directly, redefining productive labour under capitalism, and showing how natural conditions and bad economics obscure the origin of surplus-value Marx reunites the two strategies of surplus extraction and sharpens the concept of productive labour under capitalism. Absolute surplus-value extends the working day beyond necessary labour..
