John Stuart Mill doubted that any mechanical invention had lightened any person's day of toil. Marx replies that lightening toil was never the capitalist's aim. A machine is bought to cheapen goods and to shrink the part of the day in which the worker works for himself, so that the part he gives free to the capitalist grows. To see how, Marx asks what a machine really is. Some writers call a machine a complex tool. Others say it is anything not driven by human muscle, which would make an ox-drawn plough a machine and Claussen's circular loom, weaving 96,000 picks a minute under one labourer's hand, a mere tool. John Wyatt began the industrial revolution in 1735 with a spinning machine, and never mentioned that an ass might drive it. He called it a machine "to spin without fingers". For Marx the break comes when the working tool leaves the hand and is fitted into a mechanism. A person can work only as many tools as he has hands and feet. German spinners found two wheels at once too hard, while the Jenny spun with twelve to eighteen spindles from its birth. Once the tool is detached, any force can drive it. The horse was the worst, since it has a head of its own, and wind and water were unreliable and tied to the countryside. Watt's double-acting engine, patented in 1784, made its own force from coal and water, stayed under human control and could stand in a town, so one engine could drive many machines. One envelope machine made over 3,000 an hour, work that once passed through several hands, and a spinning mill or a paper mill became a chain of machines handing the material along without a human touch. The factory turned into "a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories". It grew from manufacture, which supplied the first skilled mechanics, but soon outgrew them. Iron machines of giant size could not be made by hand, so industry built machines with machines. Henry Maudsley's slide rest replaced the hand that guides a cutting tool, and Nasmyth's steam-hammer could crush granite or tap in a nail. In the old workshop the process was fitted to the worker. Now the process is worked out without regard to human hands, and the worker becomes "a mere appendage" to a system that already exists. Does the machine at least make goods cheaper? Only if it hands on less value than the labour it replaces. It creates no new value. It gives up its own value to the product a little at a time as it wears out, so beyond wear, coal and oil it works for nothing, like a force of nature. Mr. Baynes of Blackburn reckoned that one horse-power drives 450 mule spindles, and that two and a half workers on them turn 366 pounds of cotton into yarn in 150 hours, where a hand spinner would need 27,000. One machine now prints as much four-colour calico in an hour, with a man or boy, as 200 men did by hand. A steam plough does in an hour, for three pence, what 66 men do for fifteen shillings. But the capitalist's own limit is tighter than the labour saved. He pays for labour-power, not for labour, so a machine is worth buying only if it costs less than the wages it displaces. That is why machines are invented in England for use in North America. It is also why the owners of woollen mills, once the Factory Acts forced them to use two sets of half-time children, replaced the half-timers with machines, since parents would not sell them cheaper than full-timers. Where human beings are cheap, machines wait. English women still haul canal boats, because the cost of keeping them is below all calculation.
The first thing capital wanted from the machine was workers who needed no muscle: women and children. Machinery threw the whole family onto the labour market and spread the value of one man's labour-power across four people, who now had to give surplus-labour to keep a home that one wage had kept before. The workman had sold his own labour-power as a nominally free agent. Now, Marx says, he sells wife and child and becomes a slave-dealer. A factory inspector found an advertisement for "12 to 20 young persons, not younger than what can pass for 13 years". The Factory Act let children under thirteen work only six hours, and a certifying surgeon had to confirm their age. According to the inspectors themselves, those surgeons overstated the ages to suit the masters. At Bethnal Green, children from nine years old hired themselves out to the silk makers at a public market every Monday and Tuesday morning, at one shilling and eightpence a week for their parents and twopence "for myself and tea". Women let workhouse children out for half a crown a week, and more than 2,000 boys were still sold by their parents as chimney-sweeps. When Parliament limited children's hours in one trade, owners complained that parents sold them to the trades still free. Marx says capital is by nature a leveller, so a limit in one branch spreads to others. The cost showed in the death register. In Manchester 26,125 of every 100,000 infants under one year died in a year, against about 9,000 in the healthiest districts. An inquiry in 1861 blamed mothers working away from home, and the neglect, opiates and starving that followed. Dr. Julian Hunter found much the same in farming districts on the North Sea, where married women worked in gangs under a contractor called the undertaker. The factory inspector Baker wrote that it would be a happy day when no married woman with a family could work in a textile mill. Parliament at last made schooling a condition for factory children, and the manufacturers made it a sham. Inspectors found certificates signed with a cross because the schoolmaster could not write. One master, asked if he could read, answered "Aye, summat", and added that at least he was ahead of his scholars. In Scotland Sir John Kincaid counted 75 children in a schoolroom 15 feet by 10. In the print works, children made up their 150 school hours in scattered afternoons whenever the printer chose to spare them, and lost it all again at work. Machinery also gave capital new reasons to lengthen the day. The machine is an automaton that would go on producing for ever, were it not for the weak bodies and strong wills of those who tend it, and capital, in the person of the capitalist, wants to wear that resistance down. There is money in it. A machine working sixteen hours a day for seven and a half years passes on no more value than one working eight hours for fifteen, but it earns back its price twice as fast, and it is safer from "moral depreciation", the loss of value when a cheaper or better machine appears. While a machine is still rare, its owner makes extra profit and works it hard, to enjoy "the sunny time of this his first love". Mr. Ashworth, a cotton magnate, told Professor Senior that when a labourer lays down his spade he idles a capital of eighteen pence, but when one of his people leaves the mill he idles £100,000. Marx finds it monstrous that a single worker should ever leave the factory. Yet the capitalist is caught in a contradiction he does not see. Surplus-value comes only from living workers, and a machine replaces workers. He cannot squeeze as much from two men as from twenty-four. To make up for fewer workers, he lengthens the day of those he keeps, and the workers the machine throws out form a surplus population that must accept his terms. So the tool that could shorten labour becomes the surest way to place every moment of the worker and his family at capital's disposal. Aristotle dreamed that if shuttles wove by themselves, masters would need no slaves. Marx adds that the ancients lacked "the bump of Christianity" to see that machines are the best means of lengthening the day.
