Marx follows a capitalist who has just bought two things on the open market: the means of production and a worker's labour-power. Now he has to use them. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting its seller to work, so Marx first looks at the work alone, with the capitalist set aside. A spider weaves and a bee builds cells that shame many an architect, he says, but the architect raises his structure in his head before he builds it. Human work starts with a purpose, and the worker must keep his will bent to that purpose the whole time. Marx splits the act into three parts: the work itself, the thing worked on, and the tools. The earth is the first larder and the first tool house. A fish pulled from the water, an ore already dug and ready for washing, a stone for throwing: each sits at a different stage of labour. Tools matter most, because they date an age. We tell the stone, bronze and iron ages apart by how things were made and with what, not by what was made.
Nothing is fixed as raw material, tool or finished product. Its place in the process decides which it is. Corn is raw material for the miller, the distiller and the cattle-breeder, and it is also next year's seed. Once a spindle or a handful of flax enters a new process, nobody cares who made it, just as a person eating bread does not think of the farmer, the miller and the baker. Only a blunt knife or a weak thread reminds the user of Mr. A., the cutler, or Mr. B., the spinner. Yet these things are useless alone. Iron rusts, wood rots, and yarn that nobody weaves is wasted cotton. Living labour has to seize them and rouse them from their death-sleep. Marx calls this productive consumption: labour uses up its materials and tools to make something new. Then he returns to the capitalist, and two facts follow. The worker labours under the capitalist's eye, which watches for waste. And the product belongs to the capitalist, like wine fermenting in his own cellar, because he bought a day's use of labour-power just as he might hire a horse for the day. The taste of porridge does not tell you who grew the oats, and this plain account of work does not say whether it is done under a slave-owner's lash or a capitalist's anxious eye.
