Grundrisse

by Marx, Karl (1993)

Key Passage

In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; the relation of capital as value which appropriates value creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as machinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the use value of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, the value objectified in machinery appears as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude; the production in enormous mass quantities which is posited with machinery destroys every connection of the product with the direct need of the producer, and hence with direct use value; it is already posited in the form of the product's production and in therelations in which it is produced that it is produced only as a conveyor of value, and its use value onlyas condition to that end. (p.694)

Keywords

No Keywords

Themes

"Fragment on Machines", Living Labour

Translator

Fowkes, B.

Citation

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