Marx, working on ‘Capital,’ writes to Engels with thoughts about the differences between ‘machines’ and ‘tools’ and why it matters for political economy.

‘On Machinery’ (1863) by Karl Marx to Frederick Engels from Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895. International Publishers, New York. 1936.

London, January 28, 1863.

I am adding something to the section on machinery.¹ There are some curious questions here which I ignored in my first treatment. In order to get clear about it I have read through all my notebooks (extracts) on technology again and am also attending a practical course (experimental only) for workers, by Professor Willis (at the Geological Institute in Jermyn Street, where Huxley also used to give his lectures). It is the same for me with mechanics as it is with languages. I understand the mathematical laws, but the simplest technical reality demanding perception is harder to me than to the biggest blockheads.

You may or may not know, for in itself the question does not matter, that there is a great dispute as to what distinguishes a machine from a tool. The English (mathematical) mechanists, in their crude way, call a tool a simple machine and a machine a complicated tool. The English technologists, however, who pay rather more attention to economics (and who are followed by many, by most, of the English economists) base the distinction between the two on the fact that in one case the motive power is derived from human beings, in the other from a natural force. The German asses, who are great at these small things, have therefore concluded that, for instance, a plough is a machine, while the most complicated spinning-jenny, etc., in so far as it is worked by hand, is not. But now if we look round at the elementary forms of the machine there is no question at all that the industrial revolution starts, not from the motive power but from that section of machinery which the English call the working machine. Thus, for instance, the revolution was not due to the substitution of water or steam for the action of the foot in turning the spinning-wheel, but to the transformation of the immediate process of spinning itself and to the displacement of that portion of human labour which was not merely the “exertion of power” (as in working the treadle of the wheel) but was directly applied to the working up of the raw material. On the other hand, it is equally certain that when it is a question, not of the historical development of machinery but of machinery on the basis of the present method of production, the working machine (for instance, the sewing-machine) is the only determining factor; for as soon as this process has been mechanised everyone nowadays knows that the thing can be moved by hand, water-power or a steam-engine according to its size.

To pure mathematicians these questions are indifferent, but they become very important when it is a case of proving the connection between the social relations of human beings and the development of these material methods of production.

The re-reading of my technical-historical extracts has led me to the opinion that, apart from the discoveries of gunpowder, the compass and printing-those necessary pre-requisites of bourgeois development-the two material bases on which the preparations for machine industry were organised within manufacture during the period from the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century (the period in which manufacture was developing from handicraft into actual large-scale industry) were the clock and the mill (at first the corn mill, that is, a water-mill). Both were inherited from the ancients. (The water-mill was introduced into Rome from Asia Minor at the time of Julius Cæsar.) The clock is the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes; the whole theory of the production of regular motion was developed through it. Its nature is such that it is based on a combination of half-artistic handicraft and direct theory. Cardanus, for instance, wrote about (and gave practical formulæ for) the construction of clocks. German authors of the sixteenth century called clockmaking “learned handicraft” (i.e., not of the guilds) and it would be possible to show from the development of the clock how entirely different the relation between theoretical learning and practice was on the basis of the handicraft from what it is, for instance, in large-scale industry. There is also no doubt that in the eighteenth century the idea of applying automatic devices (moved by springs) to production was first suggested by the clock. It can be proved historically that Vaucanson’s experiments on these lines had a tremendous influence on the imagination of the English inventors.

The mill, on the other hand, from the very beginning, as soon as the water-mill was produced, supplies the essential distinctions in the organism of a machine: the mechanical driving power–prime motor–on which it depends; the transmitting mechanism; and, finally, the working machine, which deals with the material–each with an existence independent of the others. The theory of friction, and with it the investigations into the mathematical forms of wheel-work, cogs, etc., were all developed at the mill; here first ditto the theory of measurement of the degree of motive power, of the best way of employing it, etc. Almost all the great mathematicians after the middle of the seventeenth century, so far as they occupied themselves with practical mechanics and its theoretical side, started from the simple corn-grinding water-mill. And indeed this was why the name mill came to be applied during the manufacturing period to all mechanical forms of motive power adapted to practical purposes.

But with the mill, as with the press, the forge, the plough, etc., the actual work of beating, crushing, grinding, pulverisation, etc., was performed from the very first without human labour, even though the moving force was human or animal. This kind of machinery is therefore very ancient, at least in its origins, and actual mechanical propulsion was formerly applied to it. Hence it is also practically the only machinery found in the manufacturing period. The industrial revolution begins as soon as mechanism is employed where from ancient times onwards the final result has always required human labour; not, that is to say, where, as with the tools just mentioned, the actual material to be dealt with has never, from the beginning, been dealt with by the human hand, but where, from the nature of the thing, man has not from the very first merely acted as power. If one is to follow the German asses in calling the use of animal power (which is just as much voluntary movement as human power) machinery, then the use of this kind of locomotive is at any rate much older than the simplest handicraft tool.

1. See Capital, Vol. I, Chap. XV, Section 1, “The Development of Machinery.”

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