 We ended chapter 11, I think it is, talking about obviously the working day and the kind of the brutal exploitative methods that the capitalists use to try and squeeze this surplus value out of the working class. But the point is obviously that there's only so many hours in the working day, there's only so much you can squeeze out of simply working the worker harder. At a certain point you reach the limit of time, there's only 24 hours in the day, but you also reach a physical limit. The working class does not have infinite amounts of work within them, at a certain point obviously all this degradation takes its toll. And therefore what the capitalists seek to do to increase their surplus value further, Mark says, begins in chapter 12, is to explore and intensify, develop the idea of relative surplus value. Now that basically what we've got here is we're talking about surplus and we're talking about wages, the S and the V, the variable capital. And this ratio between the two, S over V, Mark calls the rate of exploitation, the amount of surplus extracted from the working class given a certain amount paid back in the form of wages. Now obviously by extending the working day they're extending that surplus, they're extending the absolute amount of surplus they get. But Mark says, well there's another way they can increase their surplus value and that's by increasing the relative amount. In other words, if the working day is affixed, actually reduce the amount of the working day that needs to be paid back in the form of wages. And that means tackling the kind of denominator in this equation and trying to cheapen basically the commodity of labour power itself. And in short, what we're really talking about here is the idea of increasing productivity. That's what really these chapters 12, 13, 14 are focused on, the idea that really the real motor force behind capitalism or behind society is the development of productivity, being able to produce more with less labour, do more with less and produce more use values with a shorter amount of labour time. Now the thing with capitalism is whilst obviously this general process is going on of increasing productivity across the board, it doesn't happen in a planned and kind of thought out way. It's a chaotic and anarchic process under capitalism because as Adam Smith said, you have the invisible hand operating ultimately, the market, the price signals, the competition, that all of this is what really the method by which capitalism progresses. And what you have is each individual capitalist is obviously ultimately their motivation is to try and reduce their own labour costs. They're trying to either cheapen, obviously the cheapen the amount they spend on wages. And that means replacing ultimately workers with machines and making each individual worker more productive. Make them be able to produce more in a shorter space of time and therefore reduce the total amount of workers they need to employ. And obviously so each individual capitalist is doing this to try and ultimately because they want to try and cheapen their own commodities. They're investing in technology and new machinery and so forth because they want to be able to produce lower than their rivals. If there's a socially average necessary labour time that's been established as we talked about earlier, a kind of market price if you like, if you can cheapen the cost of your commodities and push that price lower, then you can make super profits, you can out-compete all of your fellow capitalists and suck up their market share. And that's really what drives obviously the individual capitalist. But overall obviously when every individual capitalist is doing this, investing in new machinery, investing in new technology, you get an overall development across the society where the socially necessary labour time across all commodities is generally going down. And therefore you're reducing the actual cost of labour power itself because obviously the actual commodities are getting cheaper and wages therefore which are determined by the commodities consumed by the working class are going down as well. Now Marx highlights that fundamentally productivity comes from two different categories, two different areas, productivity increases. One is the question of technology, machinery and automation and we'll come onto that in a second. That's the topic of chapter 15 but I'll cover that later on. But what I want to focus on first is what he calls techniques basically as management techniques, organisation within the factory, within the workplace and also skills and experience. You know these obviously the capitalists invest in training and an education of their workforce for a reason because a more educated skilled workforce is more productive and obviously they can then out-compete their competitors if they've got that extra skilled workforce. So obviously ties in with the whole question of education and the capitalism but that's a whole other topic, won't have time to go into. Now Marx as I said begins by looking at this latter thing, the question of the kind of management and organisational techniques within the workplace and he highlights the role effectively of cooperation and of division of labour. So you've got this dual process going on within the workplace. Well on the one hand the capitalist is basically dividing up the work that needs to be done into smaller and smaller tasks but on the other hand is bringing more and more workers together under one roof to do all of these miniscule tasks as part of an integrated network, an integrated plan within that factory, within that workplace or office and it's this that Adam Smith actually talked about. He had the example of a pin factory where each individual worker is just doing the same monotonous action over and over again to produce this pin but it's split up into miniscule tasks and ultimately none of them is producing the pin in itself but each of them through the kind of specialisation is able to become more and more efficient and increase their productivity. In other words what you've got is this incredible specialisation, this intense division of labour that capitalism takes to an even more extreme lengths. James talked about how you've always had a division of labour under class society and commodity production under capitalism it's taken to this extraordinary extreme. The other thing you see as I say is workers being brought more and more together under a common plan within the sphere of one workplace. In other words what we talk about as being economies of scale, you see today how different businesses will what they call horizontally and vertically integrate. Horizontal integration is the idea that you buy up your competitors and accumulate more and more of that particular market. Vertical integration is the idea that you buy up both your suppliers and your distributors so you're forming a kind of common chain of production all the way from the top to the bottom and you see this going on very much today under 21st century capitalism. I would say this whole process contributes even more enormously to the question of alienation the idea that workers are more and more divorced from their actual product and more at your specialised to the point where you don't really understand what task you're actually doing or in the sense that you don't necessarily see the bigger picture if you like. Anyone who's worked in any office job knows how monotonous and tedious you can describe almost any office job these days with the same set of fundamental tasks emails, spreadsheets, phone calls and so forth and it's incredibly alienating work despite being so-called white collar jobs and so forth because it's broken down into these miniscule tasks where it's impossible to really see what you yourself are producing you don't feel any connection to the product that you're making and you see this as people have said today already the examples of call centres of a lot of office jobs and particularly of the gig economy these kind of very precarious work where this extreme sense of alienation that Marx talks about but as I say you've also got the process where workers as well as being kind of atomised in these kind of jobs like the bogus self-employment and so forth they're also increasingly brought together within one company you've got these factories in China now producing iPhones the Foxconn factories which are literally cities hundreds of thousands of workers producing within one factory and they never leave the complex they sleep there they marry there they go out partying at the weekends in social venues owned by Foxconn and Apple and so forth so you see how enormous the scale of production is and actually that is what Marx refers to as the idea that capitalism creates its own grave diggers it's bringing workers together these workers in China who used to be atomised peasants now all within one factory and going on strike and actually having a sense of class consciousness so you see the political side of this the social side of this the capitalism creating its own grave diggers hence why alongside this as I say you've got the process of the capitalist trying to atomise isolate workers, break up the trade unions, restrict trade union rights restrict the right to organise and so forth but as I said this economy of scale is being achieved this kind of bringing together of production under one roof what it really implies is there is you know although it's not really ever admitted by the capitalist because they hate to say the word but there is a plan going on within the workplace the fact that you've got all these workers coming together operating these miniscule tasks but being all integrated it shows that someone somewhere is obviously planning that someone within the factory, within the office is dictating this process is bringing all this capital together and you see this taken to extremes under capitalism today the idea of monopoly capitalism every market you can possibly name really today in the advanced capitalist countries is dominated by a handful of companies oligopolies as they're called in traditional economics and we would call it monopoly capitalism the idea that all these individual markets all these sectors in every country are dominated by a handful of companies whether it's the banks or the utilities the landlords all of these are just a miniscule amount of companies concentrating this wealth together and internally the point is these companies are incredibly planned they take a company like Tesco for example a huge supermarket chain or Lidl where I personally do my shopping but it's no different fundamentally they all fundamentally are planning from the farms and the factories through to the shops and the supermarkets they've got a network of knowing that as soon as you check through and you do it yourself these days because the people used to do it have been automated they know how much then to order they know how much needs to be brought in they know the price to set things out or this incredible level of planning and efficiency within the firm done obviously to increase profits but yet between the different firms between these different monopolies you have the anarchy of the market you leave everything up to prices and to this so-called invisible hand and obviously that contributes towards this tendency towards overproduction the idea that each individual firm is producing more and more and more trying to get bigger and bigger slice of the pie but they're all doing this at the same time churning out this abundance of goods and at the same time replacing all those cashiers with self-checkout machines and therefore pushing away cutting away at the very branch that they're sitting on cutting away at the market of the wages that need to buy all these goods now this brings us on to the second half of this question the question of technology and machinery which as Marks highlights in Chapter 15 is not brought in in order to reduce the burden of work we have this idea that science fiction says robots will go around and clean up after us and be there as these kind of terminator meets jeevs sort of thing where they're going to come around and help us in our daily tasks that's the kind of science fiction imagination of what technology should do but obviously the reality and the capitalism is that the machinery is brought in not to alleviate the burden of work on the worker but rather to get them to be even more productive to get them to produce even more with less and to increase the profits of the capitalism for the capitalists and it's this driving force to find why machinery is brought in that explains all the contradictions that we see in terms of machinery and technology under capitalism we see today the fact that there's this abundance of technological potential in the world and yet productivity growth has stalled you can't pick up a newspaper these days without hearing about the latest gadget that's been invented or the next potential breakthrough that's going to revolutionise our lives if anyone ever subscribed to The New Scientist I used to do engineering in a previous life and I remember our lecturers saying if every discovery that was heralded on the front page of New Scientist had come true we'd be living in this kind of socialist utopia right now of perfectly green energy and super abundance for all and inequality destroyed the point is that none of this has come to fruition and in fact the reverse has happened actually productivity growth has stalled over the years productivity increases are there but they're focused within the hands of these tiny monopolies tiny number of monopolies the tech companies in particular companies like Apple and Google they're obviously highly productive churning out billions in terms of wealth and employing relatively few in terms of their actual employees and that obviously gives rise to the inequalities that we'll discuss in the next session the fact that there are productivity increases but the benefits of that are focused more and more in the hands of the tiny few capitalists who are in those sectors and at the same time they're employing fewer and fewer workers and those who are left behind have no skills are not reeducated are being replaced by robots you have this idea now there's a book released by some MIT economists called Race Against the Machine and it's the idea that more and more you're seeing again in the press the idea that we're in not in harmony with the technology they're invented but actually in some sort of competition with it workers can actually see that in effect they're not just competing against each other now for jobs but they've got this threat of the machine hanging over them and Marx makes this point 150 years ago says that the capitalist always uses this threat of being replaced by the machine as a lever to push down the wages of the worker even further say if you won't accept lower wages I've got this machine here that doesn't belong to a trade union that doesn't complain and once I've bought it I don't have to pay it anything so you've always got that kind of threat there and therefore those who are out of these productive sectors are forced more and more into things like the gig economy into actually very low skilled very low productive sectors what a contradiction we have where on the one hand we're talking about the wonders of Apple and Google and all this face recognition and AI and all this sorts of things self-driving cars and yet actually the economy these days is based on people driving around on bikes to deliver food that's not efficient, that's not productive but it shows you the contradictions that capitalism creates in terms of technology and in fact Marx highlights I mean it's incredibly prophetic when you think about it 150 years ago he's highlighting these kind of fears that we see as kind of zeitgeist in the press today 150 years ago he points out that actually capitalism itself becomes a barrier to developing and implementing technology because what you have is wages pushed down so much by this competition by this threat of automation by things like globalization tax on the trade unions and the anti working class laws and so forth all of this pushes to drive wages to the point where actually it's not cost effective to use a machine anymore machines cost money to develop they cost money to implement you've got to rearrange your factory your office and so forth but a worker well if you can just hire them like that and then fire them at the next whim then you just employ an army of precarious workers and you see that today productivity is stagnated there's an ought in Britain in particular we've actually seen a fall in productivity since the beginning of the 2008 crisis and there's an all time low of investment into machinery, into technology into research and development and instead a reliance on this kind of service sector of low productive jobs and so forth and what it really shows actually is that technology is not some sort of deus ex machina it's not something like a manner from heaven that just falls from the sky like oh you know more technology please yes and it's just some sort of inevitable progress in society what we see is actually technology historical progress scientific progress requires material conditions it requires in capitalism's heyday Mark said capitalism was able to accomplish wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids and Roman aqueducts in its heyday it was progressive and revolutionary in developing science and technology through the profit motive through competition but now it's turned into its opposite now actually it's become an enormous barrier to the development of technology to the development of science you know again when I was still an engineering field you could see it in research you know even in the public sector influenced by the profit motive by the need because there was such a scarcity of resources different academic departments hoarding their results and trying to get their papers out before other ones in order to keep on that small slice of the pie that we had in terms of research funding and so you can see capitalism itself has become this barrier to science and technology but vice versa capitalism itself demands a development of the technology a development of the productive forces it demands this constant drive to produce more for less and so forth and therefore there is this constant kind of contradictory process going on within capitalism where on the one hand it's forced to kind of seek out new technologies to increase productivity but on the other hand because it's done in this chaotic and anarchic way you see it kind of leaving a trail of destruction behind and in fact the capitalists even have a wonderful euphemism for this called creative destruction Schimpeter an Austrian economist came up with it creative destruction sounds lovely oh it's destroying but oh it's creating the problem is obviously the creation is mainly in terms of profits in the hands of the few and the destruction is mainly in terms of the jobs and the services of the 99% and you see this obviously today where these kind of mass scars of unemployment in areas where there used to be industry like the miners for example mining communities in the north in Wales now kind of obviously left behind and there's no creation of new jobs really in these areas in fact they've had to rely on public sector money on public sector jobs and now obviously that's under attack with austerity as well you see obviously whole areas basically permanently scarred and it's for this reason this kind of this trail of destruction I think you see why historically you have these movements of workers periodically that kind of rebel against technology you know the term Luddite today is bandied about to describe someone who's against technological progress it's this kind of derogatory term saying oh you know you're against technology and they use it for example with the tube drivers when they go on strike against the idea that there's going to be ticket machines instead of ticket counters and the demands of the trade unions should be very simple to say well look we're not against technology being introduced but why introduce it in order to lay off staff why use it to put in more intense conditions on the rest of us and not use it to keep the number of jobs that are there and reduce the hours that we all have to work but obviously that's not the motivation for the capitalists introducing them they're there to increase the profits they don't care about the number of hours you work in fact they just want you to work more hours and so you can see why you have these rebellions like the Luddites the Luddites were actually quite radical they were rebelling against these machines being these looms, mechanized looms being introduced making them unemployed and make them redundant and obsolete and that's why today I think you see a lot of kind of scare stories in the press about the idea of technological unemployment, this threat hanging over us where people are worried about losing their jobs to the robots and the fact that we're not having voluntary leisure anymore but forced idleness that's what really we see in terms of machinery under capitalism and the point is today it's happening at such a rapid pace this is why it's so scared even the bourgeois are scared of it is because even white collar middle class jobs formerly middle class jobs are being affected by this kind of whirlwind of technological development there was a study done by some academics in Oxford who predicted that up to 50% of jobs by 2030 I believe could be automated this year and most of those jobs were not blue collar ones most of those have already been automated away what they were describing was actually white collar kind of office jobs things like accountancy editorial roles and things like that translation, a lot of this stuff that's being automated by AI and so forth all of these putting kind of white collar jobs under threat and so we see all of this process going, this very contradictory process and therefore automation at the same time it creates these contradictions for capitalism itself because what you've got to remember as we talked earlier is that it's ultimately the working class themselves that are creating value that are creating profits, they're the source of the capitalist profits and if you're replacing workers with machines you're killing the goose that lays the golden egg so as Marx describes how as you replace workers with machines more and more you get to a point where actually there's a tendency for the rate of profit to go down you're getting more and more machinery less and less workers and therefore less and less in terms of the actual people who are producing the wealth in society machines just pass on their wealth to the final product, they don't create any new value and at the same time you have a tendency towards overproduction the idea that as I said the capitalists are churning out more and more goods but reducing the number of workers that are employed who are ultimately the ones who need to be buying these goods that the working class is the market that they are producing and that creates this contradiction of overproduction and just to kind of end there's a very funny apocryphal story actually about Henry Ford that obviously the so-called inventor of mass production being taken around one of his factories by a trade union representative and he kind of very arrogantly said to the trade unionists well look at all these machines we're getting introduced how are you going to get them to pay your trade union subscriptions and the trade unionists turned around quick as a flash and said yeah but how are you going to get them to pay for your cars and that's really the contradiction that's facing the capitalists now that they've got this development of technology but they can't employ it in a planned, in a rational way but instead it comes in these fits and bursts we see this incredibly vast potential in terms of 3D printing as I say machine learning, artificial intelligence the internet of things but under capitalism what we see alongside that is the mass unemployment, the overwork the stagnant productivity in other words we see that we're not being liberated by machines but enslaved by them and that's all because of the barrier of profit and that's ultimately what we need to get rid of I'll leave it there