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the easiest way to see this is via marx. i'll do this before i head out for a fine malted beverage---now i know that you probably see "marx" and say something like "ew..communism"--but if you do that, then you haven't read any of his work--there are basically two sides to it, one the critical description of capitalism in the middle 19th century, and another which was a revolutionary politics. the second follows from the first, relies on the first, is oriented by it---and that part of marx is really pretty amazing stuff. in the mid 19th century, the most advanced industry in terms of becoming-capitalist was textiles--what made capitalism itself for marx was the logic of mass production, which entails a standardization of outputs, a standardization and deskilling of work, and a series of attending separations--of aspects of a single task (in a craft setting) into multiple tasks, the separation of skill from workers via technology, the separation of workers from each other, the separation of ownership from production etc..
these separations are expressed in wage labor, which for marx tended toward a situation in which entirely deskilled workers sold their physical ability to perform a particular (ususally repetitive) task to the holders of capital in exchange for a wage. because the work is standardized, and because of the machinery that enables that, workers become more or less interchangable with one another. that turned out to be increasingly the case across the 19th and into the mid 20th century--he was writing before the development of the assembly line, but the logic he outlines makes the assembly line seem almost inevitable (but it wasn't---that's another story)...
anyway, the main advantage of mass production is lots and lots of cheap standardized goods. the effect of this--eventually (it wasn't automatic) was the destruction of an entire system of smaller-scale production of textiles--you know, spinning, weaving etc.---there are other factors that condition the outcome, and marx talks about them (but i won't because this is a messageboard and things have to be short-ish)--but anyway a result of this was the transformation in relations between city and countryside and a migration of people from the latter to the former in search of a way to make a living because the older systems of producing textiles and stuff based on them cheaply (it was poorer folk who were really hit by all this) were wiped out (again, there's more to this story). anyway, the result of this effect was the migration of far more people into the cities than there were jobs. the result of that was the formation of the "industrial reserve army" which functioned to push down wages and keep them down. the result of this was inhuman living conditions...just brutal stuff...which is why working people had to organize themselves---and which is still why working people have to organize themselves if they want any meaningful power. they have to take power away from capital.
this story amounts to a pattern, and that pattern has repeated in sector after sector over time, and this is the general explanation for how it came about that capitalism came to rely on the industrial reserve army as a way of forcing down wages.
the counter to this was political and trade-union organization.
it still is, but not in the forms that were developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, simply because these forms are themselves played out and because the geography of capitalist production is very different now than it was in the 1860s.
that's the idea.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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