the instrument of labour (1867)

Marx had good reason to stress the great fluidity of the connection between segments in artisanal labour. This connection appears to the factory worker on an assembly line in a detached, reified form. Independently of the worker's volition, the object being worked upon, comes within his range of action. And it moves away from him just as arbitrarily. "Every kind of capitalist production," writes Marx, "has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instrument of labour, but the instrument of labour that employs the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this reversal for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. In working with machines workers learn to coordinate their own movement to the uniform, unceasing motion of an automaton."

– Walter Benjamin, citing Karl Marx (1867)