It’s been a bit since we haven’t dealt with the facts of our capitalist, who must have certainly prospered in the meantime. Let’s go back to his workshop, where we may have the pleasure of seeing our friend, the spinner, again. Here we are. Let’s enter.

Oh, surprise! There’s no longer one worker, but now a large number of workers find themselves at work. All quiet and in order as if they were many soldiers. The lack of guards and inspectors is seen as supervisors who walk among the ranks, all observing, giving orders, or overseeing the the execution is by the books. Of the capitalist nothing is seen, not even a shadow. A glass door opens inside, maybe it will be him; let’s see. It’s a solemn person, but it’s not our capitalist. The supervisors carefully stand around him, and they receive his orders with the utmost attention. The sound of an electric doorbell is heard; one of the supervisors runs to put his ear to the mouth of a metal tube, which descends from the doorway along the wall; and and he soon comes to announce to the director that the boss demands a conference with him.

Let’s look in the crowd of workers for our old acquaintance the spinner; and finally we come to find him in a corner, completely devoted to work. He’s become gaunt and pale in the face: on his face one reads a profound thought of sadness. One day we saw him at the market negotiating his labor power peer to peer with the money-owner; but how great the distance between them has grown today! Today he is a worker lost in the crowd of the many that populate the workshop, and oppressed by an extraordinarily long workday; while the money-owner, who’s already become a big capitalist, stands like a god atop Mount Olympus, from where he sends orders to his people through a group of intermediaries. Whatsoever has happened? It’s a piece of cake. The capitalist has prospered. Capital has grown by a lot, and, in order to satisfy his new needs, the capitalist has established cooperative labor, that is labor done with a joining of forces. In this workshop, where at another time only one labor force used to work, today there works a whole cooperation of labor forces. Capital has gone out of its infancy, and presents itself for the first time with its true appearance. The advantages that capital finds in cooperation can be reduced to four. Firstly it’s in cooperation that capital realizes true social labor power. Social labor power being, as we already said, the average taken in a given center of production among a number of workers who labor with an average degree of ability and intensity, it’s clear that every single labor force will move itself more or less from average or social force, which it therefore can only obtain by gathering a great number of labor forces in the same workshop; i.e. in cooperation.

The second advantage is the economics of the means of production. The same workshop, the same heaters, etc., that used to serve only one, now serve many workers.

The third advantage of cooperation is the growth of labor power.

“Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of a regiment of infantry is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the individual cavalry or infantry soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands take part simultaneously in one and the same undivided operation, such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch, or removing an obstacle” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 13).

The fourth advantage is the possibility to combine forces that are able to execute tasks in a way that either wouldn’t be able to be accomplished with isolated efforts, or would be able to be accomplished in a very flawed fashion. Who hasn’t seen how 50 workers can move enormous loads in one hour, while one labor force wouldn’t be able to move them, in 50 hours altogether, even one inch? Who hasn’t seen how 12 workers, placed along the scaffolding of a house under construction, go through a quantity of materials in one hour immensely greater than that which one worker would go through in 12 hours? Who doesn’t understand how 20 bricklayers can do much more work in one day than only one can do in 20 days?

“Cooperation ever constitutes the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 13).