Speaking of snipping, here we see Marx doing vocal collage. Within a lengthy analysis of the English factory Acts, he pauses to assemble a large number of very short excerpts from a select committee report on mining in 1866. The select committee interviewed mine owners and mine workers about whether or not the recently introduced laws on working conditions in mines were actually being followed, and their answers were recorded in the report. “The whole farce is too characteristic of the spirit of capital, not to call for a few extracts,” says Marx.

What emerges from the rapid question-and-answer snippets that follow reveals, of course, that the mine owners couldn’t give a shit about laws or people or the conditions they force their adult and child labourers to work in:

“Why do you not apply to the inspector?” “To tell the truth there are many men who are timid on that point; there have been cases of men being sacrificed and losing their employment in consequence of applying to the inspector.” “Why; is he a marked man for having complained?” “Yes”

During the collage, Marx throws in the occasional sassy comment, or gives one of the speakers a name like “Bourgeois Vivian”. It’s like reading an experimental radio play for the page, where voices with all their antiquated diction install themselves in your head, right alongside your personal rage about the state of capitalism, late capitalism, too late capitalism, techno-feudalism, etc.

First published in 1889, collected in Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Unwin, 1947