The foundations for an analysis of the transformation of the labour process were laid over a century ago by Marx in Volume I of Capital. It is thus appropriate to begin with an exposition of that forbidding, unavoidable book. This chapter is not, however, an exercise in social theory so much as an attempt to provide the non-specialist reader with an understanding of the concepts which constitute the theoretical ground of this study.

Capitalism exists when the process of production is organized in terms of a market on which commodities, including labour itself, are bought and sold according to standards of monetary exchange. Such a process emerges when a class of men and women who do not own the means of production are forced to sell their labour power. In terms of the normal contract of employment the worker does not agree to do an exact amount of work; he surrenders his capacity to work and it is the task of management, through its hierarchy of control, to transform his capacity into actual productive activity. It is this process of transforming labour power into productive activity that is central to capitalism, and yet it is at the same time hidden. Let us therefore ‘leave this noisy sphere of the market’ and examine ‘the hidden abode of production’.

Let us begin ‘by stating the first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all history; the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to make history. But life involves before anything else, eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself.’ The process of producing the material means to satisfy these needs — ‘purposeful activity aimed at the production of use values’ — Marx calls ‘the labour process’. The labour process is a universal condition of human existence and is not in itself peculiar to capitalism.