How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph) or (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
In general, the greater the productivity of labor, the less the labour-time required to produce an article, the less the mass of labour crystallized in that article, and the less its value. Inversely, the less the productivity of labour, the greater the labour-time necessary to produce an article, and the greater its value. (1.1.17)
Advances in technology often increase productivity. Increased productivity means that the production of commodities doesn't take as long, so value of those commodities goes down. So, advances in technology generally make goods and services cheaper.
Quote #2
The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital. The production of commodities and their circulation in its developed form, namely trade, form the historic presuppositions under which capital arises. World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of capital starts to unfold. (4.1)
The origin of the modern mode of production, capitalism, dates back to the 16th century. That's when the economic system we know today started to unfold out of feudalism, the previous system in Europe. Might there be another mode of production someday?
Quote #3
The historical conditions of [capital's] existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power. And this one historical pre-condition comprises a world's history. Capital, therefore, announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production. (6.9)
Marx says there's a crucial variable that allowed the modern mode of production, capitalism, to emerge. That's the emergence of free workers: people who can sell their labor-power—as opposed to, say, serfs or slaves.
Quote #4
The use and construction of instruments of labour, although present in germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a 'tool-making animal'. (7.1.5)
Technology plays a crucial role in human existence. Marx isn't saying here that he defines the human being as the tool-making animal necessarily, but he definitely thinks enough of the idea to quote Benjamin Franklin saying it.
Quote #5
Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic formations of society as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work. (7.1.5)
Advances in technology improving the instruments of labor give insight into the economic structures of societies. For example, the invention of complex machines during the Industrial Revolution led to the factory era.
Quote #6
Moments are the elements of profit. (10.2.15)
Saving time increases efficiency and therefore means more profit. As capitalism has become part of modern life, so part of modern life means a drive for efficiency, as represented in this clip from a famous Twilight Zone episode where a boss badgers an employee about pushing harder at work all the time.
Quote #7
In this 'House of Terror', this 'ideal workhouse, the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat labour.' [...] The 'House of Terror' for paupers, only dreamed of by the capitalist mind in 1770, was brought into being a few years later in the shape of a gigantic 'workhouse' for the industrial worker himself. It was called the factory. And this time the ideal was a pale shadow compared with the reality. (10.5.12-14)
The technology of the Industrial Revolution led to factories with infamously bad working conditions.
Quote #8
The collective worker, who constitutes the living mechanism of manufacture, is made up solely of such one-sidedly specialized workers. Hence, in comparison with the independent handicraft, more is produced in less time, or in other words the productivity of labour is increased. Moreover, once this partial labour is established as the exclusive function of one person, the methods it employs become perfected. The worker's continued repetition of the same narrowly defined act and the concentration of his attention on it teach him by experience how to attain the desired effect with the minimum of exertion. (14.2.1)
Manufacture organized handicraft workers in ways that led to increased efficiency. Advances in organizational schemes could be considered a kind of technological development for businesses.
Quote #9
While simple co-operation leaves the mode of the individual's labour for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly revolutionizes it, and seizes labour-power by its roots. It converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house, through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations, just as in the states of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow. (14.5.2)
Modernization under capitalism means workers become more specialized. Here Marx is pointing out the negative consequences of over-specialization. He says it closes down on productive drives and inclinations workers might have otherwise explored. Are you becoming increasingly specialized as a worker or student in order to meet current or future financial demands, and if so, how might this be impacting you negatively?
Quote #10
It is machines that abolish the role of the handicraftsman as the regulating principle of social production. Thus, on the one hand, the technical reason for the lifelong attachment of the worker to a partial function is swept away. On the other hand, the barriers placed in the way of the domination of capital by this same regulating principle now also fall. (14.5.14)
The development of machines allowed capitalists to dominate people more because they were no longer limited to using handicraft workers to power the productive process. Machines, such as steam engines, have their own motive power. The Industrial Revolution made the production process become further removed from the control of individual workers.