Yeah, I don’t mind being pinged, especially for interesting topics like this.

I think for the section you quoted, when Marx is talking about “domestic industry,” he is talking about pre-capitalist manufacturing, or maybe very early capitalist manufacturing. What I mean is that, before capitalism, people had to make everything themselves. Moms and sisters would usually sew all the clothes for the family, and fathers and brothers would make/repair tools and equipment they needed. The first industry that really jump-started capitatim in England was clothing, as home-made clothing was replaced by factory-made clothing. Of course, this involved a huge world-wide network with cotton coming in from the American south, India, and Egypt, where raw materials were turned into finished goods, and exported for profit.

Before factories existed, capitalists would actually just contract out what were basically “gig workers” to make clothes in their own home. This was often “piece work,” where people would be paid per unit of clothing sewed, instead of hourly work. Centralizing everything in factories then led to the rise of “Taylorism” and then eventually “Fordism,” as clothing factories were joined by all sorts of other factories (cars, glass, chemicals, etc.).

It recruits itself constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and agriculture, and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery.

Marx is talking about the death of this home-made industry (handicraft) and the rise of factories with machines. Because these small, individual producers are being replaced by factories, they basically become jobless. Factories are just more efficient and thus more cost-effective, lowering prices, so handicraft workers can’t make a living anymore. It’s the 1800s version of Wal-Mart putting mom-and-pop stores out of business. Marx is emphasizing that these people, now unemployed, are forced to join the ranks of the proletariat, alongside rural workers who lost their farms when they were bought up during the enclosure period. We can see the same thing happening today – AI replaces software engineers, so those unemployed programmers have to find another job. We don’t have “elevator operators” or “switchboard operators” because a microchip can do their job now. Bowling allyes used to have “pin boys” who reset the pins, also replaced by machines. It’s interesting to think about what will happen when automation replaces almost all the jobs. That could result in “luxury socialism” (good ending) or neo-feudalism (bad ending).