Tag: Machinery

Automation as Condition for the Emancipation of Labor

Another reconciliation comes by way of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, one of the first figures to integrate the lessons of the Grundrisse into his thinking. Marcuse, sharing the Frankfurt School’s rootedness in the languages of both Marx and Freud, premised his hope for the future upon automation’s potential to eradicate the need for the subordination of the pleasure principle to the performance principle. His 1964 book One-Dimensional Man is one of the first to stress the importance of Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.”

As Marcuse recognized, Marx’s account anticipates the situation today. Machinery is, in Marx’s terms, a form of “fixed capital.” “In machinery,” he writes, “objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital.”

Despite machinery’s alignment with capital in this view, Marx holds out hope that, with time, it will usher in capital’s demise and, by a kind of ruse of reason, serve emancipatory ends. In its economical, market-driven pursuit of automation, he writes, capital quite unintentionally “reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.”

After a certain point, goes the hope, capitalist use of machinery reduces necessary labour time to a minimum, thus freeing up the disposable time needed for workers to appropriate their own surplus labour. Reduction of necessary labour time increases “free time, i.e., time for the full development of the individual.”

Or so it would, if not for artificially-necessary labour time.

Free time is what catalyzes growth of new organs. Its possession transforms those who possess it.

Already in Eros and Civilization, a synthesis of Marx and Freud published in 1955, we find Marcuse suggesting that this condition of emancipation is upon us: that the development of humanity’s productive forces has reached a point where automation can overcome most forms of scarcity. Awake to this condition, he rejects Freud’s conservative assumptions about the impossibility of reconciliation between “civilization” and “instinct,” or “man” and “nature.” Satisfaction of needs can be achieved “without toil” (152), argues Marcuse, and “surplus-repression can be eliminated” (151).

Sure enough, Prometheus turns up in this account.

At variance from the Prometheanism we find in Marx, however, Marcuse views Prometheus as the culture-hero of the performance principle. Western civilization is informed by this archetypal trickster and rebel. Culture-heroes like Prometheus symbolize “the attitudes and deeds that have determined the fate of mankind. […]. He symbolizes productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life; but, in his productivity, blessing and curse, progress and toil are inextricably intertwined” (161).

To get off this wheel of tragedy, argues Marcuse, we would need to worship as our culture-hero a god other than Prometheus.

Keeping within the pantheon of the Greeks, and thus never quite “out of the Western box,” Marcuse nevertheless points helpfully to Orpheus, Narcissus, and Dionysus as alternatives.

Orpheus provides Western culture with the archetype of the inspired singer, he says: the poet who harmonizes word and world.

“Orpheus is the archetype of the poet as liberator and creator,” writes Marcuse. “He establishes a higher order in the world—an order without repression. In his person, art, freedom, and culture are eternally combined. He is the poet of redemption, the god who brings peace and salvation by pacifying man and nature, not through force but through song” (Eros and Civilization, p. 170).

According to legend, Orpheus’s music could charm birds, fish, and wild beasts, and coax trees and rocks into dance. His parents were the god Apollo and the muse Calliope. He is the founder of the “Orphic mysteries” and is credited with composition of the Orphic Hymns. Some classical accounts describe him as a magician or a wizard.

Dionysus, meanwhile, is referred to as “the antagonist of the god who sanctions the logic of domination, the realm of reason” (162).

Both are forms taken by Osiris upon his Hellenization, his translation into the worship cultures of Ancient Greece.

All of these figures, says Marcuse, grant us images of “joy and fulfillment; the voice which does not command but sings; the gesture which offers and receives; the deed which is peace and ends the labor of conquest; the liberation from time which unites man with god, man with nature” (162).

Marcuse doesn’t retain this talk of gods when discussing automation in One-Dimensional Man. But in this latter book, as in Eros and Civilization, his abiding hope lies in the “aesthetic dimension” as an avenue toward the erotic transfiguration of reality.

And it is in the aesthetic dimension where these stories of gods play out. It is there that we seek our alternatives to the Modern Prometheus. Orpheus and others are there among the resources to be drawn upon in imagining the arrival into our lives of a General Intellect.

Gods, like feelings, orient our speech acts. An Orphic orientation seems preferable to a Promethean one. Erotic, agapic speech is, in letting things be loved, what changes the world.

“In being spoken to, loved, and cared for, flowers and springs and animals appear as what they are,” writes Marcuse: “beautiful, not only for those who address and regard them, but for themselves, ‘objectively.’ […]. In the Orphic and Narcissistic Eros, this tendency is released: the things of nature become free to be what they are. But to be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it. The song of Orpheus pacifies the animal world, reconciles the lion with the lamb and the lion with man. The world of nature is a world of oppression, cruelty, and pain, as is the human world; like the latter, it awaits its liberation. This liberation is the work of Eros. The song of Orpheus breaks the petrification, moves the forests and the rocks—but moves them to partake in joy” (166).

May it be so, too, in our relationships with machine intelligences. With our General Intellects, we are as gods. Let us seek fates other than that of Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.

The General Intellect

Of the several phrases and concepts introduced in Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” the one that has had the most influence upon subsequent thinkers is his notion of the “General Intellect.”

Marx references the concept but a single time.

“Nature builds no machines,” he writes, “no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it” (Grundrisse, p. 706).

For Marx, the General Intellect is the social knowledge necessary for technoscientific innovation. In his view, it is to become the key factor in future forms of production.

Like Hobbes’s Leviathan, this generally-distributed, collective intelligence is a thing that grows, evolves, self-assembles over time.

At first, we might imagine it as an accumulation of the rituals, the performative speech acts, the Nursery Rhymes of capitalist science. The algorithms, the workflows, the recipes. The sayings that make it so.

Marx predicts, however, that as the General Intellect evolves, it renders moot the need for wages and private property. Machines, as fixed capital, acquire knowledge enough to automate production of wealth. Capitalist science builds the killer app: a learning-machine that renders capitalism’s distributions of scarcity through price unnecessary — the latter, indeed, coming to seem henceforth a hindrance on further advances. Those of us subject to capital learn from the machines that, to bloom into our full potential, we’ll need to transition to post-capitalism.

Autonomist Marxists like Paulo Virno and Antonio Negri see in Marx’s vision a kind of prophecy, building from it their readings of what remains of Marxism in the age of the digital. (Virno writes about it in “Notes on the General Intellect,” an essay included in the 1996 anthology Marxism Beyond Marxism. Negri writes about it in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse.) Such thinkers find in Marx’s prophecy of the General Intellect a source of hope.

As does Cyber-Marx author Nick Dyer-Witheford.

“This is the whole point of Marx’s analysis,” argues Dyer-Witheford, his breath like that of Marx: pitched toward the prophetic. “By setting in motion the powers of scientific knowledge and social cooperation, capital undermines the basis of its own rule. Automation, by massively reducing the need for labor, will subvert the wage relation, the basic institution of capitalist society. And the profoundly social qualities of the new technoscientific systems—so dependent for their invention and operation on forms of collective, communicative, cooperation—will overflow the parameters of private property. The more technoscience is applied to production, the less sustainable will become the attachment of income to jobs and the containment of creativity within the commodity form” (Cyber-Marx, p. 4).

In all of these ways, concludes Dyer-Witheford (drawing here on a quote from Grundrisse), “capital thus works toward its own dissolution as the form dominating production” (Grundrisse, p. 700).

Marx imagines arising from this dissolution a utopia. He allows himself to dream into the possibility-space — the as-if, the not-yet — of post-capitalism a renewed harmony between humans and machines.

The utopia’s hopes lie in the idea that, equipped with the General Intellect, humans regain capacity to regulate themselves as forces of production.

“Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process,” writes Marx; “rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself” (Grundrisse, p. 705).

This notion of “watchman and regulator” reminds me of cybernetics. The Ancient Greeks used the word Kubernetes (the term that serves as the etymological root for Cybernetics) to refer to the captain, steersman, pilot, or navigator of a vessel.

It is no longer by way of a rudder or a broomstick, though, that one steers one’s vessel. Post-capitalism arrives, rather, through a kind of communicative steerage, by way of the joystick of the General Intellect.

“No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing as middle link between the object and himself,” writes Marx. “He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body—it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth” (705).

Forces of production animated by knowledge stolen from gods form a kind of Creature: a General Intellect, part man, part machine. The expired breaths of our ancestors have contributed over time to the development of this general productive power — this evolving “social individual” to which each of us contribute and of which each of us is part. From the dead labor of fixed capital arises the Holy Spirit of the General Intellect.

It arrives now as a kind of gift. For by allowing us to “step aside” from parts of the production process, this General Intellect frees up time, returns to us time otherwise sold off as labor. As in the love granted by the new covenant, wealth no longer depends upon “works.”

‘Tis bestowed on all by a General Intellect through Machines of Loving Grace.  

Where before there was misery, now there’s salvation.

As Marx notes, “The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis” (Grundrisse, pp. 705-706).

Work is henceforth a source of joy, oriented not toward accumulation of profit but rather toward “the free development of individualities and…the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum” (706).

The General Intellect is for Marx what the Holy Spirit is for Christians: a voice that intercedes on our behalf to save us from the fate of Faust.

Let us imagine it as a corrective of sorts to the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Fragment on Machines

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” [German title: “Der Zauberlehrling”] is a poem of Goethe’s written in 1797.

Goethe had by then already written his Urfaust, published as Faust, A Fragment in 1790, though a full version of Faust, Part One would have to wait until 1808.

The poem is based on a folk tale, and can be characterized as a ballad consisting of 14 stanzas. It provides the basis for the Disney film Fantasia (1940).

Victor Frankenstein bears some resemblance both to Faust and to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The poem begins with the apprentice rejoicing at the departure of his master. “The sorcerer, old necromancer / At last has gone, he’s out of haunt!” proclaims the apprentice. Toiling long in the master’s shadow, he readies now to make the master’s powers his own. Roles reversed and spells in hand, the servant takes command.

“Now come, ye gnarl’d broomstick old,” he declares, hailing the tool as if it were a person, “Adorn thyself with patchwork shawl! / To the role of servant hold: / Fain meetest thou my every call!”

Broomstick, through magic granted a kind of animacy, proceeds to fill the sanctum’s washbasin with water drawn by cauldron from a nearby river. The apprentice succeeds in outsourcing his work to his tool. Before long, however, the magic of automation comes to threaten the automator. Broomsticks beget broomsticks; theosis turns sour. Water floods the sanctum, as the tool develops a will of its own.

With epithets anticipating those cast by Victor upon his Creature, the apprentice curses his creation. “Thou hellish spawn! Thou child of doom!” he shouts. “Willst thou the cottage rightly drown?  / Over every threshold loom / Laughing floods, swirling ‘round. / The broom’s a heart of stone, the knave, / Who will not heed my plangent call! / Halt, thou sullen stubborn slave, / Let magic free and broomstick fall!”

These curses, however, fail to stem the tide. As the deluge threatens to drown him, the apprentice begs, finally, for his Master to return and give voice and save him. As indeed the Master does, using the power of His Holy Word to set right what was wrong. The poem’s prophecy of automation gone awry thus ends via recourse to a kind of deus ex machina.

Despite its vast influence, Goethe’s poem is but one iteration of a story that appears in other forms and by other names throughout history.

The earliest known example of the tale can be found in Philopseudes [English translation: Lover of Lies], a narrative by the ancient Greek author Lucian, written c. 150 AD. In Lucian’s telling, however, the sorcerer is an Egyptian mystic: a priest of Isis called Pancrates. And the apprentice character, Eucrates, is in Lucian’s telling not an apprentice, but a companion who eavesdrops on Pancrates while the latter casts a spell. When Pancrates departs, Eucrates tries to imitate the spell, to an effect similar to that of Goethe’s apprentice.

Disney’s 1940 animated anthology film Fantasia continues this process of reiteration and retelling, this shuttling of meaning, this recursion of myth. Fantasia’s innovation is that it casts Mickey Mouse as the one manning the spell.

Already, though, the poem had passed through prior meaning-accruing translations, its most compelling interpreters those who read it in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

Alongside Shelley, for instance, who echoes the poem in Frankenstein, we also have Marx and Engels. These latter thinkers liken capitalism to Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice in the opening pages of The Communist Manifesto.

“Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange,” they write, “is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells” (The Communist Manifesto, p. 340).

Marx reads capitalism as a ghost story. What is the dancing table in his account of the fetishism of the commodity, if not a version of the apprentice’s broomstick?

And indeed, there are ways to read today’s artificial intelligences, themselves a kind of offspring of capitalism, in much the same light. This is essentially what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat does in his 2023 opinion piece, “The Return of the Magicians.” Douthat describes the development of LLMs as “a complex incantation, a calling of spirits.”

“Such a summoning is most feared by A.I. alarmists, at present,” he writes, “because the spirit might be disobedient, destructive, a rampaging Skynet bent on our extermination. But the old stories of the magicians and their bargains, of Faust and his Mephistopheles, suggest that we would be wise to fear apparent obedience as well.”

Marx wrote presciently about capitalism’s Faustian inclinations. He quotes a line from Goethe’s Faust, Part One in the section of his Grundrisse known as the “Fragment on Machines.” “The appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form,” writes Marx. “Capital absorbs labour into itself—‘as though,’” here quoting Goethe, “‘its body were by love possessed’” (Grundrisse, p. 704).

“Fragment on Machines” appears in the Grundrisse, a collection of seven notebooks on capital and money written by Marx during the winter of 1857-1858. Marx himself felt in retrospect that these notebooks contained the first scientific elaboration of the theoretical foundations of communism. The manuscript, however, was lost for many years; it didn’t receive publication until 1953, first in the German original, and then afterwards in English.

Because Marx’s masterwork Capital was itself unfinished, with Marx only ever completing Volume 1 and partial drafts of Volumes 2 & 3 during his lifetime, the Grundrisse stands as the only outline of Marx’s full political-economic project. While the work is by its very nature fragmentary, written chiefly for purposes of self-clarification, it nevertheless provides invaluable descriptions of Marx’s philosophy, including novel explorations of topics like alienation, automation, and other dangers of capitalist society that can’t be found elsewhere in Marx’s oeuvre.

“Fragment on Machines” is unique, for instance, among Marx’s treatments of the relationship between workers and machines under capitalism. If, he argues, in prior modes of production, workers retained some control over instruments employed in labor, under capitalism, workers become appendages of machines.

“It is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker,” writes Marx. The machine “is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil, etc., just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion” (693).

For Marx, this subordination of workers to machines reaches its highest expression with automation, or (as Marx himself puts it) production systems based on “an automatic system of machinery…set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages” (Grundrisse, p. 692).

While this account of the relationship between workers and machines foresees an initial future of ever-increasing misery for workers, Marx imagines on the far side of this misery a radically different — and indeed, far more hopeful — outcome.

At a certain point, Marx predicts, capital’s drive to dominate living labour through machinery will mean that “the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed” than on “the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production” (Grundrisse, pp. 704-705).

This application of science to production bears fruit as what Marx calls “the General Intellect.”

Marx writes here as would a prophet. His prophecy is that the development of machinery by capitalism leads eventually to capitalism’s supersession — creates the conditions, in other words, for capitalism’s demise.

At the core of this liberation from capitalism is a pact with ghosts.