HUMAN LABOUR AND LABOUR-POWER
In Capital, Marx presupposed labour as ‘an exclusively human characteristic’ and repeatedly qualified this central concept as ‘human’ and ‘living’ or even ‘living human’ (1990: 283–4). His qualification of labour in this way can be explained as rhetoric against the bourgeois political economists who fetishistically argued that land and capital, in addition to labour, were sources of value.<sup>8</sup> But Marx’s assumption that labour is inherently human is more than rhetoric. While Marx primarily discussed labour with reference to the social relations in which it occurs, the touchstone for his concept of labour was, for better or for worse, the human being. That labour is human is one of Marx’s axioms.
When Marx discussed labour as such, i.e. without reference to the society in which it occurs, he sharply distinguished it from the productive activity of animals. In Marx’s theoretical framework, when animals are employed in a capitalist production process, unless as raw-material inputs, they are functionally equivalent to machines, reduced to the status of fixed capital.<sup>9</sup> Given this functional equivalence, the arguments Marx advanced in the $\scriptstyle 1 8 4 4$ Manuscripts and Capital for why labour is qualitatively different in kind from the productive activities of animals are salient for understanding both why machines cannot labour – and why, in theory, AGI could labour. Marx’s arguments for why animals cannot labour are especially interesting because they describe animals in terms quite similar to the domain-specific behaviours of narrow AI. By extension, this suggests an isomorphism between the concept of AGI and Marx’s concepts of labour and labour-power.
In the seventh chapter of Capital, Marx argues in transhistorical terms that labour is ‘a process between man [sic!] and nature, a process by which man through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature’, and through this metabolism the human species ‘appropriate[s] the materials of nature in a form adapted to [its] own needs’ and ‘acts upon external nature and changes it’ $\left( 1 9 9 0 \colon 2 8 3 \right)$ . The statement makes it appear as if Marx is arguing that humans are the only beings that act on, use and alter their lived environment. In the $\scriptstyle 1 8 4 4$ Manuscripts, however, he recognizes that all animals are ‘sensuously acting, objectifying subjects’ that build their own versions of the world and reproduce their habitats, albeit in a speciesspecific manner (Fracchia 2017). Throughout the $\scriptstyle 1 8 4 4$ Manuscripts, Marx recognizes that humans and animals have a lot in common because all living beings must engage in a ‘continuous interchange with nature’ in order to survive (Mulhall 1998: 10). In addition to producing speciesspecific habitats, humans share with animals the ‘animal functions’ of eating, drinking and procreating, etc. (Marx 2007: 75). But despite the similarities, the specific way in which humans engage with their external environment differs significantly from that of animals.
perfect machines, inhuman labour
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