The reason Marx gives for why human labour is different from the activity of both animals and machines is that it is highly flexible, adaptable – in short, general. And while many animals are more adaptable than Marx thought, and have domain-general intelligence, human intelligence is yet more general, which is what gives this particular species a wider qualitative range of productive behaviours than any other. Although Cockshott and Renaud (2016) seek to blur distinctions between what humans and animals can do, they nevertheless recognize that the qualitative range of what humans can do is wider than those of all other animals and current machines. Noting how easily Watt’s steam engine replaced horses as a source of power in production, and that humans are not as easily replaceable (although they recognize that machines do take their place), they argue that ‘there is more to work than muscular energy’ and, hence, that human beings ‘can be set to almost any labouring task … they are adaptable … it is this adaptability which must be a fundamental reason why we are the dominant species. We are, in effect, universal robots’ (Cockshott and Renaud 2016: 21). Thus, when Marx argues that humans have a capacity to labour, he is implying a qualitative range of productive and adaptable behaviours, which includes potentially new ones.
Machines, animals and humans can be placed on a continuum of intelligence ranging from general to narrow, with humans located close to generality, while existing machines, including ML systems, as well as species of insects, lie towards the opposite end. Marx’s concepts of labour and labour-power can also be located somewhere along this continuum: for a being to have the capacity to perform labour, it must reach some as yet undefined critical mass of encephalization and threshold of generality of intelligence that, as of 2019, only human beings have so far crossed. Thus, while we agree with Marx that it is still only human beings that can labour, by placing the capacity to labour on a continuum of degree of generality of intelligence, we nevertheless argue that another being could labour and, therefore, that Marx’s concept of labour should no longer be considered necessarily anthropological. Grounding the concept of labour in general intelligence severs its inherent connection to human beings and, therefore, theoretically allows for the possibility that some other being that is generally intelligent could labour. The actual emergence of such a being would empirically prove that labour is not an exclusively human characteristic.
perfect machines, inhuman labour
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