On the surface this passage is unremarkable in the theoretical point it makes about the durability and cost of maintaining machines: an indestructible machine could never completely transfer its value into circulation, which effectively means that because its value would approach zero, it could continuously function to reduce necessary labour time and produce relative surplus-value without any additional outlay of capital.<sup>16</sup> But what makes this passage even more interesting is that Marx’s invocation of a perpetuum mobile places it in the realm of science fiction. No such machine, of course, existed during Marx’s time, nor will one ever exist according to the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Thus this passage can be interpreted as Marx engaging in a flight of fancy as he did at several other points in Grundrisse, including the ‘Fragment on Machines’. If Marx was in a speculative mindset, what he states in the bracketed part of the quote becomes more interesting than his mention of perpetual motion: ‘quite apart from the invention of more perfect machines which would rob it of the character of being a machine’. As one of us (Kjøsen 2013a, 2013b, 2018) has argued through a science-fictional optic, this statement is the closest Marx comes in his oeuvre to thinking about the possibility of something like intelligent robots, androids or AGI. Indeed, Marx could have been speculating about androids, which, while a rare word, already in 1837 meant an ‘automaton resembling a human being in form and movement’ (Online Etymology Dictionary n.d.) and was often used in reference to automated chess players. Marx’s reference to ‘perfect machines’ can, therefore, be interpreted in the following way:
Given the context of Marx discussing fixed capital and knowing that no machinery can create value, if a machine’s character of being a machine is robbed of it, it means that it negates its own being as fixed capital and becomes its opposite, namely variable capital. The perfect machine is dead labour resurrected as living labour … The perfect machine is a machine that can create value, but for that reason it is no longer a machine. (Kjøsen 2018: 173)
It is, however, necessary to unpack Marx’s argument in more depth because although it is theoretically possible that a machine with a general intelligence could perform labour and be living labour, it does not automatically follow that it could create value.
perfect machines, inhuman labour
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