That commodity-producing labour has a twofold character was one of Marx’s critiques of the Smithian and Ricardian labour theory of value, but such a duality also means that the capacity to create value is not an ontological determination of labour (Ramsay 2009). As Caffentzis has argued in relation to universal Turing machines: ‘if value is created by labor per se and its positive features can be accomplished by machines … then machines can create value. But this is a reductio ad absurdum of Marxist theory’ (2013: 161). But under what conditions could AGI create value? What would the ontological status of AGI be in the capitalist mode of production? In essence, these two questions ask the same thing, but to answer them requires that we investigate precisely how AGIs would be involved in the social process of production and thus what their social function would be. Hence, it is necessary to turn to Marx’s ontology, i.e. value and its forms.
The commodity, money and fixed capital are all examples of what Marx referred to as social forms or economic categories, which are the theoretical expressions of social relations of production (i.e. class) (Marx 2008: 119). Therefore, they are also the forms in which value appears and at the same time also the ‘forms of appearance’ or ‘modes of existence of things’ (Gunn 1987: 58–9). One of Marx’s main critiques of bourgeois political economists was that they confused ‘the form of appearance [with] the thing which appears within that form’ thus fetishistically ascribing a characteristic of capitalist society to the thing (1990: 714). He therefore distinguished between ‘natural form’ (i.e. use-value or matter) and ‘social form’ (i.e. value). For example, things appear as or are commodities only ‘in so far as they possess a double form, i.e. natural form and value form’ (Marx 1990: 138). The natural form of a chair is its physical properties as made out of wood or metal and shaped into a seat, four legs and a back, but the fact that this chair is a commodity, i.e. has an exchange-value and is exchanged, ‘is not a characteristic of the chair itself as a thing, but rather of the society in which it appears’, and ‘a specific aspect of capitalist society is that almost everything is exchanged (Heinrich 2012: 40–1). It is precisely because of this fetish that things are treated as if they are the forms they appear in. Accordingly, a thing is treated as a commodity when it is exchanged and this is its social function. Economic categories thus also ‘express social functions ... which are acquired by things as intermediaries in social relations among people’ (Rubin 1973: 35). The being of things as commodities, money or capital comes from the specific social functions they serve in the social process of production: the commodity exists to be sold, money to buy, and (fixed) capital to extract surplus labour-time from workers. In other words, the different social forms things appear in are their concrete social reality (Negri 2017). The mode of existence of a thing is, however, not permanent. When it serves a different social function in the social process of production, its form of appearance changes. Referring to a machine, Marx wrote:
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inhuman power