Marx reserved the possibility of personifying economic categories for human beings; things like coats, industrial machinery and animals (and human slaves as well) could only appear in, be the content of, such socio-economic forms. The reasons for this division between humans on the one side, and things and animals on the other, are more or less the same ones Marx gave for why labour is uniquely human: humans are conscious and intelligent, and can do different things. In short, human individuals are subjects with agency that ‘endow’ economic forms with ‘consciousness and a will’ (Marx 1990: 254). But this particular aspect of Marx’s value theory concerns the fetishism we attach to economic forms: the inversion of social relations between human individuals so that they appear as ‘material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (1990: 166). The effect of this inversion is that when people engage in economic intercourse through their private property, their ‘will resides in those objects’ (1990: 178). Thus when individual humans engage in economic activity, they are, in effect, programmed by socio-economic forms (Kjøsen 2013b).
Writing about the personification of capital, Marx argues that the logic of this social form, the valorization of value, becomes the capitalist’s ‘subjective purpose … it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, i.e. as capital endowed with a consciousness and will’ (1990: 254). It is in relation to this particular personification argument that Marx argues that capital is an ‘automatic subject’ (1990: 255). The paradox of the inverted world that humans produce due to capitalist social relations should be clear: ‘on the one hand, capital is an automaton, something lifeless, but on the other, as the “subject”, it is the determining agent of the whole process’ (Heinrich 2012: 89). Capital is an ‘automatic subject’ in which so-called human subjectivity and agency are reduced to abstract personifications of economic categories; that is, humans are, like Marx’s bees, reduced to executing the algorithms, although in this case those of buying, selling and exploiting.
perfect machines, inhuman labour
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