THE RECONFIGURATION DEBATE
Major passages in Marx’s work predict that capital’s compulsive technological development will not only eventually kill it, but also leave a machine legacy for socialism to inherit and put to emancipatory use. Yet many Marxists have found a tension between these promises and other sections of Marx’s writing emphasizing the dominative, life-crushing powers of capitalist machinery. These issues have come to the fore in the ‘reconfiguration debate’, which began with an exchange between Alberto Toscano (2011) and Jasper Bernes (2013) on the growing importance to capital of vast logistical systems – systems that are, we note, one of the prime sites of actual and probable AI deployment, be it in automated distribution centres, robo-trucking or drone-delivery schemes.
Toscano (2011) criticized the anarchist group The Invisible Committee for looking at logistical systems, such as high-speed train systems and electronic networks, solely as targets for ‘sabotage’ and ‘hacking’ without a longer-term perspective on the ways in which such technologies could be ‘refunctioned’ as components of a future non-capitalist social order.
conclusion: communist ai
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