These two versions of crisis theory, and their degree of compatibility, have been intensely debated. But in both versions, capital’s recurrent crises arise from its inherent drive to substitute constant (machinery) for variable capital (labour). This either reduces consumption power (by cutting wages) or lowers the profitability of production (by cheapening goods), or both. The outcome is repeated throughout deepening cycles of economic breakdown, each of which offers the possibility of a revolution by a working class suffering from downward pressures on wages and the threat of unemployment, but still central enough to production to halt or take control over it. This, then, with its internal bifurcations and attendant controversies, is what we call the major line of Marxist thinking about capitalism and machines. An analysis of AI undertaken within this current will analyse it in terms of labour exploitation, inter-capitalist competition and capitalism’s techno-induced crisis tendencies.
What we dub the two minor tendencies in Marx’s thought are extensions of, but also deviations from, this major line. Latent in Marx’s account of capital’s increasing mechanization is the idea that the positions of worker (initially the main, value creating actor) and the machine (at first the worker’s power-amplifying supplement) invert. The worker, who at the handicraft stage was the subject of the labour process, becomes an automaton of repetitive, repeated motions, responding to automatic machinery rather than using it; the automatic machinery has become the subject of the labour process. Two subsidiary, perhaps maverick, lines of Marx’s thought develop this idea to its logical conclusion – but in two different directions.
The first, and by far most famous, comes from the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in Marx’s Grundrisse, which from the 1970s on has been seen as an extraordinary anticipation of high-technology capital. In the ‘Fragment’, Marx envisaged capital making vast techno-scientific achievements by mobilizing the ‘general intellect’. This enables it to reach a level of automation that, while not eliminating human labour entirely, reduces and relegates it to the peripheral position of supervising a mainly machinic process. This might seem the final triumph of capital over its troublesome working class, but Marx in the ‘Fragment’ presented it as a pyrrhic victory. By removing the necessity to base production on wage-labour (and hence liquidating the possibility of basing consumption on waged income), it undermines value, i.e. the whole basis of capital’s social organization. Automation inadvertently subverts capital by abolishing work. This is consonant with other celebrated passages of Marx’s concerning the liberatory nature of technological development, most notably the account of how developing ‘forces of production’ burst apart fossilized ‘relations of production’, making way for the appearance of a whole new ‘mode of production’ (Marx 1973 [1859]).
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inhuman power