This account might seem just another description of the mounting organic composition of capital, or indeed of the semi-automated ‘animated monster’ of capitalist machinery featured in Grundrisse (1993: 470). There are, however, differences in inflection. For one thing, since the subsumption argument is that capital actually adopts machinery that it designs to its systemic requirements (the valorization of value through elimination of human labour and acceleration of commodity circulation), it becomes more difficult to envisage how the ‘forces of production conflict with ‘relations of production’ – if anything, the former would seem to reinforce the latter. There is certainly no hint in the ‘Results’ of either the crisis-inducing falling rate of profit or of the self-destructive labour-abolishing logic of the ‘Fragment’. There is just the towering presence of an all-but-incomprehensible production apparatus that looms over and surpasses the worker it once depended on. This is all the more apparent because, while the first half of the appendix includes one of the most complete discussions in Marx of the powers of the ‘collective worker’ engaged in the cooperative fusion of various types of work, from manual labour to engineering, by the end the collective worker is dwarfed and seems virtually obliterated by the machine apparatus to which its powers have been transferred.
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inhuman power