THE GENERAL CONDITIONS OF PRODUCTION
Let us suppose that capital’s current love affair with AI is not broken up by performance failures and commitment nerves. What might be the eventual offspring of this union? To elaborate the possible long-term significance of the second era of the AI industry we turn to an often-overlooked Marxian concept: the general conditions of production. What does Marx mean by this category that is mentioned in passing in Capital (1990: 472–3, 474, 505–6, 579, 652), but discussed in some depth in Grundrisse (1993: 308, 524–33, 725)?
To begin, it is helpful to understand what it means that these conditions are general. In Marx’s system, ‘general’ is almost always opposed to ‘particular’, and so it is with the general conditions of production, which he distinguished from the ‘particular conditions of production for one capitalist or another’ that are bought or produced directly by individual capitals to keep production going, and include material inputs (raw materials and intermediate goods), means of production, and labour (Marx 1993: 531).<sup>5</sup> Whereas particular conditions concern the production of this or that individual capital, the general conditions of production are common to all capitals.
In Grundrisse, Marx spelled out the relationship between an individual capital and the general conditions as ‘a specific relation of capital to the communal, general conditions of social production, as distinct from the conditions of a particular capital and its particular production process (Marx 1993: 533). The general conditions are, therefore, ‘something that benefits (or impedes) all particular capitalist production processes’ (Kjøsen 2016: 65). Infrastructure is illustrative of the nature of the general conditions, because roads, canals or railways ‘benefit not just a single capital, but all individual capitals in a given area’ (Kjøsen 2016: 65). With the general conditions of production, Marx thus described the general milieu in which an individual capital finds itself at a particular historical moment; it is the terrain of both class struggle and capitalist competition.
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inhuman power