To really appreciate Marx’s argument about the function of the general conditions of production and thus how AI could function therein, it is necessary to discuss how they develop in lock-step with the mode of production itself. That is, the general conditions always refer to a specific locale and time period, meaning that the general conditions for the period of manufacture were different from the period of large-scale industry, which in turn differed from that of Fordism and so on, all the way up to a possible future AI-capitalism (Marx 1990: 505–6; Kjøsen 2016: 65–6). Importantly, the general conditions for one period may be ‘inadequate’ or ‘unbearable fetters’ to the following one, and will thus have to be adapted or updated so that they become ‘appropriate’ to the new period; when they are appropriate, ‘the mode of production [i.e. period] acquires an elasticity, a capacity for sudden extension by leaps and bounds’ (Marx 1990: 579; Kjøsen 2016: 65–6). That is, the velocity and volume of production can now occur at higher levels than during the previous period.
How are the general conditions adapted to emergent modes of production? To sketch the possible capitalist future of AI we need to elaborate this dynamic. The connection between the general conditions and the mode of production starts at the level of branches of industrial capital (Kjøsen 2016: 66). A revolution in production, for example through the invention of a machine, may force transformations in other branches that ‘are connected together by being separate phases of a process, and yet isolated by the social division of labour, in such a way that each of them produces an independent commodity’ (Marx 1990: 505). Any changes that cause productivity increases in terms of volume and/or speed in one branch require connected branches to adapt in order for the original branch to maintain its new level of productivity. To illustrate this dynamic, Marx referred to the mechanical revolution in cotton-spinning that ‘called forth the invention of the gin’ because without this technology, the supply of cotton would not be able to keep up with mechanized cotton-spinning (1990: 505). With the general conditions, this dynamic is writ large; paying particular attention to the means of communication and transport, Marx argues that it was specifically the generalization of production with machinery and its resultant increase in speed and output that forced a change in the general conditions to become appropriate to large-scale industrial production. Thus, when particular branches of production are closely connected, ‘a revolution in terms of knowledge, technology and organization in one branch propagates throughout related branches, leading not only to growth in productivity, but also increased output, which in turn leads to new chain reactions throughout related branches of production and eventually to a revolution in the mode of production’, which thus becomes elastic in its productive capacity (Kjøsen 2016: 66–7).
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inhuman power