In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of the product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself…the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain [des gesellschaftlichen Gehirns], is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, insofar as it enters into the production-process as a means of production proper…in machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by the needs of capital [die Bedürfnisse des Kapitals].<sup>94</sup>
Like its earlier cited counterpart, this passage allows us to grasp the essential relation between the self-expansion of capital and the materialist concept of history, epitomised by the assertion that ‘self-activating objectified labour’ appears as ‘the force of production itself’. Yet of equal importance here, and what we will examine now, is something that, in addition to automation (although indissociable from it), constitutes another dimension of the valorisation-process and real subsumption, thus something that, along with automation, secures capital as the condition of thinking history. This feature is alienation.
<sup>93</sup> See, in particular, Tony Smith, ‘Hegel, Marx and the Comprehension of Capitalism’, and Riccardo Bellofiore, ‘Lost in Translation: Once Again on the Marx–Hegel Connection’, both of which appear in Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, ed. Fred Moseley and Tony Smith.
<sup>94</sup> Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 594-95 (Grundrisse, 694-95). The ‘social brain’ in this passage dovetails with the physiological dimension of Marx’s concept of abstract labour highlighted in the previous chapter.
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