[D66] Rereading Marx on machines in the time of COVID-19

[R.O.]

  Gavin Smith: Rereading Marx on machines in the time of COVID-19

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Gavin Smith, /University of Toronto/

“/One of the many perils lies in normalizing the ‘batshit crazy’ 
presently underway/.”
—Wallace, Liebman, Chavez & Wallace 2020: 5

The COVID-19 pandemic has stripped the veneer off capitalist society 
whether in its softer social democratic version or its bare-faced pseudo 
Darwinian version. Both the cause and the cure are down to the way 
capitals, now thoroughly integrated into states, have driven the 
direction of technology to produce this perfect storm. The staggering 
failures at the curing end are not just glaringly obvious in the present 
crisis; you’d have to be especially starry-eyed not to see that the 
wheels and most of the chassis had been stripped off public health well 
before now. But at the causative end “the normalizing [of] the batshit 
crazy presently underway,” risks being lost in the chatter.

It looks like this: “Ecosystems in which such ‘wild’ viruses were in 
part controlled by the complexities of the tropical forest are being 
drastically streamlined by capital-led deforestation… While many 
sylvatic pathogens are dying off with their host species as a result, a 
subset of infections that once burned out relatively quickly in the 
forest, if only by an irregular rate of encountering their typical host 
species, are now propagating across susceptible human populations whose 
vulnerability to infection is often exacerbated in cities by austerity 
programs… Growing genetic monocultures—food, animals, and plants with 
nearly identical genomes—removes immune firebreaks that in more diverse 
populations slow down transmission. Pathogens now can just quickly 
evolve around the commonplace host immune genotypes” (Wallace et al 
2020: 7-8).

As Rob Wallace put it in March, “You couldn’t design a better system to 
breed deadly diseases.” (2020: 6).

/Iatrogenesis/—illness brought forth by the healer, as the Greeks would 
say— is itself an element of the pandemic, as old people die in ‘care’ 
homes while others skirt hospitals in fear of catching what they came to 
be cured for. But it is also a synecdoche for technology in the hands of 
capital, something that has taken on an addict-inducing life of its own; 
like a hit of coke it becomes the problem for which it alone is the 
solution. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the puzzle that Marx set himself 
in thinking about the “organs of the human brain, created by the human 
hand.”

Contrary to prevailing readings of his ‘fragment on machines,’ I don’t 
think we should use these lines for programmatic solutions but rather 
make them the basis for a discussion on the challenges of the 
present—which I hope this blog post will produce. These pages from the 
/Grundrisse/ that speak of this weird and apparently unstoppable tidal 
wave of machines necessitating and making possible other machines until, 
as capital, it consumes itself—are almost as cryptic as they have become 
seminal/./ It seems to me that he was rehearsing a nightmare of the 
conditions that arise when the process of social life itself has come 
under the control of what he called “the general intellect” (1973: 706).

Here are the steps he took to arrive at this conclusion.

 1. [Under these conditions] in no way does the machine appear as the
    individual worker’s means of labour (1973:692).
 2. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in
    place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own
    in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil
    etc. /(matières instrumentales), /just as the worker consumes food,
    to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker’s activity, reduced to a
    mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all
    sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The
    science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their
    construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist
    in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the
    machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself (/ibid/).
 3. The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an
    accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping
    of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate
    to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the
    general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into
    capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of
    capital, and more specifically of /fixed capital, /in so far as it
    enters into the production process as a means of production proper
    (/op cit/: 695).
 4. Hence, the greater the scale on which fixed capital develops, in the
    sense in which we regard it here, the more does the /continuity of
    the production process /or the constant flow of reproduction become
    an externally compelling condition for the mode of production
    founded on capital (/op cit/: 703).
 5. The development of machinery along this path occurs only when large
    industry has already reached a higher stage, and all the sciences
    have been pressed into the service of capital; and when, secondly,
    the available machinery itself already provides great capabilities.
    Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to
    direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and
    solicits it (/op cit/: 704).
 6. [Capital] calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as
    of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make
    the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time
    employed on it (/op cit/: 706).
 7. Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric
    telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human
    industry; natural material transformed into /organs of the human
    will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They
    are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; /the power
    of knowledge, objectified (/ibid:/ 706).

Never too convincing to the original inhabitants made redundant in the 
global south, the idea prevalent in the wealthy countries that 
technology will save, looks more and more like the emperor with no 
clothes. Palm oil, soy, lumber biomass and intensive livestock rearing 
use the language of technological magic as the front for ravaging carbon 
resources below and stripping vegetation above. Technological fixes as 
always—always—cover for spatial predation. This means that if we don’t 
tackle modernity’s tunnel-vision view of technology and the supposedly 
unstoppable and ‘natural’ unfolding of technological ‘advances’—from 
chemical fertilizers to biomass fuels—we are doomed. We are probably 
doomed anyway, but it’s hard to find a language beyond Luddism that 
might help us to understand the way in which the path-dependent 
direction of technological fixes in the hands of capital and capitalist 
states follows its own logic, “products of human industry [becoming] 
natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature…”

These few extracts from Marx, together no doubt with others, might help 
to frame what is now so urgent a conversation.

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*Gavin Smith* is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the 
University of Toronto and a Board member of /Focaal – Journal of Global 
and Historical Anthropology/.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*References:*

Harvey, D. 2020: “We Need a Collective Response to the Collective 
Dilemma of Coronavirus” /Jacobin/ Blog April 24 
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/david-harvey-coronavirus-pandemic-capital-economy 
Accessed 1 May 2020.

Marx, K. 1973: /Grundrisse/: Foundations of the Critique of Political 
Economy (Rough Draft) Trans. M. Nicolaus. Penguin. Harmonsworth.

Wallace, R. 2020: “Capitalism is a disease hotspot” [Interview] /Monthly 
Review Online/ March. 
https://mronline.org/2020/03/12/capitalism-is-a-disease-hotspot/ 
Accessed 8 May 2020.

Wallace, R., A. Liebman, L.F. Chavez, & R. Wallace. 2020: “COVID-19 and 
circuits of capital” /Monthly Review/ April. 
https://monthlyreview.org/2020/05/01/covid-19-and-circuits-of-capital/ 
Accessed 3 May.

Wright, Steve. 2002: /Storming Heaven: class composition and struggle in 
Italian autonomist Marxism./ Pluto. London.


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