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<h1 class="css-1z36ek">Gavin Smith: Rereading Marx on
machines in the time of COVID-19</h1>
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<p>Gavin Smith, <em>University of Toronto</em></p>
<p>“<em>One of the many perils lies in
normalizing the ‘batshit crazy’ presently
underway</em>.” <br>
—Wallace, Liebman, Chavez & Wallace
2020: 5</p>
<p>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.</p>
<span></span>
<p>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).</p>
<p>As Rob Wallace put it in March, “You
couldn’t design a better system to breed
deadly diseases.” (2020: 6).</p>
<p><em>Iatrogenesis</em>—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.”</p>
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<p>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 <em>Grundrisse</em>
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<em>.</em> 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).</p>
<p>Here are the steps he took to arrive at
this conclusion.</p>
<ol>
<li>[Under these conditions] in no way does
the machine appear as the individual
worker’s means of labour (1973:692).</li>
<li>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. <em>(matières instrumentales), </em>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 (<em>ibid</em>).</li>
<li>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 <em>fixed capital, </em>in
so far as it enters into the production
process as a means of production proper (<em>op
cit</em>: 695).</li>
<li>Hence, the greater the scale on which
fixed capital develops, in the sense in
which we regard it here, the more does
the <em>continuity of the production
process </em>or the constant flow of
reproduction become an externally
compelling condition for the mode of
production founded on capital (<em>op cit</em>:
703).</li>
<li>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 (<em>op cit</em>:
704).</li>
<li>[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 (<em>op cit</em>:
706).</li>
<li>Nature builds no machines, no
locomotives, railways, electric
telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These
are products of human industry; natural
material transformed into <em>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; </em>the power of knowledge,
objectified (<em>ibid:</em> 706).</li>
</ol>
<p>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…”</p>
<p>These few extracts from Marx, together no
doubt with others, might help to frame what
is now so urgent a conversation.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Gavin Smith</strong> is Emeritus
Professor of Social Anthropology at the
University of Toronto and a Board member of
<em>Focaal – Journal of Global and
Historical Anthropology</em>.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>References:</strong></p>
<p>Harvey, D. 2020: “We Need a Collective
Response to the Collective Dilemma of
Coronavirus” <em>Jacobin</em> Blog April 24
<a
href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/david-harvey-coronavirus-pandemic-capital-economy"
rel="noreferrer noopener">https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/david-harvey-coronavirus-pandemic-capital-economy</a>
Accessed 1 May 2020.</p>
<p>Marx, K. 1973: <em>Grundrisse</em>:
Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy (Rough Draft) Trans. M. Nicolaus.
Penguin. Harmonsworth.</p>
<p>Wallace, R. 2020: “Capitalism is a disease
hotspot” [Interview] <em>Monthly Review
Online</em> March. <a
href="https://mronline.org/2020/03/12/capitalism-is-a-disease-hotspot/"
rel="noreferrer noopener">https://mronline.org/2020/03/12/capitalism-is-a-disease-hotspot/</a>
Accessed 8 May 2020.</p>
<p>Wallace, R., A. Liebman, L.F. Chavez, &
R. Wallace. 2020: “COVID-19 and circuits of
capital” <em>Monthly Review</em> April. <a
href="https://monthlyreview.org/2020/05/01/covid-19-and-circuits-of-capital/"
rel="noreferrer noopener">https://monthlyreview.org/2020/05/01/covid-19-and-circuits-of-capital/</a>
Accessed 3 May.</p>
<p>Wright, Steve. 2002: <em>Storming Heaven:
class composition and struggle in Italian
autonomist Marxism.</em> Pluto. London.</p>
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