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.

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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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Cite as: Smith, Gavin. 2020. “Rereading Marx on machines in the time of COVID-19.” FocaalBlog, 15 May. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/05/15/gavin-smith-rereading-marx-on-machines-in-the-time-of-covid-19/