Capitalism, Automation, and Socialism: Karl Marx on the Labor Process (original) (raw)
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Marx, Automation and the Future of Work
Global Labour Journal , 2024
The ever-increasing use of automation technologies in the manufacturing process has again raised concerns about the future of work. A considerable number of left-wing thinkers argue that, with the wave of automation, we see a dissolution of the foundations of a work-based capitalist society, and that a new society has emerged spontaneously. Marx's studies have been referenced, more or less, in most of these analyses. Efforts to base this thesis that we are moving into a post-work society on Marx are highly speculative. In Marx's analysis, automation and proletarianisation are two facets in the process of accumulation of capital that function together. A small number of workers and technology-intensive manufacturing in some sectors make labour-intensive production necessary in other sectors and countries. Today's available data and trends also indicate that Marx's analysis of automation in the context of accumulation of capital is still applicable.
Automation and Labor: Is Marx Equal to Adam Smith?
The qualifications for employment within the modern microelectronic-based, automated systems can be understood as a negation of the Marxist claim that work would come to demand less skill as technology developed. This paper attempts to criticize this interpretation by seeking the work-deskilling concept in the writings of Marx himself. The result is the proposition that that which is observed in the modern factory*/ that is, the radical dispensability of living work*/ really mirrors work deskilling according to Marx. The more usual idea of work deskilling, attributed erroneously to Marx, is in reality Smithian in nature. Based on this analysis, a critical analysis is made of Labor and Monopoly Capital by Braverman, which has become accepted as the definitive interpretation of the ideas of Marx on the subject. The sole cause for confusion arising from equating the Marxist and Smithian analyses concerning technology and work should be attributed to an incorrect understanding of Taylorism and Fordism. Here we propose that recent technological developments in reality signify an end to the mistake of equating Marx with Smith, and also indicate the great relevance of Marx today.
Automation, Work, and Ideology: The Next Industrial Revolution and the Transformation of "Labor
2017
and Concrete Labor Capitalist society is characterized by how it makes individual reproduction and society’s reproduction dependent upon the interdependent labor of workers in a division of labor that now spans the globe. At the core of this interdependence is the unique socially mediating function labor takes in capitalism. Trenkle (1998b) notes how the nature of labor in capitalist society is dependent upon its social context to derive meaning (pg. 1). Labor in capitalism is only considered labor if it “materializes in the abstract-social context of the production of commodities and some wage is awarded for the carrying out” (Trenkle, 1998b, pg. 1). What Marx calls abstract labor refers to when selling labor power for a certain amount of time in 93 Of course, there are kinds of work that exist “outside” of what capitalism considers labor, because what counts as labor in capitalism is labor time expenditure in exchange for the universal equivalent, money. The most common example of...
2018
Debates about automation and the future of work have proliferated in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. From smart software to nimble industrial robots, new labor-saving technologies seem to explain why the post-Recession period has witnessed the decoupling of economic growth and employment. This essay argues that Marx's contribution to the automation debate is his critique of the contradictions and hollow promises of capitalist technological progress. For Marx, although robots could potentially help transform labor time, they are ultimately frauds that express the emancipatory potential of science and technology in the inverted form of humanized machines and mechanized, superfluous humans. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. […] All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. (Marx, "Speech" 655-66) I. Rise of the Robots Derek Thompson's article "A World Without Work," published in The Atlantic in 2015, features fictionalized photographs of what I imagine to be a Museum of Work. One photograph shows a businessman encased in glass: "Full-Time Worker Circa 2016." Another image is of a coffee mug, which is labeled "Typical Workplace Warm-Beverage Container," while another picture of "Factory Man…Extinct" depicts a man in a hard hat who resembles the stuffed hominid ancestors that we find in the anthropology wing of today's museums. The photographs suggest that what we now understand as work will soon belong to antiquity; the future of work is that work, as we know it, has no future. What if the "experts [who] have predicted that machines would soon make workers obsolete," the article's caption submits, "weren't wrong, but only premature?" "A World Without Work" is one of many popular and professional discourses on automation that have been circulating widely in the United States since the Great Recession of 2007-2009. From Barack Obama to Elon Musk, from The New Yorker to Jacobin, it seems everyone has a position on the "robots." The burning question is whether we are on the verge of a jobs apocalypse, a future for which "humans need not apply" (Kaplan). To be sure, it seems that every time people invent new systems of automated production, there are renewed fears that auto
Capitalism, Labor and the Totalising Drive of Technology
Envisioning Robots in Society— Power, Politics, and Public Space; Proceedings of Robophilosophy 2018/TRANSOR 2018. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2018, 2018
In this paper I try to illustrate, quite roughly and indicatively, the interconnections between automation technology and social organization. Central to this analysis are the notions of automation, increased productivity in a capitalist society, labor, equality, global inequality and the modern culture of technology. I will end the paper with brief critical remarks on the question of 'robot rights'.
Technology and Culture, 1990
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The 'Social Paradigm' of Automation
Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelten, 2024
The lineage of industrialisation that began in the eighteenth century continues with the development of artificial intelligence (AI). It reveals a heuristic apparent in/as the social paradigm that defines labour as interchangeable with the machinery it operates. Placing AI into a socio-cultural context with the industrial revolution reveals the on-going impacts of the social disparities created by capitalist production in the nineteenth century that were justified by reifying Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy concerning judgement (human agency) continue to shape contemporary developments. Examining this philosophical justification and its influence illuminates a social paradigm focused on the replacement of labour with automation. This interdisciplinary approach links moral and aesthetic claims to the questions of labour to reveal a heuristic in which workers were cast as the “intellectual organs” of the machine, anticipating “machine learning” and other forms of digital automation that replace intelligent labour. This cultural foundation developes from the continuity of technological changes that defined each stage of industrialisation through disparate social, cultural and aesthetic claims about machinery and the social significance of the industrial factory. The regimentation of labour by industrialization concerned nineteenth century artists and critics whose ideas established an archetype whose structural effects shape and constrain the contemporary implementation of automation and AI.
Automation and the Future of Work
This chapter argues that to think about automation and the future of work, it is necessary to take account of the particular technologies used to implement automation processes and how they are implicated in the social relations constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. It proposes the concept of synthetic automation as a means for thinking about automation and the future of work. The concept of synthetic automation emphasises the significance of the approach to artificial intelligence known as machine learning as a new technological infrastructure underlying the contemporary approach to automation. But synthetic automation also implies a theory about how automation functions and develops under capitalism-as a "postulate" in the terms of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. A postulate is a tendency immanent to the capitalist system. This conception shows that capital is driven to automate automation itself. This is significant for the future of work, not in terms of pointing to a specific scenario in which particular jobs will be rendered obsolete by a certain year, but rather by demonstrating that the technical dynamism which characterises capitalism applies also to its automation technologies. In other words, the qualitative nature of automation is driven to change by the structure of capitalist production. The possible imports of automation for the future of work therefore cannot be discussed productively in abstraction from the development of the particular technologies which realise automation.
A Marxist analysis of the role played by developing technologies in intimating a shift from capitalism to a new mode of production. In this essay I will examine the role of technological development in Marx's theory of history, and apply this focused analysis to contemporary capitalism. My central thesis is that developing technologies; specifically in the area of automation, such as robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) play a central role in transforming the mode of production beyond capitalism. However I wish to qualify against a "technologically determinate" interpretation of Marx's theory, and emphasise the role that class antagonisms play in the motion of history. As such I will not be predicting the end of the capitalist mode of production, due to these technologies, but rather highlighting the opportunity they present for change. The first section of this paper will detail Marx's theory of history, often called historical materialism. The second section will examine the role of technology within this theory, and explore the fundamental contradictions automation and mechanisation present to capital. The third section will propose automation and information technologies as radical changes in the productive forces, of sufficient scope to induce a radical change in the mode of production as a whole. Section four will examine the applicability of the contradictions noted in section two to these technologies, as well as examining limitations to the role played by these technologies in a movement towards post-capitalist society. In concluding, I will review the extent to which Marx's theory holds explanatory potential when applied to contemporary capitalism vis-à-vis the role of developing technologies, as well as interrogating how far this analysis can take us in trying to understand or predict any forthcoming changes to production relations as a result of this technological evolution. Marx inherited from Hegel a conception of history as working towards a purpose. Whilst for Hegel this was the realisation of Mind, for Marx this purpose was the emancipation of humankind from alienation. By alienation is meant the loss of ability by people to determine their relationship to 1 others, to determine the course of their own life, to own the products of their own labour and so on, Singer, 2000. 56-57.