Selections from Marx's Gründrisse

 Questions

1. What is the difference between fixed and circulating capital? (280). Can we provide an example of what is new (or is being introduced) by fixed capital?

2. Can we unpack the following claim: "In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital" (Marx-Engels Reader, 279).

3. "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" (279). Does this entail technological determinism? Is there any autonomy or agency left for the worker?

4. Can we discuss the distinction between machine/machinery and instrument? (279)

5. "In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself" (280) & "Thus the quantitative extent and the effectiveness (intensity) to which capital is developed as fixed capital indicate the general degree to which capital is developed as capital, as power over living labour, and to which it has conquered the production process as such" (281). What is the power-relation of machine and labor? In Foucauldian terms is this a sovereign, a disciplinary, or other modality of power relation? Does this imply a zero-sum struggle?

6. "While machinery is the most appropriate form of the use value of fixed capital, it does not at all follow that therefore subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery" (281). What does this mean? Does this open the door to techno-communism? What valence does this have: pessimism, optimism? Is it deterministic?

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Discussion

Hiroshi Onishi suggests that machines (or mere tools) have no elasticity in pre-capitalist mode of production but in capitalism the elasticity of capital is always higher than zero.

Marx describes the process through which capital is split (282). The production process includes (a) means of labor, (b) material of labor, and (c) the product of labor. (a) = fixed capital and (b) & (c) = circulating capital. 

Machines (that are created by workers and is therefore "dead labor") is then used in the production process to create value and modify/accelerate the process itself. This can explain Marx's suggestion that machinery (dead labor) confronts living labor (workers) as an alien power or force that alienates them further.

The production process gets determined by the machine (a living organism, an automaton) and not by workers, even though they still remain indispensable from the process as their conscious element (although they are scattered).

"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." Should we see this as techno-determinism? Or what kind of determination is at play? It seems that this does not have to be takes as necessary law-like process but more like a tendency... Not a final teleology but a compulsion that is difficult (but not impossible) to interrupt.

Marx also recognizes the "workers' struggle against machinery" (283) and therefore recognizes that there is agency of the working class that can resist this (formal and real) subsumption...

It is not that machinery is bad intrinsically but the problem is that it is inserted or subsumed under capital as a social relation.

Could we think of Star Trek as a representation of a communist techno-utopia?