notes on capital
chapter 15: machinery and large-scale industry
sections 1-5

(492): quoting john stuart mill on the dubious utility of technological innovation for "any human being," marx seems to approve of a thoroughgoing skepticism. this, it has to be stressed, is in direct contrast to left, center, right interpretations of marxist developmentalism which ally a misguided appraisal of marx's technological determinism to an alleged 'linear' view of history. against these understandings, both this introduction and the rest of the chapter make clear marx's dialectical ambiguity with respect to the introduction of technology: at once a source of unprecedented revolutions in productivity, but also simultaneously the means for the brutalization of the handicrafts, the exploitative employment of women and children in their place, etc. aside from asserting the generally contradictory nature of "progress," then, the specific morphology of capitalist deployment of technological innovation is critical: the profit-seeking that underlies prodigious advances in technology renders them useless from the point of view of human development. this disjuncture between technological development and human development, one thus understands, is left to be implicitly resolved in socialist society, where collective ownership of the means of technological discovery would orient advances in science towards the liberation of humanity. democratic control, in other words, is critical.

(499): the centrality of the story of the steam-engine to the modern geography of rural-urban relations is critical, both in the historical sense that it explains specifically a momentous revolution in human life, and in the theoretical sense that it affirms a historical materialism that identifies the importance of shifting structures of production in shaping the contours of social life. though, in a basic sense, cities remain parasitic on the agricultural economy (in the sense that their metabolic reproduction is rooted in rural areas), the urban economy, now, for the first time, stands to become a concentrated area of real productive activity. in this sense, cities in industrial england in the 19th century are clearly entirely different from urban formations in earlier centuries.

(508): marx here makes a critical point about the changing basis for the "organization of the social labor process." in pre-machine manufacture, he argues, the organization of labor "is purely subjective." as i understand it, this means that it depends not on the nature of the implements being used, but takes the form of progressive innovations, on the part of the merchants/small capitalists in charge, in the form of organizing the process of production. with the advent of the machine era, however (and particularly, it would seem, with the point at which machines begin making machines (504)), the progressively more alienating organization of the labor process becomes an objective necessity, grounded in the technical requirements of production by machinery. in other words, as man, in general, cedes his sovereignty to machines, in general, specific man, in the form of the labor, loses all possibilities of control over his specific workplace. the machine takes the reigns. (see also page 547.) this attempt to understand the morphology of the factory in terms of prevailing technologies is crucial: perhaps raymond williams et. al. would insist that this not become reified as one of many "moments" (such as the ill-considered argument that 'mental' and 'material' labor become irrevocably split at one point in history)--in other words, that this dynamic, the relation of the division of labor to extant technology, needs to be constantly assessed and re-assessed. yet it does seem indisputable, this notion that the machine era inaugurates something totally unprecedented, in requiring a particular form of bondage in the factory. (i suppose, though, that it's only the williams argument that would make room for emancipation, even if it's hard to anticipate.)

(524-525): much of das kapital is littered with examples of the fallacies of liberal narratives of the industrial revolution (i.e., the ways in which they (a) less sophisticatedly, discount the suffering of the subalterns in favor of extolling the gains; (b) more sophisticatedly, recognize the suffering of the subalterns, but subjugate it, as benjamin insisted, in a narrative of future progress. in other words, the past becomes irrelevant because we live in the future). against all this, marx recovers the timelessness of domination. it is with the persistence of this morphology in mind that one ought to engage capitalist anthropology, the struggles of the working-day, etc. not as moments when capitalism had yet to be civilized, but as examples of the emphatically present requirements of capital accumulation. moments that form as inextricable a part of our present experience as anything that happens today, precisely because they explain, both historically and theoretically, today.

(530): remember--the distinction between the individual pursuit of relative surplus-value, and the way in which it is acquired by capitalism in toto. namely, the distinction between the honeymoon period (which is all the neo-classicals see), which results from the successful implementation of a new technology by one capitalist, and the general cheapening of consumer goods, which benefits all capitalists by cheapening the price of labor-power (and thereby reducing the the amount of necessary labor in a day).

(531): the classic immanent contradiction, which leads to the formulation of the declining organic composition of capital.

(542): 1780s, beginnings of unrest; 1833, 12 hr day; 1847, 10 hr day. needless to say, the presentation of these pieces of legislation as amenable to bourgeois aspirations is a revision, in a sense, of the polanyi picture of a capitalism being tamed (if i remember that right). in other words, these are not quite the fetters on bourgeois rapacity that orthodox explanations of them might attest. while of course it's true that these were welcome gains for workers, it is important not to forget that they were co-opted, in one way another, to fit the enormously plastic tactics of capitalism. to give marx's example, the shift to the 10-hr day, he argues, led to an "intensification" of the working day, which concentrated more labor-time in it than had previously been expended in 12 hours.

(548): a specific use of sisyphus to explain the laborer in machine-production. marx and engels as apologists for liberal modernity? please!

(548): here a reflection on the separation of intellectual labor from manual labor (i.e., the former becomes the duty of capital, and latter the bitter fate of labor). in other words, we see, with machines, the consolidation of alienation. yet, as williams would suggest, perhaps we need to remember that more is going on here? yet is that truly the case? i find it hard to see ways in which mental labor is not being detached from the lives of laborers everywhere. we, of course, need ranciere's reminders here, always. but this should not obscure, i don't think, the emphatically true suggestions that alienation intensifies with the ascent of the machine over handicraft/manufacture.

(549): a reminder, again, of foucault's debt to marx. aside from the talk about disciplining an entire population to accept the dictates and routines of industrial production and urban life (teaching workers to consume, for example), here marx writes of the implementation of specific intra-factory codes. the formation of an autocratically-administered army at the site of production, in the name of discipline and diligence (and, of course, as marx makes explicit at the top of 550, in defiance of the representative 'democratic' tradition laid claim to at the time).

(557-559): marx formulates briefly an argument about how the implementation of machinery creates (and re-creates, as time progresses), an reserve army of labor. specifically, he writes of english hand-loom weavers, and--critically to the caricatures of marx as colonial apologist--of the weavers in india who were devastated by english innovation. these examples, and this general history, is his explanation for luddite rejoinders to machinery. yet, of course, it's not that these open up revolutionary possibilities; in that sense, they are, however regrettably, only birth-pangs of the new order.

from "questioning technology: a critical anthology", eds. john zerzan and alice carnes, 1988:
[joseph weizenbaum, "computer power and human reason"]
During the times of trouble on American university campuses, one could often hear well-meaning speakers say that the unrest, at least on their campuses, was mainly caused by inadquate communication among the university's vaiours consitutencies, e.g., faculty, administration, students, staff. The "problem" was therefore seen as fundamentally a comunication, hence a technical, problem. It was therefore solvable by technical means, such as the establishment of vairous "hotlines" to, say, the president's or the provost's office. Perhaps there were communication difficulties; there usually are on most campuses. But this view of the "problem" - a view entirely consistent with Newell and Simon's view of "human problem solving" and with instrumental reasoning - actively hides, buries, the existence of real conflicts. It may be, for example, that students have genuine ethical, moral, and political interests that conflict with interests the university administration perceives itself to have, and that each consituency understands the other's interests very well. Then there is a genuine problem, not a communication difficulty, certainly not one that can be repaired by the technical expedient of hotlines, but instrumental reason covers each dilemma, however genuine, into a mere paradox that can then be unraveled by the application of logic, by calculation. All conflicting interests are replaced by the interests of technique alone. (24)
(...) This, like Philip Morrison's story, is a parable too. Its wider sigificance is that the corruption of the word "problem" has brought in its train the mystique of "problem solving", with catastrpohic effects on the whole world. When every problem on the international scene is seen by the "best and brightest" problem solvers as being a mere technical problem, wars like the Viet Nam war become truly inevitable. The recognition of genuinely conflicting but legitimate interests of coexisting societies - and such recognition is surely a precondition to conflict resolution or accommodation - is reendered impossible from the outset. Instead, the simplest criteria are used to detect differences, to search for means to reduce these differences, and finally to apply operators to "present objects" in ordder to transform them into "desired objects". It is, in fact, entirely reasonale, if "reason" means instrumental reason, to apply American military force,B-52's, napalm, and all the rest, to "communist-dominated" Viet Nam (clearly an "undesirable object") as the "operator" to transform it into a "desirable object", namely, a country serving Ameican interests. (25)
(...) [quoting from Horkeimer] According to the philosophy of the average modern intellectual, there is only one authority, namely, science, conceived as the classification of facts and the calculation of probabilities. The statement that justice and freedonm are better in themselves than injustice and oppression is scientifically unverifiable and useless. It has come to sound as meaningless in itself as would the statement that red is more beautiful than blue, or that an egg is better than milk. (25)

from "questioning technology: a critical anthology", eds. john zerzan and alice carnes, 1988:
[lewis mumford, "authoritarian and democratic technics"] "Democracy" is a term now confused and sophisticated by indiscriminate use, and often treated with patronizing contempt. Can we agree, no matter how far we might diverge at a later point, that the spinal principle of democracy is to place what is common to all men above that which any organization, institution, or group may claim for itself? This is not to deny the claims of superior natural endowment, specialized knowlege, technical skill, or institutional organization: all these may, by democratic permission, play a useful role in the human economy. But democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole, rather than the part, and only living human beings, as such, are an authentic expression of the whole, whether acting alone or with the help of others. (13)
(...) We surrender some of our autonomy when ill or criplled: but to surrender it every day on every occasion would be to turn life itself into a chronic illness. The best life possible - and here I am consciously treading on contested ground - is one that calls for an ever greater degree of self-direction, self-expression, and self-realization. In this sense, personality, once the exclusive attribute of kings, belongs on democratic theory to every man. Life itself in its fullness and wholeness cannot be delegated. (13)
(...) The tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation, between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created a critical situation. If our eyes had been open, we might long ago have discovered this conflict deeply embedded in technology itself. (14)
(...) My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two tecnologies have recurrently existed side-by-side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unlesss we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonnomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries. (14) [how does this escape depending on the dubious assumption that a deeply democratic ethos prevailed in the pre-neolithic period? unless it is the technic that is democratic - but then that would require faith in the progress that the man-friendly technic would produce, correct?]
(...) [democratic tecnhics] What I would call the democratic technics is the small scale mehthod of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature. This technology had limited horizons of achievement, but, just because of its wie diffusion and its modest demands, it had great powers of adaptation and recuperation. This democratic technics has underpinned and firmly supported every historic culture until our ow day, and redeemed the constant tendency of authoritarian technics to misapply its powers. Even when paying tribute to the most oppressive authoritarian regimes, there yet remained within the workshop or the farmyard some degree of autonomy, selectivity, creativity. No royal mace, no slave-driver's whip, no bureaucratic directive left its imprint on the textiles of Damascus or the pottery of fifth century Athens. (15)
(...) [authoritarian technics] ...authoritarian technics is a much more recent achievement: it begins around the fourth millennium B.C. in a new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control that gave rise to the pecuiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization. Under the new institution of kingship, activies that had been scattered, diversified, cut to the human measure, were united on a monumental scale into an entirely new kind of theological-technological mass organization. In the person of an absolute ruler, whose word was law, cosmic poewrs came down to earth, mobilizing and unifying the efforst of thousands of men, hitherto alltoo-autonomous and too decetralized to act voluntarily in unison for purposes that lay beyond the village horizon. (15)
(...) The new authoritarian technology was not limited by village custom or human sentiment: its herculean feats of mechanical organization rested on ruthless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery, which brougt into existence machines that were capable of exerting thousands of horsepower centuries before horses were harnessed or wheels invented. This centralized technics drew on inventions an dscientific discoveries of a high order: the written record, mathematics and astronomy, irrigation and canalizatoin: above all, it created complex human machines composed of specialized, standardized, replaceable, interdependent parts - the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy. (15) [Weber's "modern" here becomes post-neolithic]
(...) ...it created the fist economy of controlled abundance: notably, immense food crops that not merely supported a big urban population but released a large trained minority for purely religious, scientific, bureaucratic, or military activity. (16)
(...) as long as agriculture absoved the labor of some 90 per cent of the population, masss technics were confined largely to the populous urban centers. (16)
(...) But there were even greater weaknesses: the system had no inner coherence: a break in communication, a missing link in the chain of command, and the great human machines fel apart. Finally, the myths upon which the whole system was based - particularly the essential myth of kingship - were irrational, with their paranoid suspiciouns and animosities and their paranoid claims to unconditional obedience and absolute power. For alll its redoubtable constructive achievements, authoritarian technics expressed a deep hostility to life. (16)
(...) Up to now, following the optimistic premises of nineteenth century thikers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, we have regarded the spread of experimental science and mechnaical invention as the soundest guarantee of a peaceful, productive, above all democratic, industrial society. Many have evey comfortable supposed that the revolt against arbitrary political power in the seventeenth century was causally connected with the industrial revolution that accompanied it. But what we have interpreted as the new fredom now turns out to be a much more sophisticated version of the old slavery: for the rise of political democracy during the last few centuries has been increasingly nullified by the successful resurrection of a centrlaized authoritarian technics - a technics that had in fact for long lapsed in many parts of the world. (17) [weberian, most certainly]
(...) At the very moment Western nations threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducting coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might be in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanisitc purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that has now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dmiensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our owng age: pyschologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and comulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life. (17)
(...) Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependenc upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servo-mechanisms, still human enough to harbor purpoes that do not always coincide with those of the system. (17)
(...) ...its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientif knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex ocnditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves. (17) [much like effiency for free-market zealots]
(...) The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible pesonality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented. (18)
(...) In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike Job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated. (18)
(...) Do not misunderstand this analysis. The danger to democracy does not spring from any specific scientific discoveries or electronic inventions. The human compulsions that dominate the authoritarian technics of our own day date back to a period before even the wheel had been invented. The danger springs from the fact that, since Francis Bacon and Galileo defined the new methods and objectives of technics, our great physical transformations have been effected by a system that deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, overplays the role of the abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of existence. (18)
(...) Why has our age surrendered so easily...? The answer to this question is both paradoxical and ironic. Present-day technnics differs from that of the overtly brutal, half-baked authoritarian systems of the past in one highly favorable particular: it has acecpted the basic principle of democracy, that every member of society should have a share in its goods. By progressively fulfilling this part of the democratic promise, our system has achieved a hold over the whole community that threatens to wipe out every other vestige of democracy. (19) [surely not suggesting that everyone is equally subjugated?]
(...) The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the comunity may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. (19) [very well-put]
(...) I would not belittle, still less deny, the many admirable products this technology has brought forth, products that a self-regulating economy would make good use of. I would only suggest that it is time to reckon up the human disadvantages and costs, to say nothing of the dangers, of our unqualified acceptance of the system itself. Even the immediate price is heavy; for the system is so far from being under effective human direction that it may poison us wholesale to provide us wiht food or exterminate us to provide national secuirty, before we can enjoy its promised goods. (19) [so this is less a call to return to the pre-neolithic era, and more a demand to dismantle bureaucracy]
(...) Once our auhoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquilizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical collective. The spread of a sterilized scientific intelligence over the planet would not, as Teilhard de Chardin so innocently imagined, be the happy consummation of divine purpose: it would rather ensure the final arrrest of any further human development. (20)
(...) What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned wth maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an underdimensioned ideolgogy and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated. (20)
(...) ...we had better map out a more positive course: namely, the reconstitution of both our science and our technics in such a fashion as to insert the rejected parts of the human personality at eveyr stage in the process. These means gladly sacrificing mere quantity in order to restore qualitative choice, shifting the seat of authority from the mechanical collective to the human personality and the autonomous group. (20)
(...) I trust I have made it clear that the genuine advantages our scientifically based technics has brought can be preserved only if we cut the whole system back to a point at which it willl permit human alternatives, human interventions, and human destinations for entirely different purposes from those of the system itself. At the present juncture, if democracy did not exist, we would have to invent it, in order to save and recultivate the spirit of man. (21)