Karl Marx anticipated the integration of computers into capitalism and the development of the Info Economy

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Proletarian
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Karl Marx anticipated the integration of computers into capitalism and the development of the Info Economy

Post by Proletarian »

From a scrap entitled "Fragment on Machines", written in 1857 in his notebook and posthumously published as Grundrisse:
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. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.
The Fragment goes on to state the following:
... But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.
The fact that Marx distinguishes the "mechanical" and "intellectual" organs of this automaton is evidence that Marx was aware of the possible function of machine intelligence in capitalism. This wouldn't actually require an impossible feat of prognostication - proto-computers like the Difference Engine, the Eureka Machine, etc. were known to the Victorians. Their integration into capitalist production would have been obvious to a materialist like Marx.

Verily he was the Al Gore of his day.
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Re: Karl Marx anticipated the integration of computers into capitalism and the development of the Info Economy

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

If you are going to read this particular essay in that way, I'm surprised you missed out on a more obvious/explicit quote from it (emphasis mine):
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 or oil just as the worker consumes food to keep up its perpetual motion.
He sets up a very clear analogy for the machines becoming surrogate humans, to the point of having souls. In my mind, that is stronger evidence in support of your interpretation than the "and intellectual" aside in a rather ambiguously phrased passage.

Personally, I don't find the essay as a whole really supports your reading, of Marx literally foreseeing machine intelligence. It seems far more likely to me that he is being prosaic, since the primary focus of the piece is about how he predicts that the social and economic consequences of increasing automation will inevitably lead to the end of capitalism. His conclusions only really follow if you intuit that when he talks about automation he is really referring to the automation of the processes of production, leading to the accumulation of surplus labour value in the former working class (he even explicitly says that this frees up workers to pursue artistic and scientific pursuits, which he frames as being beyond the realm of production, whereas machines are explicitly tied only to the realm of production).

(On a side note, it's been a long time since I've read Das Kapital, does Marx not touch on automation in it?)
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