Class 12: Capital Chapter 13 Machinery

(dramatic music) - We're talking about machinery, and particularly the machine, as a site of capitalist energy, of energy for the capital system as a new kind of entity, as a point of organization for human life, for your laboring day, for a new kind of logic, the organization of work process, which doesn't follow the logic of any philosophy that we had before. One of his complaints, Marx's complaints about political theorists, political economists before is that they don't understand how material conditions change under material pressures, one of which is what we could call technology. But I'm gonna make you a proposal about technology today just to think about it in a particular way. We can think of the machine age as, as I said last time, the triumph of process over skilled labor. We can think of the machine itself as purpose without restrictions. That is, knowing nothing else but its purpose, and pursuing it, and having no second thoughts. A machine has no second thoughts, it only has a first thought. So that's why workers who would actually enter into the machine as a second thought, and say, oh, but what about the workers? That's the form of a second thought. "Oh, but what about... " The machine does not have those thoughts. So insofar as the machine is in control, the workers fall out of consideration. And we're gonna talk about the ways in which that happens, but it's not just falling out of consideration, it's becoming a prop and having the whole fabric of your laboring life changed. Okay, I wanna make some general remarks about the machine. It is not primarily a material thing, metal. It is primarily the result of a drive, which we talked about in the chapters leading up to this. The drive to increase relative surplus value. The machine is just the concretization of, let's say, the difficulty increasing surplus, relative surplus value, or any surplus value, by any other way. The machine was necessary, it was the invention of this problem. It solved a problem and it created many others, which is a form you should get used to in Marxist thinking. Antagonisms deepen, even if they bring goods with them. So machinery, which developed out of the drive to increase relative surplus value, was a direct result of the limits on absolute surplus value. One is like a natural limit, the day is only so long, we have only so much energy. And the other is a legal limit, which is embodied for Marx in this terribly contradictory set of laws called the factory acts, which of course reduced overall labor time and helped children move out of the factory, except, as we saw, it brought many, many more children across the board into the factory, given that they could work shorter time. Well, the solution to all of this was a machine that has little hands, and doesn't have a mouth, or its mouth is fed by raw materials, but not by means of subsistence. Okay so, here we are, following Marx's historical procedure, historical and analytical procedure, to say this is what capital requires in its idea, it requires an increase in surplus value. It reaches a historical limit, in the limit to absolute surplus value, and it eats its limits. That's just what capital does. So it starts to produce more relative surplus value, and to do that, it invents the machine. Capital invents machine, and along with inventing machines, it invents scientists to invent machines. What made a barber decide they suddenly had to invent the water frame? They were busy cutting hair. Capital, there was a need for it, there was reward a vacuum especially shaped in the shape of a machine. That's what capital created. I wanna mention, just in these general remarks, the absurdity of increasing relative surplus value. Marx's way of thinking is that every part of the capital system, and particularly every innovation, brings a kind of absurdity with it. What is the absurdity? How do you increase relative surplus value?

You drive down the value of commodities. But the whole point of capital is to drive up the value of commodities. Remember which type of commodities, the value of which you have to drive down, which is the, that was not a good sentence, you understand what I'm saying? Which commodities? - Commodities that relate to the means of subsistence. - Exactly. Whatever forms part of the worker's labor power, their means of subsistence, you need to drive those commodities down. So you want to increase surplus value by driving down value. It's a dicey game. There is no easy path to capitalist paradise, it's always paved with these sorts of absurdities and complications that lead to restless innovation on the capitalist side. So, fundamentally, the increase of relative surplus value is absurd, it requires driving down value. Driving up value That's what Marx calls, in other places, a contradiction, or an antagonism. This is a beautiful doubling of words, a contradiction is logical, but an antagonism is social, and they work together. The contradictions in the capital system are already antagonisms, or become antagonisms, and can be stretched and pushed on by social means, just like strikes in the factory push owners to limit the working day, but then they develop the capacity to increase relative surplus value without increasing the length of the day. Absurdities, for Marx, become contradictions in the logic and antagonisms in the social field. Another general remark, obviously the advent of the machine age puts artisans definitively out of work. There are still artisans, but they don't contribute to the core of the capitalist economy. It also puts an end to the cooperative manufacturing workshop. That thing out of which it was born. No more cooperation. The workforce, the group that is workers, will look very different after the machine age or in the machine age. So here's one of the ripening antagonisms, he calls them ripening, I love this, as though capitalism was a kind of a hell fruit that ripened in front of your eyes. Cooperation is the model on which the machine is made, and the machine puts cooperation out of business. You remember that cooperation was people doing part jobs in a line or in parallel? Well, that's what a machine is. As soon as the machine can mechanize that, can make the workers obsolete, theoretically, driving down the cost of labor power to zero, of course, if you drive all of the cost of labor power to zero and put everyone out of work, no one has any money to buy the goods you're producing, so that's not gonna work. Technical utopias, they're not even contradictory, they're just ludicrous. Imagine that we had a technical utopia, everything was made, and distributed, and communicated about by machines, and then the capitalists just handed out money to us, I guess, so that we can go buy the goods so that they can remain capitalists. Doesn't make any sense. Okay, those are the general remarks. The machine chapter, which is enormous and deserves to be a book in itself, is one of the two best theories of technology as far as I'm concerned. And as a theory of capitalist society, it presents four major contradictions that arise with machines, because of machines, around machines. I'm gonna give them to you like a gift, like a poisonous gift. The first major contradiction of the machine milieu is the value trap, I mentioned it last time, where the final effect contradicts the immediate effect. The final effect is reducing labor power, and therefore value. Because the machine replaces workers, that's the final effect. The immediate effect is there's a sharp increase in value when you get a machine and you can put out 100 times what you were putting out before, but that soon evens out when everyone else gets the machines. The value of the commodities go way down, and, of course, you're reducing the input of labor power, including the input of surplus labor power

or surplus labor. So this is the value trap, the final effect contradicts the immediate effect. That is, in some sense, it leads to its own crisis, the machine age. The second contradiction is what he calls the absolute contradiction on page 449. That is that the machine age brings in with it the compulsion to permanent technical revolution. Permanent technical revolution, which means that any machine you have now will not be the machine you have tomorrow. That's impossible. All decisions are made on that basis. You didn't need to wait till the late 20th century for planned obsolescence in consumer electronics, obsolescence is built in. That is to say, in order to survive and thrive, capitalists have to continually throw out their work process for another one. Rather than being supervisors of a work process that take the surplus value of it, they're like paranoid squirrels, like the squirrels in JE, constantly looking around to see who got the nuts. Where are the nuts coming from? This is what Marx calls the absolute contradiction. To some degree, I would say it's among the one or two most significant discoveries of this book, and we still live in the age of permanent technical revolution, obvious to all of you. We'll say some stuff about the technical side of capital and the moral being of technology today. Another contradiction, it's related to the value trap but is a separate contradiction, the social contradiction is that workers produce the machines that put them out of work. This is a form of the contradiction, where Arkwright, who made the water frame, will eventually not need to invent things because something else, a machine, is making the machines. Eventually, the machines are making the machines. And of course the big contradiction that's still sitting with us in one particular form, this is the fourth, that the machine age of capital or industrial capital ruins its resources. It poisons them, it ruins the resource of labor, and the Earth. That's a big one, Marx saw it clearly. These are contradictions that will, unless innovated around or changed by overcoming the capital system, destroy capital from the inside. So, he starts to track these things. Okay, as we go through the machine chapter, I want to propose a thought for you to sit with for today, and maybe you can sit with it even beyond this lecture, just sit with it through the whole day. Is that a lot to ask? Not the week, you're going on break, not the semester, not for your life. Here's the thought: technology is always an extractive tool. Think about it. So, you go to your car, or you use your phone. It may be an excessive thought, but it's worth sitting with it for the day, for you to understand where we are vis-a-vis technology today. Technology is an extractive tool. And the other part of it, in being an extractive tool, it extracts labor, it extracts skill, and returns very little to the worker, if anything. It's also self-contradictory, it leads to its own demise, its own overcoming. Technology, for Marx, so that's the thought, the thought is, technology is an extractive tool. That means though that you have to give up any idea that technology is a helper, will help you get the things done that are your purposes. It carries out its purposes that to some degree are independent of capitalist purposes. A humane capitalist cannot tame the permanent technological revolution just because they feel like it. They have to go with it, and then they fall to the wayside. Think of the tame capitalist technologists like Henry Ford, think of Henry Ford. You don't think of him as tame maybe if you know something about the history. But look at Ford next to Musk, he looks like the warmest, most fuzzy, most labor-positive human being on the planet, Henry Ford. Technology is never a helper and it never saves work. You gotta keep this in mind.

This is Marx's theory, Marx's commitment. Okay, we need to talk a little bit about machines themselves before we get to talking about what Marx is really after, which is their effects on laborers, or on labor, as an essence, as an idea. Let's just say a little bit what a machine was for Marx. Maybe I started this, but I'm gonna go through it again. Machines go through a kind of development and retain some of their older features. At first, machines are souped-up tools. For those people who are technology enthusiasts, including people who write the history of technology, to go back into history and absorb tools into the history of technology is just false, because tools are not extractive. Tools serve the purposes of humans, even if they shape human behavior to some degree. They're reciprocally-purposed, they have their own purpose, and they're always used for social ends. A machine is a souped-up tool, in that it takes a tool and absorbs it into the machine's purposes. For Marx, it has three parts, and I want to add a fourth part. You will have read this at the beginning of the chapter, but I'm gonna remind you, a machine is simple. It has a motive mechanism, a transmitting mechanism, and the tool end. The tools are the working parts, the parts that do the work. To that, I want to add, so, a motive mechanism, you'll see this in part one where he's talking about the machine itself, motive mechanism, transmitting mechanism, and the tool are the working parts. We need to add to that something that he couldn't fully see, although it was already there in his time, that is, a governor or a control mechanism. Which becomes the computer. Any of these parts can be subject to the permanent technological revolution. The motive mechanism, that is not just, let's say, the type of engine, internal combustion engine, nuclear engine, warp drive, whatever you wanna call it, but also the energy that runs it. You'll see a lot of technology work, or so-called science, is aimed at innovating in the motive mechanism. The transmitting mechanisms, the tools or working parts, any of them can be subject to rapid, sudden overturning invention and transformation. Suddenly, these are not the best tools anymore, tool ends. We have totally new tool ends. The work product is held in a different way, is attacked by very different kinds of blades. But of course, we are living in the age in which the fourth part of the machine, the governor or control mechanism, is undergoing the most rapid and thoroughgoing revolutions. That is, the so-called digital age. There's an argument to be made that it's just the machine age focusing on a different part of the machine. The machine is a souped-up tool at first, becomes a new means of labor, and with these different kinds of parts, the metal embodiment of process revolutionizes the whole mode of manufacturing. A machine changes the way things are made, from beginning to end, may even change the kinds of raw materials that you need to make the same thing you used to make because they have to be machine-ready. Whatever that is, smaller pieces, different alloy, right? Everything you used to think the miners have to change, the agriculture has to change, they have to have food that can be digested very quickly on a 20-minute lunch break. Like, what is that crazy British spread? Not Marmite, it's the Australian version, I think. The other one. Vegemite. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of totally disgusting, already processed calories that you can eat in 20 minutes and can affect your energy very quickly, right? Revolutionizes everything, the machine. The machine is a souped-up tool with these special parts. It revolutionizes the mode of manufacturing. It contributes to a commodities value, but as we know, only in parts of its own value, never makes more value or surplus value, only preserves its own value and transfers it in little pieces.

This is what a machine is for Marx, it is a store of capital. Did I go through this already? No. If I did, you forgot. I did? You think I might've. All right, I'm going through it again. It's a store of capital, which means once you invest your capital in it, it's there. It's stuck, it's sunk. It is a representation of capital that's been advanced already, not capital to be advanced, which is usually in the form of money. So it is a form of capital, your machine. That's why one of the new jobs of laborers is to take care of it. Laborers who take care of the machines are like bankers money, they are charged with taking care of your advanced capital. Another way that Marx talks about this is that machines are already objectified labor, or dead labor. They need to be enlivened by living labor, but in the machine age, the vast majority of activity in the working floor is carried out by already objectified labor. A machine is also a hub of collectivity, it is the place around which human beings turned. We know it is also an increaser of productivity. And as such he calls it, in one of his brilliant metaphors, the mechanical body of the capitalist, who is its soul. The machine then becomes its own force that acts on labor in a number of ways. It is an impetus to brutally extend the workday again, to keep it running. It is an impetus to brutally speed up labor and produce things in shorter time. So even though the machine is doing the brunt of the work, let's say, the people who are working along with it have to work much faster to keep up with the damn machine. It is what I would call the new master on the work floor. It forces an increase in labor intensity, it changes the way you labor around it, it reduces your skill contribution. Okay, those are all the things that a machine does. Questions about that? Yeah? - So the machine isn't like the individual, like physical object, but like the system, like technically a system of capital? - A machine, let's say, what would you wanna say? What's a good way to say this? Marx also will describe to you the way machines produce systems of machines that work together so that the mechanization of one part of the economy leads to the mechanization of the rest, partly because the machine on this side that's making whatever needs its supplies more quickly, so you need to mechanize mining to get there. You eventually end up with a coordinated system of machines, which means its own kind of control. You also need new industries that spring up, communications and transport. They're not exactly new, but they take on increasingly important roles. Because in the system of machines, the coordination of the output of the different machines has to take place by communication, and the transport of the materials has to take place very quickly. Otherwise, you don't get the benefit of a machine. So you have technological raising in all areas, technological ascent, if you wanna call it that. The machine is the center of this. It's as though you had a kind of ontological transformation. It used to be, let's say the worker and the capitalist, and now in between is the machine that is, to some extent, calling the shots for both. There's a new player, and it becomes the central player. - Do you think Marx would have considered something like a windmill or water wheel a machine? Or is that like, because it belongs to an earlier period, like how do we categorize those sorts of machines? - Well, those are parts of the historical development of the machine factory. So the water wheel, we're gonna talk about, why don't we do this now, the water wheel is a key component

but still that is, let's say a mill wheel, whose motive force is mechanized, that's a certain way of extracting motive force from nature, the force of the river, through mechanical means, with a transmission system and a tool at the end. It's a machine, but it's not a capitalist machine. Because for, let's say 1,000 years, there's no pressure to revolutionize it. What happens under capitalism is there's pressure to speed up the wheel, to turn the wheel into something you can control more outside of the weather, to make a kind of linkage that allows multiple wheels to be happening at the same time, and where the innovation of the technology becomes a driving force in the whole economy. And so you could call that, you know, a mechanized tool, that's what I would call it, but the machine involves all these factors. Machinery involves all these factors, changes the social life. So, this is just from Wikipedia, you can look it up, but you can see a little bit, we're just talking here about thread, you can see a little bit the history of inventions. And I'm gonna just show you the spinning wheel, the spinning jenny, the, where is the water frame? The water frame, which I didn't highlight, and the spinning wheel. Just so you have a sense of what it looks like. Thank you to this lovely human being for posing for this photograph in the late 19th century. There's, of course, still individual spinning happening. And you can see here is a tool, between a tool and a machine, or a kind of pre-capitalist machine, where the human supplies the motive power. Do you see that? The energy comes from the foot. It's one single human being, spinning wool in this case, into one single spool of thread at a time. And you can imagine, to industrialize this, you can, you need a factory floor with 100 such charming women. Right? And this is the way you would increase your output in the 17th century, up till the 17th century. Probably like the 15th to the 17th century, you would increase your output by having more people spin. They would spin in their own cottages, or when you move to the factory system, you'd move them all to a floor, they'd have access to the wool, the wool would be all carted for them, et cetera. There's a limited amount of output, but you'll notice there's a human being here who doesn't only look charming, but has the corporeal intelligence and mental intelligence to handle the process of making wool into thread from beginning to end. This person knows everything, including how to get rid of slobs. And don't you know what a slob is? It's the little slight irregularities in the thread. Anyone a slob here? That the spinner would smooth out, would feel only with the sensitive tips of their fingers, this is what made it hard to mechanize, so that they could then stretch it a little more and the thread would be more even. So the quality of the thread depended very much on the sensitivity of the human being and all the intricate knowledge that this woman didn't invent, but was passed down to her by her mother, and grandmother, and great-grandmother. It did happen to be mostly women's work in these centuries, though not exclusively. What is that one? Well, there's this guy. Suddenly. Anyway, I'm not gonna play you that. But there's a great YouTube video to show you how to spin flax. You see him feeling for the slobs there? I think that's what my mother did with my room. This is the spinning jenny, which was invented in 1765, as you can see. Oh, so in the other version, let's say you had one person spinning one spool of thread in one hour, with a spinning jenny, one person managed the machine, and the early versions could do eight spools at once. The late versions could do 120 spools, but somebody had to pedal it still. The spinner used their right hand to rapidly turn a wheel that caused all the spindles to revolve and the thread to be spun. Obviously, you don't have enough fingers to feel for the slobs, so you need other mechanisms to take up for the spinners, and innovation starts to spread across the late, early modern world.

What happened, this was invented by James Hargreaves, he invented this and he forgot to patent it, because nobody understood how technology was gonna change so rapidly that you would immediately lose your value. So by the time it was patented in about 1770, there was something else in its place, so he lost all the money for it, incidentally. What happened when he used it, he kept it secret for some time and used it only for his own factory. But when prices began to fall, people got furious, and what's the first thing they did? was not invent their own spinning jenny or steal the plans for this one, they went in and they burned his factory to the ground, including all the spinning jennys in there. And that was the first reaction of competitors and laborers to machines, they would destroy them, because they were their direct competitors. There's a live one. They're incredibly beautiful, I have to say. We haven't talked about techno fetishes, but here's one. Richard Arkwright, who was a, I forgot what he did, one of them was a barber, Arkwright in 1769 invented the water frame, which is something like a more compact spinning jenny that ran from a water wheel through a series of grated gears to tone down the motion, that would run this without human motive force. It's spun 96 threads at the same time. And we end with, do you notice there's a great video with Ron Weasley's father talking about the spinning, talking about the water frame, but I won't play it. Here is the ultimate end of all of this which basically froze the design, the self-acting spinning mule patented in 1779, invented by Richard Crumpton, which was, I don't know how many threads it did, well, you can see there's a number there. It was run by a laborer called a minder, and two children who had to run back and forth to make sure that the thread wasn't getting off the thread. At the peak of self-acting mule productivity in Lancashire alone, there were 5 million spindles being spun at any one time. 5 million. What were the effects of this? The effect was to produce a shitload of thread, a lot of fabric, and to need cotton to be produced, especially where? In the colonies. One of the social outcomes of mechanization is intense imperialism and colonization. Okay, that's the end of my PowerPoint. How was that? Let's talk a little bit about machines coming into the workplace and replacing workers. First, it really puts workers out of work. Everyone who was spinning on their own, everyone who was minding a small machine, when those functions got incorporated into the machine, one way or the other, the human beings were put out of work, and, as Marx says in the chapter, just starved to death. The Silesian weavers are a good example of that. Another early effect of machinery is that it made human beings into the motive power for machines. So they start to take on a different role vis-a-vis their tools. They'd make the machine, which has all the skill, operate, does that remind you of anything? What machines are skills making operate? Well, you'll think about it. Later in the developed factory, it took exactly the place of cooperative labor so that kind of cooperation, where you learned how to have a relay with other people, this was a new knowledge in modernity, was taken over by the machine, which is a coordinated distribution of simple partial acts. That's what cooperation was. Motivated by a power unit, controlled by a control unit, linked by linkages that makes process into its method. Marx says here that process appropriates the worker. It's on page 349.

Process as a tool, as an instrument of capital increase, has its own variables. Any particular process is part of a system of processes, the process to get the stuff out of the ground, the process to refine it. So a mining process, a refining process, a transportation process, a manufacturing process, a distribution process. Process becomes the main tool of capitalism. Processes are always scalable. And you look at an economy now for the first time, according to Marx, as a giant automaton. As though the economy were itself a machine. Now look what happens to a laborer who walks into the factory floor. First, they're kicked out of the factory floor with a certain set of skills, but discover very quickly they better go back to it. And when they get back to it, they find the process of production ready-made, needing them only to do exactly the specific, small task that this process requires of them. A generational process of unlearning had to take place, which Marx documents. When the workers go back to the machine manufacturing factory, they find everything changed, but it's also not the same workers. You will remember this from your reading. The workers that are preferred or unskilled workers. So there's a lot of talk about gender and sexual difference in these chapters, and about age difference in these chapters. It's sometimes taken that Marx thinks that women and children shouldn't be in the workforce, by the kind of moralistic tone he sometimes takes about it. In fact, he will tell you at the end of the chapter that it's a good thing that it happened, because it broke down the traditional divisions made on traditional ideas of sex and gender in the family. Everyone is liberated from the domination within the bourgeois family, or the proletariat family, by the fact that everyone can work. But what is wanted from women and children on the factory floor is the fact that, just traditionally, since they've been kept out of the workforce till now, they have no skills, no manufacturing skills. So their lack of manufacturing skills is their highest skill. The skill that's wanted is people who can be paid much, much less. So the men who have skills and command a certain amount of pay are no longer wanted. This is capital's progressive gender politics, if you wanna put it that way, in the 19th century. And Marx is registering the irony of that. He's certainly not a naturalist when it comes to gender, although he has some ticks in that direction, and it isn't as progressive as we would like it to be. Marx says, "Capital is by nature a leveler, believing it has an innate human right to exploit labor under equal conditions. " Equality is capital's thing. It uses liberal equality movements towards equality and liberal political society to produce an equal playing field to drive down the cost of labor, and to find a workforce that is unskilled. And this is the trick of capital, it now has to find an unskilled workforce that has all sorts of flexibilities the workforce never had before. Certainly that charming, and brilliant, and hardworking woman at her spinning wheel is not the one they want. What do they want? Well, first, we have to understand what happens to the capital's need for labor under the machine era. doesn't actually diminish. It diminishes at first, people get replaced by machines. Then, of course, they have to come back for a number of reasons. One is, they have to have a market.

Another is, they need living labor input to make any surplus value. Another is, well, there's still a lot to do, but what's to do has changed completely, as we said, its become unskilled. Beyond that, what does a machine allow a capitalist to do, and how do they actually make value for themselves? How do they capitalize their capital? Well, what is a machine for? For increased productivity, so they have to increase productivity. You would never get a machine and continue to dribble out one spool of thread at a time. For increased productivity, you need increased means of production, raw materials. You need a huge influx of unskilled labor into the workforce to deal with this giant increase in productivity. We're not just talking about a few more spools of thread, we're talking about going from 1 to 5 million, or 100 to 5 million, like that, in historical time, in 30 years. For that, you need to find these workers somewhere. They have to come in, they have to oil the machines, they have to keep them running, they have to put the stuff in, feed. And they have to get their value back out of this. Where they have a huge investment of value in machinery, they need to increase their surplus value by increasing relative surplus value, which can only be done through living labor. So they go back to extending the working day to as long as they possibly can. Now it's being extended in width as well as in length. They need all those new workers to put in motion all of those means of production. This produces what Marx starts to call in the book the proletariat. The proletariat is a non-cooperative, immiserated, reduced in skill, knowledge unneeding, tradition unneeding, free time unneeding conglomerate with no individuals, whose substance is compressed and expanded, pushed and oppressed in different ways at any different time. So the machine is now producing 10 hammers in an hour, where it used to produce five hammers in an hour. Someone has to run along with it, someone has to take them out, someone has to package them. And workers, as Marx said, not being blind, start to struggle against machines. You remember, this is a very important section. The first reaction being sabotage, as we mentioned. There comes to be, we think of class warfare, now there is human-machine warfare. The machine is out to kill the worker, whether by replacing them, or by de-skilling them, by taking them out of the continuum of history, and making them totally free of their ancestors and all the knowledge that's been passed down, by freeing them from nature and making them servants of technology. It tries to kill them, including working them to death. And the workers try to fight back, but it's very hard to fight back against a machine because the capitalists have to have it to compete, so the workers are trapped. And Marx puts this in a formula that will be useful to the people who like early Marx, alienation gets superseded by total antagonism. In the machine age, alienation, which was when workers encounter the conditions and product of labor as independent and alien to them, becomes a means of labor that wants to kill them, wants to reduce them to nothing, wants to use them up as fast as possible. An example is the self-acting mule, wants to get rid of them from the work floor. Okay, in one minute, I'm gonna tell you a number of things, and then we're gonna go off to our rest of our day. A little bit about the role of science, which Marx hints at here, but you could develop into a critique. There is a new separate industry

the industry of all industries, which he calls science, where all of the skill knowledge is now concentrated. It's concentrated there because those are the people who invent the machines. It's not just machines that are invented, it is motive energies that are liberated from the Earth. This science, which claims to be for its own sake, for the sake of pure knowledge, for Marx, is always motivated by extraction, even if an individual scientist doesn't know this. Every scientist is mutely participating in the industry of industries where knowledge is concentrated that leads to inventions that improve extraction, compelled by the need to revolutionize the means of production. The consequence of this is, of course, the degradation of two main resources which I mentioned at the beginning. The degradation of the Earth resource, because it puts out pollution and it consumes at such a rate that it could never be replaced naturally. And the degradation of the human resource, which becomes the least sophisticated part of the machine. Two other ancillary consequences, which are of great import. If you look at page 14, you could read Marx's scathing account of colonization as part of the machine age's need to find resources, make markets, and degrade Earth and human resources. And on page 415, if you want to take a look at it, he shows how the ebb and flow of the machine revolution causes value cycles across the world, in which at certain times, growth is flat and people can't find work, and at other times, growth is rocketing upward with new technologies, and people can find work, but they have to completely change their mode of work to do it. And that, my friends, is the happy news from the machine age. (outro music)