# Class 11: Capital Chapter 12 & 13: Changes in the Division of Labor, Machinery

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** YaleCourses
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyBkeehEYR8
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/24378

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

(energetic music) - What is Marx dealing with in this section? The ways in which capital develops so that it gets more relative surplus value, because absolute surplus value has an absolute limit, which I won't repeat again. The way capitalism develops is to develop the ways of producing relative surplus value. That is not by extending the day, but by increasing productivity or diminishing the space between B and B prime. And one of the ways it does this, so you can speak in a personifying way about capital because it is the subject. The actors, in the capital system, are going to progressively lose their subjective status. And when machines come in, it's gonna become radically unclear, actually, whether even the capitalist is a subject or has some subjective agency left, because they have no choice but to adopt the machine, and supervise the workers so that they conform to the machine. There's a lot of compulsion and servitude. In a machine economy, everyone serves the machine. Okay. The machine is a direct outgrowth of cooperative labor. This, I remember I said. This is because one of the main ways to increase the production of relative surplus value is to increase the number of laborers. That doesn't extend the day. Although, de facto, it extends the day, it enlarges the day, it expands the day horizontally, right? Because you have more people working at the same time. So what will happen when industrial capitalism hits its stride is it starts absorbing ever larger segments of the population and becoming highly indiscriminate about which segments of the population, and which populations, it absorbs. It just needs more workers. It needs more workers and it needs them to be more fungible so it can throw them out of work at any particular time and change the content of their work at any time. So what we're dealing with in the production of relative surplus value, these are the technical levers to increase it, are: the number of workers and the command and control of the capitalist. Remember, we were saying that the capitalist becomes a commander and controller, a supervisor. And so, as the population that's absorbed, that's not absorbed, but moved into the capital system and produced for the capital system, increases, the capital class also decreases in size, because with the advent of machines and bigger, sorry, before we even get to machines, with the advent of bigger worker populations, they have to have larger amounts of capital. Capital has to be a larger size. It has to be concentrated in fewer capitalists. Let's say fewer capitalists have capital of the size that they can employ enough workers to increase their relative surplus value. This is a little bit about the way classes form in a very different way under the capital system than they did in any other historical period. Classes are a projection of the technology of labor. Here, the technology, or the technique, of labor, the technical side of labor, is just cooperation. We haven't gotten to technology as we understand it: metal people. I mentioned probably the ways in which a simple enlargement of the workforce reduces the cost of the means of production. That's another way to say increases relative surplus value, decreases the cost of the means of production, or labor power. Did I say these things? It improves mechanical capabilities? I think I did. Because many people can do things that few people can't do, and it has a whole host of effects including using means of production in a more efficient way because more people are using it at the same time. So if you get a whole load of means of production, of coal or whatever, it can be used more efficiently through sharing it or a tool that can be used on two different sides or a work product that can be worked on different sides at once. Okay, I wanna add one term that also won't be on the exam, but you should keep in mind 'cause it becomes important later, and that is subsumption.

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

I mentioned it. Subsumption is the antidote to capitalist control whereas the name for capitalist control when viewed from the perspective of labor. We say the more people, the more complex the work process becomes, the more you need supervision to make sure that the work process is carried out properly because the knowledge of that process is not held by the workers. So we're going through a transformation really from work to process. The metaphysical name of machine is a process. A machine is a concretized, materialized process. But you can have a process without a machine. In any case, workers who are part of a process are no longer workers in the Aristotelian sense that they have an image of the work and everything that needs to be done before they start the work, and they make decisions all the way about how to carry it out. They become steps in the process. So because workers are steps in a process, the knowledge function becomes independent, goes into the hands of what we like to call a manager. They know what you're supposed to do when. They know why you're doing it. They know who you have to pass it on to. If you don't pass it on to them, they will come in and say, "You're fired", or, "Pass it on. " Does that make sense? So you have here also the seeds for the separation of manual and intellectual labor in the separation of the knowledge part of labor from the grunt part, let's say. The more that supervision has to intervene in labor, the less efficient it is, the less productive it is. It's much better for (indistinct) to take that supervision into themselves and know exactly how much time they have to do a certain thing, what exactly are the steps, when they're overstepping their own labor parameters. (Paul coughing) That would be called the subsumption of labor into capital. Marx says, on page 305 if you want to look, this is the point in which laborers are incorporated into capital. They become parts of a laboring organism. Having them as organism with nothing sticking out, with nothing left of their own native intelligence or their own planning capacities, is much better for capital processes. The more they're incorporated into those processes, the less supervision they need, the more productive they are, when the motivation to increase surplus value comes from within them. Okay, I'm just pointing that out as something that comes up in the cooperation chapter and is mentioned again later. These are all the levers that capitalists can use, consciously or unconsciously, to increase the production of relative surplus value. And, of course, what's required for work becoming a process is a transformation in the division of labor. This is Chapter 12 for those of you who are looking. Did we start talking about Chapter 12 or no? We did just a little bit. Someone says no. If there's confusion, I'll go over it a little bit. The division of labor is a standard feature of societies, of all societies according to Marx, and anything human is social. So for as long as there have been humans, that we recognize as humans, there have been societies and there has been a division of labor. But only a societal division of labor. That's, in essence, what it means to be a society. That the activity of producing the subsistence for everyone is shared and shared out in a particular division. (Paul coughing) For precapitalist and paracapitalist and maybe postcapitalist societies, the social division of labor derives from the wants and needs of that particular society. What is wanted and needed, those different products, determines the different kind of labor that's done. And in the traditional society that Marx is comparing capital to, one kind of product is made by one kind of worker. An individual worker has all the skills and knowledge and the imprimatur of their teacher

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

and the permission from society, and the connections in getting the means of production that they need to do that one thing. So you have tailors and you have what are other jobs? In a traditional society, we forget. Teachers, what else? Weavers, oh yeah, weavers is an important one. You have all of those things, farmers. (Paul coughing) Okay. The mode of producing subsistence through a societal division of labor is very flexible. Every time you need something new, you can find someone to learn that, invent it and make it. And they become part of the division of labor. It can grow. It's very different than other kinds of species who do may have divisions of labor, but where they don't grow and change. And this allows human beings, just to be anthropological for a minute, to move into all sorts of niches that other sorts of creatures couldn't survive in. Because you can imagine someone who's gonna chip the coal out of the rock, or who's going to make the land arable. These are just fulfillments of wants and needs. Wants and needs arrive, and someone can arrive to fulfill them. So the history of a societal being, like the human being, is the history of the changing manners of labor and divisions of labor. You farm, you carpenter, you deal with the gods, you teach the children, you keep the foreign enemies away, etc. Capitalist division of labor is totally different. First of all, we learned already in cooperation that no single individual has charge of making a whole product. A single individual makes a part of a product now. And this leads to a set of reverberations in which one part of the population labors and another part does not. That doesn't mean that capitalists don't exert effort. They do, they'll tell you they never stop working. But it doesn't count as productive labor in Marxist sense. Marx will tell you, in Chapter 12, give you a beautiful genealogy, somewhat abstract, somewhat forcing things into their categories, of how simple artisanal production moves to factory production, becomes what he calls fully-developed form. But this is looking backwards, fully developed from the perspective of what capital needs. It's not more highly-developed than any other form of work. You can certainly argue that a tailor who knows how to take, you know, from the fabric to the fitting to be much more highly-developed than someone who can only put the thread on a bobbin, right? So we're not talking in moral terms when we say development. We're talking retrospectively on the path leading to capital. So we start with artisanal production. And this is 12, right? It's a really important chapter. Did I ever say any of them was not important? No. The precursor to large-scale industry and machine factories is the manufacturing system, which was, already in the 18th century, a transformation of artisanal production. What we talked about in the individual worker in the artisanal period which, let's say, runs from antiquity to the Middle Ages, is that you have a worker personality that is multifarious, that knows the history of their craft, that knows the design part, that knows the timing of it, that can tell the seasons, that can know where to find their supplies when they need to, that can make all sorts of human interconnections between different aspects of society because, "I need more coal", and I need more this, and I need to know different people that can reeducate themselves, that can know the human destination very well. What is it that an artisanal worker knows more than anything else? What their customer needs. So they know society from a particular perspective. Every artisanal worker is a sociologist of that society. You can see where we're going. All of this is eradicated under capital. No one has to know anything about anything or anyone. What a horror. Although, we get this book where we can finally start to know again. Though, it's slightly depressing at times. In the artisanal workshop, the worker moves and the product stays still. We're tracking all of these little moments of freedom

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

that are taken away under capital. The worker can move around. The worker's also free in terms of their time. They don't have to be tied to a certain productivity schedule, at least not in the crazy way you would under capital. The worker knows how to use many different tools, can invent tools, can bring new tools in. The worker is a kind of genius of the tool. Time, under artisanal labor, I'm just summing up what Marx says, it's pretty interesting. In a sense, as a student, you're an artisan. You're an artisan of your soul. But I think maybe as a student at Yale, you're more like a capitalist laborer. Any case, we can talk about that. For an artisanal worker, time is sequential and interrupted. You do something until you have to stop and get something, and then you stop doing it to go get that thing. The process is extended and interruptible. Space is a set of relays. It's quite local, but places get connected by the worker. "I need this from here. I need to deliver this to there. " Education is also multifarious and is what we would call in German (speaking German), forming. It's about forming the worker so that they can do the work in the best way possible. The product of education is the educated worker. Soon, it will not be necessary. There is a special relationship in artisanal labor between the apprentice and the so-called master who passes on a tradition. So history has a particular shape. It is traditional history in the sense that a tradition is carried on. And that's one of the jobs that a worker does, and one of the social functions. That's a social function that every artisanal worker carries out: to continue the tradition. But this is true of all social labor, including capitalist labor, that each actor in the society, each social being, has the responsibility to reproduce that society. All right, so this is what Marx calls a social division of labor. I fought tooth and nail to have it called societal 'cause the German word is (speaking German). Did I say this already? I'm not gonna throw my collaborator writer under the bus 'cause he did a great job. And social division of labor is the standard way of talking about it. But it's a little confusing because it sounds a bit like you're going to a party. The social division of labor. That would be a good band name, for example. But what we're really talking about is societal division of labor, meaning that the unit of concern here is society, not that it's social in the sense that people are getting along with one another. (Paul coughing) Here's an interesting fact about artisanal work. Needs are societal. Needs are social, labor is not. "I do my work, but I do it for all of you because all of you need the pens that I'm making or the education that I'm trying to force on you. " - Yeah, Samuel. - (indistinct) a little bit of the oversimplification saying there were definitely, I mean, he was just talking about corvee labor, right? Sometimes things, in the Middle Ages and antiquity, needed to be done that could not be done by a single person alone, and in that case, either you did it to corvee labor or you brought it together in a stream like to work together with your neighbor because maybe, on Monday, we're gonna harvest John's field and, on Tuesday, we're gonna all go harvest Jane's field, and I feel like this individual, this is a little bit like labor history, like it's idealized form- - Yeah, but the way to think about it. No, I mean, that's totally right. The question was, "Isn't this an idealized version of labor history or the history of societies? " I wouldn't call it idealized. Marx is very conscious of this problem, and he will show you where, at different times in history, different like say cooperative labor is obviously going on in Egypt 'cause how can they build the pyramids, for example? That's not the kind of skilled, educated, holistic labor that an artisanal worker does. But on the whole, in these societies, this is the form of labor, even though other forms of labor are necessary too from time to time. And he's giving you really, again

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

what you might think is a history is really an analysis of the kind of labor that happens in capital. So if you can isolate what artisanal labor is, of course, there's artisanal labor in capital too, right? It takes on a kind of luxury like the Arethusa of capitalism. status, and only certain people can afford it, and it really can't supply the needs of the masses, right? When Arethusa gets into the supermarkets, it will dispense with its farm in Litchfield County. So these are the laws of capital that don't describe every single instance of labor, but it does describe, in general, these historical periods and, analytically, exactly what the difference is in the capital system. Now, we're talking about, yeah. - I have a question also kind of about this. Since we were talking about the genealogy, 'cause he's also provided the genealogy of how the artisanal labor workers then kind of become industrial, right, to the kind of manufacturing system. And he says that there's two kinds, or two ways in which this might happen. One is where you have people kind of working in the same trade who start concentrating in a certain space, and people who do different kinds of trade, but complement each other and kind of concentrate in the same... Isn't it the case that, given enough time, this is all becomes industrial and is no more artisanal. Don't they end up taking the same form? - I mean I think that's what he sees the trajectory of capital is. But the need to do, let's say, to minimize artisanal labor as much as possible comes from the way capital is produced and needs to have its return. And capitalists have to absorb all possible other modes of producing wants and needs into themselves. So you'll see there's whole histories of areas that have been artisanal which get taken over. The great example in Marx's age is the Silesian weavers, which you can read. He mentions them many times. But this is immortalized in German, if you study German literature, all you ever read about are the Silesian weavers and their uprising. Heine wrote a poem about it. Gerhart Hauptmann wrote a play about it. It's mentioned over and over because here were these weavers who were doing a pretty good job, they were renowned for their weaving, but someone introduced a weaving machine, and they were all put out of work on mass. And they struck against history. And this is what's interesting for Marx. They didn't have anyone to strike against, but they struck against a technological revolution that was putting them out of work or making their artisanal labor worth infinitely less than it had been before. This is part of the complaint of this book, that, under capital, there's really no one to strike against. If you push, you're pushed out. So yes, he is showing a tendency towards a highly-developed capital system in which the only way to get more surplus value is to transform all of the other modes of production into capitalist modes of production. Yeah. - (indistinct) 'cause Marx brings up colonialism, but doesn't like go into detail, but like the weaving in particular, there's like a gendered and a cultural (indistinct) element to that like thinking Indigenous that create products that are very sought after that become mechanized, but then they're also very sought after. - Yeah, can I respond? - Yes. - The question is about Marx's knowledge of, or reference to, colonial practices and also other sorts of traditional forms of labor, Indigenous weaving labor. Marx didn't know that much about Indigenous practices, I think, in the States, but he certainly knew a lot about colonization. And in fact, the last chapter's on colonization, and the whole last two or three chapters is on the way capital turns Europe into its own colony and forces people off their land. So the first practice colonization was, you know, in early Middle Ages, starting in the early Middle Ages, in Europe, where all of those traditional practices had to be ended by bloody means and by imposing domination and control. So that's the happy ending of this book. (Paul coughing) And he's getting there. That wasn't Marx's, let's say, main focus of attention.

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

There are good extensions of Marxist theory of the need for imperialization and colonialization and bringing the world into capital. And the first big strike there was Rosa Luxemburg's book on capital accumulation in about 1910. She said, well, Marx mentions this, but really it's absolutely essential that capital and its governmental forces go out and dominate places in the world, make them into both places for means of production, into supplies of labor and into markets. So Marx says this, but she explains why that's an ongoing necessity. Okay, now, we wanna talk about manufacturing. Roughly going from 1550 to Marx's present. Although, let's say, 1550 to 1780 or so, manufacturing is not large-scale industry. We wouldn't call it industry. Again, historically, it's not pure, but, analytically, it's pure. The manufacturing process is absolutely distinct from artisanal craft, practice. Practice, 'cause we haven't got to process. The best description of this is in Smith's "Wealth of Nations". The description of the manufacturer of pins, which goes from an individual pin maker who knows how to draw out the wire, and what metal to use, and how to sharpen the end, and how to hammer the top, and has all the tools for it, to a factory where one person stretches it, I must have mentioned this before. Here, the product moves and the worker stays still. You have a step towards unfreedom in the labor process. The worker becomes highly specialized, although still educated and knowledgeable, about their special labor. So no more general labor. Only special labor. The worker becomes a function of something approaching a process. And they're pegged to that function. You would never come in the next day and be sharpening tips of needles, or pins, because someone else already does that better and more efficiently, right? And then, of course, you'd need someone to fill your spot drawing out the wire. In the manufacturing system, labor becomes divided into parts, and individuals become parts of the labor rather than parts being given to the laborer to put together into a whole. The whole relationship of wholes and parts changes. Once the tasks are separated, and isolated, and given to different people, it becomes much more efficient because they can be carried out, instead of sequentially with interruptions to get more material, they can be carried out simultaneously side by side, with someone else getting the material who's dedicated to do that. I can be continually feeding you. In fact, there's a function called the feeder. Someone becomes the lifelong feeder, but, at least, they know what they're doing. They have a name. In machine, industrial, large-scale industry, what people do does not have a name. It's just called labor. And so under the manufacturing system, you have something like the birth of a system, where it's not only wants and needs that are societal, but labor becomes societal. You will have a whole group of pin drawers, wire drawers. Some other effects of manufacturing is that the place of labor becomes concentrated. They are all in the same place. The time of labor becomes split into this simultaneous row like ticking rather than a sequential flow, becomes highly unflow-like and repetitive in each of the functions. So repetitive, simultaneous and unflow-like. You can see how we already have a machine going, where production, in order to continue, needs to be coordinated and timed. Because if I'm drawing out the wire, the sharpener and the head hammerer can't do their job until I've drawn out the wire. Does that make sense? But I can't do my job too quickly, nor can I do it too slowly, for fear that I don't have enough material to fill up my day or things pile up, etc. Someone has to coordinate this. Again, the organization of labor becomes crucial, and the capitalist becomes the controller of organization.

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

Labor becomes a process. Laborers become a collective. And labor becomes societal insofar as the end of one person's labor is the beginning of someone else's labor. You can see how different this is than a tailor and a chicken farmer coming together for a drink at the end of the day, and the one says to the other, "How'd it go? " And the other says, "Fine. " And they have nothing more to do with one another except when one wants eggs and one wants a new suit. In the socialized labor of the manufacturing system, the sharpener is waiting and can't complete their job unless the wire puller completes their job. I think I mentioned this last time, that this is where socially-necessary average labor time becomes particularly important, because everyone has to work at the right speed here. They have to take the right amount of time, let's say. And so this gives a huge leap to being able to calculate value because the main ingredient is the right time, is the right amount of time. So if I do my wire pulling in more time than someone, it might be a whole row of us, one thing that happens is the differences in the pulling times of that wire average out immediately in the factory. So the factory can say between 10 minutes and 5 minutes, we have seven and a half minutes if you're doing a mean. And the other is that, across different factories that are doing this, they wanna all come out with their products at roughly the same time to take them to market. So the averaging pressures are really high. Zoe. - Is it one worker that moves that process up or is (indistinct) - The capitalists would like to decrease socially-necessary average labor time. They the average time it takes for anyone to do a particular job because then they get more value out of it. They can do many more of those operations in a day. So are we seeing where we're heading to? We're heading to the first industrial revolution, which you might think someone invented a machine and suddenly we could do everything faster. What Marx is saying is that machines are just there to carry out the need of the capitalist under the regime of process. Where process becomes the main mode of producing wants and needs, the machine is inevitable. There's nothing special about it except for what it then does to devastate working populations and to turn everyone into an appendage of the machine. You can think of the machine age as the triumph of process over the skilled laborer. The epitaph has long been written. The eulogy has been given many, many times for the skilled laborer. This is nothing new at this point. What the machine does to the manufacturing process is speeds it up and totalizes it, and makes a lot of other changes that were unexpected, including changes to the way capitalists can act. It restricts them highly. Machinery and large-scale industry. Marx didn't live to see the second industrial revolution. So imagine what Marx would've said about plastic. (Paul sighing) Questions up to this point? - So I have two questions. The first has to do is cooperation, right? I mean, all your cooperation chapter. I guess I'm making that chapter license to ship on describing or, at least, provide a kind of anthropomorphic description of capital, right? So I guess my question is what is the relation between capitalism of the system and the capital via who isn't doing the bidding of the system, ought to battle in the system that is like already programmed the way he behaves, right? So it gives you kind of your causal relationship there. And then, the second question has to do with this division of labor, especially in manufacturing. I mean, it seems that there is obviously plus and gains, right, of the division of labor, but then there's a kind of interesting negative quantitative, for example, workers who work one kind of job over time.

### Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00]

Is there a risk of becoming both (indistinct). - No, he was really clear that drudgery is the gift that keeps on giving in manufacturing. What it produces for the worker, instead of the free play of their capacities, gee, he talks about at moments quoting Kant. There's a number of different kinds of freedom that Marx wants. He wants free time. He wants freedom of movement. He wants the free play of your capacities, where you can develop them, and discover things, and you have a sense that the product of your labor is coming from you and your own powers. And what manufacturing already does is makes you part of a process, limits your freedom, and makes your activity not a feeling of power, but a feeling of the draining of your own powers, and without a return to you. And that's called drudgery. And he was clear about that. He got that picture from his friend Fred Engels who sent this great description of the conditions of the working class in England in 1845 in a great and harrowing book. So that's for sure. Tell me your first question again. Oh, what happens to the capitalist? Well, people have thought of, let's say Marxists, or anti-capitalists, have been anti-capitalist in the sense that they think there are people there that they can be angry at or fight against. And Marx thinks of capitalists as trapped as laborers, although getting the better end of the stick, no question. There are benefits. This is maybe a good segue into the machinery chapter, because capitalists, these are the people who are functions of capital as the ones who get the return. Workers make the surplus value that is the return, but it doesn't go to them, right? Workers are constantly giving away, and capitalists are constantly getting. But that's not because workers are selfless and capitalists are greedy. Obviously, workers are not selfless. Although, their self is highly reduced. Capitalists are not greedy except insofar as they wanna be the biggest capitalist. I'm not mentioning any names, trillionaires, for example. There's certainly greed, comparative greed, among capitalists, but capitalism has nothing to do with greed. The fact that the upper echelon of capitalists have drifted up towards like astronomic sums and have monopoly power in a way that nobody has had monopoly power before is possibly predictable. But you could also have a much more human and humane capital in which capital is more spread out and not so concentrated. Still, the returns would go to the capitalists. Let's just take a run-of-the-mill capitalist who has to run their company. They invest 99% of the return, even if it's above their outlay, because they have to compete with other firms. They have to prepare for the whole industry maybe taking a U-turn that they didn't expect. They have to get as much profit as possible immediately. So it's a dumb capitalist, or a capitalist who has not understood the system, who does not reinvest the absolute vast majority of their return back into the business. So the reading I favor is not the kind of social Marxist reading where you can be angry at capitalists. You can certainly strike against capitalists for higher wages, but that doesn't change the capital system one iota, and being angry at capitalists, or thinking of them as greedy for Marxism misunderstanding. You have to understand them as functions of the system too, though, generally happier. Anthony, did you? - Yeah, (indistinct) in this chapter for his analysis of changes of a point in production. I guess, is there a way that he's allowing us to see a relationship even (indistinct) production at any other spheres of (indistinct), right? Like a lot of Marxists say about like the penetration of this logic into domestic sphere? - It's true, this volume is about what he calls the sphere of production. He's not thinking much about consumption. It's there as a necessary but totally ancillary process. Things have to be consumed, so there have to be enough people to buy them.

### Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00) [40:00]

But, as Marx says, consumption, unless his productive consumption, is private. Whether you actually consume the hammer or the carrot that you've bought is irrelevant so long as you bought it. So consumption, insofar as it's seen from the perspective of the return of capital, is completed at the point of sale if that makes sense. It makes no difference if you're happy. It might not even make a difference if you buy it again, if the whole industry gets revolutionized and we're no longer making hammers. You only have to buy it once. The next volume is about the circulation system, which has a just-as-necessary role, but not as fundamental. No value is produced in circulation. So this is why he starts with production. AJ? - Yeah, I think I'm kind of curious in the role that guilds play in the development of cooperation, right? Is it the case that the guilds were gilded in order to allow better cooperation or that they were suppressed in order... - The guilds were suppressed. I thought you said guilt. - No. - Okay, yeah. No, the guilds were totally against capitalization. Now, they were a vehicle for moving towards a more mobile, merchant-like system. So the guilds moved certain people, and as the professions rose, they moved people off of agricultural land. So you can't say that guilds didn't contribute to the development of capital. But capital is anathema to the guild because it wants to get rid of that whole traditional structure. It wants to wipe away the need for education. It wants to dominate the workers. It wants to take away their pride in their work. (Paul coughing) I think, clearly, we're gonna be talking about machinery through next week, which is totally fine. It's very important, because aside from one book, this is the best theory of technology we have of the need for technology in society. The other book is Simondon's technical book on the technical object. These are the two best books. The rest are just trying to work out details. You have to understand that technology is proceeded by techniques of process or technical processes. Processes that are technical in the sense that all of the internal parameters have to be controllable. It's irrelevant whether a machine does this or a computer does this. Beware of the fetishization of technology when you start to talk about machines and technology. These are really just repeatable techniques that are controllable to the nth degree in a process whose steps go together by necessity and lead towards an outcome. A process is supposed to lead towards that outcome inevitably, regardless of what happens along the way. That is regardless of the lives of workers and the lives of capitalists for that matter. So let me just give you the metaphysics of a machine briefly. What's machine? A machine is purposiveness without restraint. Or you could say purpose without interest. This is the beauty of a machine for this process. It has no interests. It doesn't require that anything come back to it for itself. It's selfless in that sense, and everything it does is towards its purpose. It's been designed to do that. Even gods are not purposive without interest. Certainly animals are not. Very little in nature is purposive without interest. Purpose and interest go together. If you exist, you have purposes which serve your interests. A machine is metaphysically all purpose, and so it can drive capital's aims along at a much higher speed without requiring as much. But there are contradictions in this. So we need to talk about what a machine was, what it did to labor, and the capital system. Because it's not simply that you introduce machines and the system stays the same. It's that the system has to adapt and develops a whole other set of internal problems, including how to make value. Because a machine can pass on value, but it can't actually produce new value. So let's just start with where Marx starts, and then, I'm gonna let you go with the ludicrous idea that machines are there to save labor.

### Segment 10 (45:00 - 45:00) [45:00]

Just like the ludicrous idea that personal computing was there to save labor. Regardless of what happens, without increasing labor exponentially around these machines that do a lot, you won't make any new value, because they are just dead labor passing on the value that has already been capitalized. When humans build a machine, you pay those humans, and you sell that machine, and you get back a huge capitalization. When I get a machine and use it to make my product, I'm only paying off what I invested. Where is my surplus value gonna come from? Machines produce for capital the value trap. (machine whirring) (ethereal music)