Marx Vs. the Robots

Marx vs. the Robots

J. Jesse Ramírez

ABSTRACT

Debates about automation and the future of work have proliferated in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. From smart software to nimble industrial robots, new labor-saving technologies seem to explain why the post-Recession period has witnessed the decoupling of economic growth and employment. This essay argues that Marx’s contribution to the automation debate is his critique of the contradictions and hollow promises of capitalist technological progress. For Marx, although robots could potentially help transform labor time, they are ultimately frauds that express the emancipatory potential of science and technology in the inverted form of humanized machines and mechanized, superfluous humans.

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starv- ing and overworking it. […] All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. (Marx, “Speech” 655-66)

I. Rise of the Robots

Derek Thompson’s article “A World Without Work,” published in The Atlantic in 2015, features fictionalized photographs of what I imagine to be a Museum of Work. One photograph shows a businessman encased in glass: “Full-Time Worker Circa 2016.” Another image is of a coffee mug, which is labeled “Typical Work- place Warm-Beverage Container,” while another picture of “Factory Man…Ex- tinct” depicts a man in a hard hat who resembles the stuffed hominid ancestors that we find in the anthropology wing of today’s museums. The photographs sug- gest that what we now understand as work will soon belong to antiquity; the future of work is that work, as we know it, has no future. What if the “experts [who] have predicted that machines would soon make workers obsolete,” the article’s caption submits, “weren’t wrong, but only premature?” “A World Without Work” is one of many popular and professional discourses on automation that have been circulating widely in the United States since the Great Recession of 2007-2009. From Barack Obama to Elon Musk, from The New Yorker to Jacobin, it seems everyone has a position on the “robots.” The burning question is whether we are on the verge of a jobs apocalypse, a future for which “humans need not apply” (Kaplan). To be sure, it seems that every time people invent new systems of automated production, there are renewed fears that auto- 620 J. Jesse Ramírez mated production will uninvent people. But when today’s prophets of automation consider the long history of anxieties about technological unemployment, they usually ground the uniqueness of the current moment in several startling changes in employment patterns. The post-Recession recovery has restored business prof- its and investment, but not jobs. In 2010, Neil Irwin of The Washington Post re- ported that net job growth in the first decade of the new millennium was zero. As Martin Ford observes in Rise of the Robots, this zero can also be read as -9 million when compared to the number of new jobs needed to keep pace with population growth over the same period (44). Other widely-cited economic indicators, such as the long-term decline of manufacturing, stagnant wages, income inequality, and falling rates of labor force participation, buttress the conclusion that economic growth and employment have decoupled. New labor-saving technologies, from smart software to nimble industrial robots, seem to explain the emerging economic situation. In the opinion of Nicholas Carr, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and Ford—to name some of the most prominent mainstream writers—the United States is only beginning to see the new technologies’ effects. “The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession,” write Brynjolfsson and McAfee in their 2011 book Race Against the Machine, “but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring” (ch. 1). According to Carr, the Great Restructuring means that “as new computer technologies extend automation into even more branches of the economy, we’re likely to see […] a further hollowing of the middle class and a growing loss of jobs among even the highest-paid professionals” (ch. 2). Since neither the unemployed nor the robots can buy the goods that the robots will produce, Ford predicts a collapse of effective demand and stark economic inequality unless consumption is supported by a universal basic income. What would Marx think of the “rise of the robots”? In this essay, I use the bi- centennial of Marx’s birth as an occasion to assess contemporary automation debates in the United States through the lens of two of Marx’s major writings on the topic, the first volume of Capital and the Grundrisse. Marx may not have antici- pated today’s computer-based forms of automation, but his critique of capitalism’s development of productive technology remains a vital lesson in the contradictions and hollow promises of capitalist progress.

II. Capital: The Fraud of Capitalist Production

Marx never used the term automation,1 which is an Americanism that first came into broad usage in the United States in the 1950s. The coining of automation is usually attributed to Delmar Harder, Vice President of Manufacturing at Ford Motor Company, although the word’s novelty belies the fact that Harder was

1 The translators of the Collected Works edition of The Poverty of Philosophy mistakenly translate Marx’s term Kraftautomaten as “automation” (188). Since Marx is referring to machines, not to an abstract process, the more historically accurate phrase in English would be “powered automatons.” Marx vs. the Robots 621 mainly referring to long-standing production processes. According to one origin story, Harder first used the word while in conversation with another Ford execu- tive about improving parts-handling equipment and removing “the delays often incurred due to the human element” (Bean 389). As David Noble explains, when Harder called for more “automation” at Ford, he “simply meant an increase in the use of electro-mechanical, hydraulic, and pneumatic special-purpose production and parts-handling machinery which had been in existence for some time” (66). Thus, while Marx never wrote about “automation” per se, he would have immediately understood that Harder was interested in implementing the techniques of the “automatic workshop,” which Marx first studied extensively for his critique of Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. And if Harder had read the section of Capital, Volume One, on the “automatic system of machinery,” he probably would have found a model of continuous production that basically describes his ambi- tions (even if, of course, the automobile industry differs from Marx’s examples): “As soon as a machine executes, without man’s help, all the movements required to elaborate the raw material, and needs only supplementary assistance from the worker, we have an automatic system of machinery, capable of constant improve- ment in its details” (503). The improvements that Harder sought, of course, were not merely technical. Ford had always been anti-union, but the war years witnessed a dramatic spike in worker resistance: 773 strikes took place at Ford plants between 1941-1945 (Noble 23). Automation was thus a solution not just to “delays” in production, but to workers’ control; not just to a general “human element,” but to the specific class power of organized labor. In Chapter 15 of Capital, on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” Marx observes that “it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt” (563). The part of that history that Marx tells in the chapter—a “critical history of technology,” as he intriguingly defines it in a footnote (493)—hinges on what I call the unhanding of needles, saws, spindles, and other tools. Accord- ing to Marx, the industrial revolution began not with new forms of motive energy such as steam, but rather with the transformation of the handy tool into a machine part; “it is not labor, but the instrument of labor, that serves as the starting-point of the machine” (500, emphasis added). Marx defines a machine as an appropria- tion of a worker’s tool, which is consequently rendered unhandy: “The machine, therefore, is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with a similar tool” (495). Only then does the human worker become a motive force that is functionally equivalent with wind, water, and steam—that is, until larger machine systems require motive forces more powerful than human muscle. I use the term unhandy in order to mark the distinction between Marx’s critical history of technology and Heideggerian phenomenologies of tool use, which abstractly and ahistorically define tools as always already handy or “ready-to- hand” (zuhanden) (Heidegger 98). The Heideggerian tool par excellence is the hammer, which is indeed a rich example of preindustrial “coping” with equipment, but is useless for understanding unhandy tools like the steam hammer “of such a weight that even Thor himself could not wield it” (Marx, Capital 507). 622 J. Jesse Ramírez

What phenomenology obscures is the de-phenomenology of capitalist machinery, that is, the historical process by which mechanization, driven by the pursuit of surplus value, radically modifies “Dasein’s” participation in technical action. Harry Braverman, one of the greatest American theorists of the work process, powerfully describes this disjuncture as the separation of “conception” and “execution” (79). Workers who guide their tools according to their own knowledge and skills—that is, workers for whom tools are ready-to-hand—can exert control over the work process. Stripping that guiding role from workers by embedding capital’s logic in machinery, whose functions can then be executed by unskilled machine tenders, remakes work and the working class in the interests of capital. Through what Marx calls the “real subsumption of labor,” the machine becomes “capital’s material mode of existence,” “the material foundation of the capitalist mode of production” (Capital 554). Apart from the controversies they sparked over the trajectory of de-skilling, Braverman’s contributions to Marxist thought can admittedly be faulted for rely- ing too heavily on a mentalistic notion of conception. To be more precise, unhanding concerns not only workers’ ideas or imagination, but also their perceptual- somatic skill. The anthropologist Tim Ingold provides a rich explanation of how working with a handy tool differs in this regard from working with machines. Ingold develops the following passage from Marx, which is liberally translated by Eden and Cedar Paul in a now obscure 1930 edition of Capital: “the essential distinction, as [Marx] put it, lies ‘between a man as a simple motor force and as a worker who actually handles tools’ [An vielem Handwerkszeug besitzt der Unter- schied zwischen dem Menschen als bloßer Triebkraft und als Arbeiter mit dem eigentlichen Operateur eine sinnlich besonderte Existenz]” (Ingold, Perception 301). 2 In Ingold’s view, what Marx meant by the handling of tools is the worker’s guidance, engaged attentiveness, continuous adjustment to the product and work environment, and awareness of the product’s emerging form. Ingold also draws on the craftsmanship theorist David Pye’s definition of skill as willful constraint— not the application of force, buts its moderation, as when the dentist constrains the force of her drill, using judgment, dexterity, and care (Pye 50-51). Whether the tool is powered by nonhuman motive energy—which is to say, whether the tool is Heidegger’s hammer or an electric drill—is of secondary significance, for what determines skill is the unity of “the technically effective gesture” and “immediate sensory perception” (Ingold, Perception 301). I find Ingold’s framework to be a brilliant way to unpack what Marx only implies by “the sensually distinct” difference between the worker as sheer motive power and the worker as operator proper, namely, the sensual, embodied, tacit intelligence expressed through the operator’s hand and in reciprocity with the object and the work environment.

2 Ben Fowkes’s translation is more accurate, but still leaves out the important reference to “eine sinnlich besonderte Existenz”: “In many manual implements the distinction between man as mere motive power and man as worker or operator properly so called is very striking indeed” (495). More broadly, Marx’s notion of the “operator” draws on his famous distinction between the labor of animals and distinctly human labor (Capital 284). For a sympathetic critique of Marx’s anthropocentric view that stresses the commonalities among all sentient production, see Ingold’s Being Alive (4-6). Marx vs. the Robots 623

Thus, when conception and execution are split, it is not only the loss of conceptual knowledge that constitutes capital’s control of the work process, but the diminution of the worker’s sensorial context as a whole. Unhanding replaces the worker’s careful constraint with mechanical constraint; when the tool is guided by jigs, for example, constraint is predetermined, automatic, constant, and invari- able (Pye 55). In Marx’s account of the effects of large-scale industry, unhandy workers become “living appendages” of a “lifeless mechanism” (Capital 548) that is dumb to changes in the work environment and in the product’s emergent form (that is, until the development of feedback, as we will see below). Furthermore, such de-skilled and cheapened work can now increasingly be done by women and children and is spread out over a working day that the capitalist lengthens and intensifies in order to take full advantage of the machine’s value before it wears down.3 Workers who are replaced by machines become members of the “surplus population,” or “a population which is superfluous to capital’s average require- ments” (Capital 782). In sum, Marx’s account of capitalist “automation” in Chapter 15 foregrounds its destructiveness of work and workers (not to mention nature, which Marx ad- dresses in the chapter’s final section on agriculture). But what makes this destructiveness especially egregious is that large-scale industry could potentially shorten work time and reduce work’s physical burden. After all, while the unhanding of tools impoverishes the worker’s perceptual-somatic experience of work, it also impoverishes the experience of drudgery, that is, of hard physical labor in which the immediate and reciprocal relation with the object and the work environment is precisely the reason that such work is exhausting (and avoided by everyone who has the opportunity to do so). If you have ever used a jackhammer, for example, you know that you must carefully constrain the tool and dexterously adjust to changes, but this does not say much for jackhammering. Most people probably still prefer to unhand this tool as quickly as possible. Marx’s central argument is not a nostalgic defense of handy labor, but an indictment of capitalism that underscores the way this system can express technological potential only in inverted form: “machinery in itself shortens the hours of labour,” but “when employed by capital it lengthens them”; it “lightens labour, but when employed by capital it heightens its intensity” (Capital 568-69). As William Clare Roberts explains, Marx’s goal in Chapter 15 is to demonstrate that capitalism is an “thoroughgoing fraud, which will never deliver on the promise of less and more attractive labor” (172). This promise is as old as Adam

3 Some feminist scholars have argued that Marx’s treatment of working-class women in Capital demonstrates that his concept of skilled labor is gendered male. According to this view, Marx opposes machinery in part because it corrupts working women’s moral and sexual “nature” by enabling them to enter male spaces (Leeb 166-85; Wendling 155-59). While I think this is a fair critique of the aspects of Marx’s thought that reproduce Victorian morality, I do not think that it undermines Marx’s broader critical history of technology. Even if its impacts are uneven with regard to gender, capitalist technological progress is a fraud for working women, too. Ruth Cowan’s More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave remains instructive on this point. For a classic Marxist-feminist inter- vention, see Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (61-132). 624 J. Jesse Ramírez

Smith, who claimed that every sensible person immediately understands “how much labour is facilitated and abridged by the application of proper machinery” (19), and as contemporary as Kevin Kelly, the cyber-utopian who thinks that once robots inevitably take our jobs, our natural response will be: “Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more fun and pays more!” In Roberts’s view, the real political potential that Marx sees in large-scale industry is that the scale and depth of its destructiveness will demonstrate to workers both that capitalism’s promises are hollow, and that they cannot return to handicraft production. This is the major sense in which capitalism’s technological development serves as a material condition of postcapitalism: it is not merely the objective technical basis of post-scarcity and abundance, as many Marxists have believed, but a condition for the working class’s subjective realization that the only way forward is a collective emancipation that appropriates and reorganizes large-scale industry (Roberts 241). Whatever concrete form that reorganization takes will be up to the emancipated people to decide for themselves.

III. The Grundrisse: Free Time

If there is a Marxist theory of revolutionary automation, it is not in Capital, but in the 1857-58 manuscripts that have come to be known as the Grundrisse. When Martin Nicolaus, the translator of the first complete English edition of the Grund- risse, introduced the “unknown Marx” to readers of New Left Review in 1968, he described the text as “the only work in which [Marx’s] theory of capitalism from the origins to the breakdown was sketched out in its entirety” (43, emphasis added). Nicolaus suggested that if the problem of capitalism’s collapse had perplexed so many Marxists, it was not because Marx had no solution, but rather because so few Marxists had read the Grundrisse, a pre-Capital manuscript that was mostly unknown until the mid-1950s. In the published volumes of Capital, Marx never makes it all the way through his immanent critique of capitalism; the stalled project thus resembles “a mystery novel which ends before the plot is unraveled” (54). But in the Grundrisse, Nicolaus found the missing denouement. Here Marx “en- visages a capitalist productive apparatus more completely automated than that of any presently existing society,” and shows how “this economic organization must break down” at the very height of its productive powers (57). Nicolaus concluded that the Grundrisse would reinvigorate Marxism because it proved that, far from being a relic of nineteenth-century thought, Marx’s critique “exposes even the most industrially advanced society at its roots” (61). Nicolaus’s assessment of the Grundrisse’s significance was prescient. Perhaps more than any other of Marx’s texts, including the three published volumes of Capital, the Grundrisse has become a fruitful source for developing Marxist theories of capitalism’s crisis. One of the most influential readings originated in the Italian New Left. According to Mario Tronti, “it was the Grundrisse, more than Capital, that seemed to offer theoretical weapons of sufficient analytical, stylistic and polemical novelty” (232). The operaismo (workerist) movement considered the Grundrisse evidence that Marx was “a proponent of […] a catastrophic view Marx vs. the Robots 625 of capitalism” (232). In 1964, Quaderni Rossi published the most “catastrophic” section of the text as “Frammento sulle macchine.” Coincidentally, in 1964 quota- tions of the same section appeared in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (Ramírez 45-46). But while Marcuse approached the Grundrisse in the hypothetical sub- junctive, contrasting what would happen if automation were fully realized with the actuality of its partial employment in welfare capitalism, the Italian exegesis tended to be in the indicative, especially in the work of Antonio Negri. Negri argued that the radical transformation of production that Marx sketches in the “Fragment” has already happened. As Negri and co-author Michael Hardt would later write in Empire, “[w]hat Marx saw as the future is our era” (364). This view has been foundational for provocative Marxist theories of “cognitive capitalism” and the “general intellect” (Vercellone). In the so-called Fragment on Machines, Marx claims that capitalism trans- forms production to suit its needs through the “technological application of science,” which in turn causes “immediate labor” to “disappear as the determining principle of production” (Grundrisse 85, 86). The laborer becomes an “overseer” and “regulator” of machines who “stands beside the production process, rather than being its main agent” (91). Marx then makes a series of profound inferences from these changes. When “labor in its immediate form has ceased to be the great source of wealth,” he continues, “labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and therefore exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value.” In one of the few passages in which he directly refers to capitalism’s demise, Marx concludes that “production based on exchange value collapses” (91). In other words, while Capital stresses the fraud of capitalism’s development of large-scale industry, and depicts “science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labour embodied in the system of machinery” as the “power of the ‘master’” (549), the Grundrisse suggests that the same powers of science and technology can es- cape the master’s control and crash capitalism. To be sure, from the more mature perspective of Capital, the Grundrisse’s speculations are incoherent. Michael Heinrich has pointed out several important ways in which Marx’s thinking in the Grundrisse clashes with his subsequent value theory in Capital. In the later work, Marx’s concept of “immediate” labor finds its closest analog in concrete labor, the specific expenditure of labor power that produces the particular use value of a commodity. Crucially, Heinrich notes that Marx makes a distinction in Capital that is missing in the Grundrisse, namely, the distinction between the concrete labor embodied in a commodity and the abstract, or socially average, labor that it represents (“‘Fragment’” 204). Capital specifies that abstract labor, not concrete or “immediate” labor, is the substance of the commodity’s value. Given the conceptual importance of abstract labor in Marx’s mature thought, it is unclear why the decline of “immediate” labor should have such a fatal effect on capitalism. The Marx of Capital would probably tell the Marx of the Grundrisse that even if concrete labor decreases, value does not collapse as a result. In this case, value represents a greater proportion of the socially average labor embodied in machines, which pass on their value to their products. Indeed, in placing so much emphasis on immediate labor, and in claiming that this production-specific 626 J. Jesse Ramírez transformation is a point of systemic rupture, the Marx of the Grundrisse has not, in Heinrich’s view, fully conceptualized the unity of production and exchange in the determination of abstract labor time under capitalism. In Capital, Marx specifies that it is in commodity exchange that the concrete labor time expended in production is unconsciously homogenized and socially “validated” as an instance of total social labor (Heinrich, Introduction 50-51). More broadly, we can say that the Grundrisse’s snapshot of collapse is inadequate to the more complex and in- terlocking totality of capitalism’s contradictions, of which there is not just one, but seventeen, at least according to David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Heinrich’s larger argument against the Grundrisse is that it reflects Marx’s ex- pectations of revolution prior to his full realization of the significance of the Panic of 1857. Whereas Marx was initially concerned that capitalism would fall before he completed his book, he later saw the Panic as evidence that crises are nor- mal elements of capitalism’s reproduction. After capitalism survived the Panic, Marx “no longer argued in terms of a theory of final economic collapse, and he no longer made out a direct connection between crisis and revolution” (Heinrich, “Crisis Theory”). In Heinrich’s view, the Grundrisse should not be considered a precursor to Capital, but instead a draft of a project that Marx abandoned in order to write Capital.4 Yet as long as it is read as the dialectical companion of Capital and not as its substitute, the Grundrisse remains a valuable resource for thinking about the temporal dimensions of postcapitalism. In one of the most powerful readings of the Grundrisse to emerge from Frankfurt School critical theory, Moishe Postone argues that the Grundrisse underscores the potential emancipatory gains in the unhanding of tools, namely, the replacement of the immediate unity of technical gesture and sensory-somatic experience with science, or the “accumulated collective knowledge of the species” (298). “One aspect of the development of large- scale industry,” Postone writes, “entails the historical constitution of socially general productive capacities and modes of scientific, technical, and organizational knowledge that are not a function of, and cannot be reduced to, workers’ strength, knowledge, and experience” (339). The contradiction that large-scale industry expresses is that while scientific and technological production reduces the social need for “workers’ strength, knowledge, and experience,” capitalism nonetheless requires these workers as sources of surplus value. Expressed in terms of workers’ labor time, capitalism displays its contradictory development of technology “by striving to reduce labour time to a minimum, while, on the other hand, positing labour time as the sole measure and source of wealth” (Marx, Grundrisse 91). While Postone stresses that there is no deterministic reason that this contradiction will automatically destroy capitalism, the Grundrisse moves beyond Capital’s negative critique and briefly envisions a positive postcapitalist future in which people have “reappropriat[ed] […] socially general capacities” (357), and in which

4 Heinrich’s views on Marx’s crisis theory have sparked considerable controversy, especially with regard to his critique of the theory of the falling rate of profit. See the debate in Monthly Review at https://monthlyreview.org/features/exchange-with-heinrich-on-crisis-theory/. Marx vs. the Robots 627 the production of material wealth (and use values) is freed from the imperatives of value-producing labor time. In other words, by sketching an account of how automation, as the embodiment of the “accumulated collective knowledge of the species,” could provide the basis for a major restructuring of labor time, the Grundrisse complements Marx’s famous claim in Capital, Volume Three that the “realm of freedom” is founded on “[t]he shortening of the working day” (807). In this respect, perhaps the Grundrisse can even clarify the material foundations of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt reminds us, the American Dream was not always understood as industriousness and upward social mobility for their own sake. Rather, the “forgotten” American Dream is one in which the point of material progress is free time, “the business of living free” (Hunnicutt viii).

IV. Conclusion

The term automation often functions as an abstract universal that condenses and obscures a host of social relations. Debates about automation are usually rei- fied ways of asking what a society can and should produce—in other words, how a society should conceive and practice a particular metabolic relation with nature— given a historically specific ensemble of class struggle, wage relations, state regu- lation, the relative embeddedness of social relations in markets, business cycles, profit rates, credit, competition, and, of course, science and technology. I have certainly left something important out of the list, but adding it would only bolster my general point that coming to terms with automation requires that we come to terms with capitalism as a determinate social totality that is shot through with contradictions. Postone’s reconstruction of critical theory is valuable because of its insistence that capitalism cannot be overcome without abolishing the temporal logic of capitalist labor and wealth creation, but its weakness lies in its isola- tion of production as the site of capitalism’s singular contradiction. Martin Ford’s Keynesian case for universal basic income is comparatively a failure, since it is an exclusively demand-side argument that leaves capitalist production untouched, and an advancement, since it recognizes consumption as another key site of contradiction.5 Yet what I also find interesting about the abstract noun automation is that it signals a higher level of abstraction than the adjective “automatic” (“automatic machinery”) and earlier nouns that refer to single machines (“automaton”). The term refers not just to mechanization, but to a further step of making machine production more continuous, seamless, and integral by removing human interme- diaries. The general renaming and regrouping of earlier technologies and systems

5 Peter Frase notes that Ford is “somewhat more radical” (5) than most liberal commenta- tors, while Harvey treats Ford rather favorably in his explication of the eighth contradiction of capitalism, “Technology, Work and Human Disposability” (91-111). For a more radical theory of universal basic income that connects the concept to a potential revolution in production, see Nick Srnicek’s and Alex Williams’s accelerationist text Inventing the Future. 628 J. Jesse Ramírez under the rubric of “automation” between the late 1940s and 1960s—a change that still frames contemporary discourse—implies collective recognition that in- dividual instances of “making automatic” were all part of a broader social shift toward systems that were something more than mechanization, and for which the earlier term automatization was perhaps found to roll too slowly—too “un-automatically”—off the tongue. This “something more” was the computer. I mentioned above that the unhanding of tools leads to the automaticity and regularity of constraint in a machine that carries out “dumb” technical action, without situational awareness of changes in the environment or product. Nicholas Carr succinctly summarizes how the computer smartens machines, thereby ex- tending the scope of automation far beyond anything Marx dealt with. Carr takes as his model the anti-aircraft weapons developed by the Allies in World War II:

First, at the system’s core, is a very fast calculating machine—a computer. Second is a sensing mechanism (radar, in this case) that monitors the external environment, the real world, and communicates essential data about it to the computer. Third is a communica- tion link that allows the computer to control the movements of the physical apparatus that performs the actual work, with or without human assistance. And finally there’s a feedback method—a means of returning to the computer information about the results of its instructions so that it can adjust its calculations to correct for errors and account for changes in the environment. Sensory organs, a calculating brain, a stream of messages to control physical movements, and a feedback loop for learning: there you have the essence of automation, the essence of a robot. And there, too, you have the essence of a living being’s nervous system. The resemblance is no coincidence. In order to replace a human, an automated system first has to replicate a human, or at least some aspect of a human’s ability. (Ch. 2)

Computer-based automation takes a major step beyond the unhanding of the tool insofar as it appropriates not only the tool itself but also the skill and perceptual- somatic action that were formerly embodied in the worker. In other words, the tool alienated in the machine becomes itself a worker (Ford xii), opening up a new range of manual jobs for robots with machine vision, updatable software, and arms and hands designed for dexterity. If the work consists in analysis of information and symbolic manipulation, then the third stage in Carr’s scheme (movement of a physical apparatus) is unnecessary. The various decision processes involved in intellectual work, from stock trading to programming, sports journalism to medi- cal diagnosis, can be performed entirely in “immaterial” communicative space. Do the new robots therefore mean that Marx is outdated? No, because for all their dazzling new capacities, the robots are still crystallizations of capitalism’s fraud. For starters, they may be a fraud in the simple sense that they are still incapable of doing all the work that they are allegedly going to take from us any day now. The hype surrounding automation makes it difficult to differentiate between the actual state of the art and what are essentially advertisements for the corporations that want to sell their vision of the automated future. Take the industrial robot Baxter, for example. Designed by the Boston-based company Rethink Robotics, Baxter can visually represent its environment, has dexterous arms that can load small parts into a machine or pack beer bottles into a carton, and can be programmed by simply moving its arms and hands in the desired motion, which Marx vs. the Robots 629 the robot then quickly memorizes. But from Baxter’s release in 2012 to 2015, the year in which Martin Ford identified Baxter as a path-breaking “Versatile Robot Worker” (5), Baxter sold only several hundred units. Mike Orcutt reports in the MIT Technology Review that Rethink Robotics “misjudged the opportunity” for new industrial automation. The other robot worker covered by Ford, a robotic arm that was allegedly “rapidly approaching a nearly human-level ability to per- ceive and interact with its environment” (5), was acquired by Google in 2013 and has since virtually vanished from the news. “The gap between human and robot motor skills remains vast,” says Google’s Sergey Levine on the Google Research Blog. “Machines still have a very long way to go to match human proficiency even at basic sensorimotor skills like grasping.” Perhaps Baxter’s day will come eventually. But it is worth wondering why capitalism’s fantastic technofutures are always said to be just around the corner, while in the meantime the “breakthroughs” arrive in the form of minor variations on existing objects and services. For capitalist innovation really is not about “disrup- tion,” despite the rhetoric of Silicon Valley; it is about the reproduction of capitalism. At a more fundamental level, the robots are frauds because they embody the contradiction of technological dynamism under capitalism: the social productivity of science and technology express their power to produce material wealth and re- make labor time in the alienated form of capital, which can only change the world in ways that ensure that it does not, in fact, change. Yet the future-oriented question of whether there will eventually arise a World Without Work is ultimately the wrong question. My point is not simply that it is impossible to predict the future—a quick Internet search shows the widespread disagreement over how many jobs will be automated—but that the question false- ly presumes that we need to wait and see what happens. In fact, the destruction of work has already occurred, leaving precarious jobs, “bullshit jobs” (Graeber), inequality, superfluous populations, and forms of “wageless life” (Denning) in its wake. Contemporary automation reminds us that capitalism’s desire to free itself of “the human element,” labor, is ongoing and relentless. That is why just about every generation of Americans has heard about technological unemployment since the rise of modern industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. Yet if Marx is right, and the exploitation of human labor is the source of surplus value,6 then workers are the lover that capitalism, as if condemned to sing the hook of Barry

6 To be sure, Marx may be wrong to believe that the exploitation of human labor is a neces- sary condition of capitalism. But while mainstream economics would like to rest assured that Marx’s value theory is utterly outmoded, fully automated capitalism, in which human labor is essentially redundant, would not only provide the ultimate proof against Marx but would also be extremely bleak. In other words, if the dismissal of Marx’s value theory is proven correct, mainstream economics will win the ideological battle, but its victory will be pyrrhic. Build- ing on Ford’s projection of mass technological unemployment, Harvey claims that in the event of capitalism’s final liberation from human labor, “the neoclassical argument contra the value theory will become more and more correct, to the point where even the most orthodox Marx- ists will have to give up the value theory. Conventional economists will doubtless crow with delight at this. What they do not realise is that this means the demise of the one restraint that has prevented the descent of capital into total lawlessness” (109). Frase calls this possible future “exterminism” (120-43). 630 J. Jesse Ramírez

White’s “Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up,” cannot live with or without. To be sure, if they were not only taxed or appropriated as common property, but opened up to democratic design, robots could support a new society of material wealth and free time—a potential that capitalist automation expresses in the inverted form of humanized machines, mechanized humans, and surplus populations who are “free” to choose between exploitation and redundancy. Whereas capitalism’s apologists reassure us that there will always be jobs, that capitalism will always findsomething for us to do, Marx’s contribution to the critique of American automation is to rephrase these promises as a warning—and a provocation.

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