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 ulti- mately 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 col- lapse 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 imme- diately 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 “criti- cal 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 criti- cal 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.

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