Ep. 361: Marx on Machines (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, then thought better of it. Our question for episode 361 is something like, how does mechanization affect labor? This is our final installment in our series on Karl Marx, finishing up some bits from Das Kapital and considering his fragment on machines from 1858. For more. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, not any more radicalized than I was, despite having spent this much time with Marx. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, absurdly assuming that I share something in common with the capitalist in Austin, Texas.

0:49 Wes: This is Wes Alwan confronting my commodities in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:54 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey contemplating the free association of free men and their labor power in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:01 Mark: All right, so we are in the middle or toward the end of chapter one of Das Kapital on the commodity, and then we are going to move. There is a later chapter in Das Kapital on machinery, and I reviewed it going into here. But I think this fragment on machines really gets to the core, will give us plenty to talk about in how we want to say labor theory. Value. That was the primary thing we covered last time. All the value comes from labor. Well, what happens when you introduce a machine? It seems like that should. Can't that just replace labor?

1:36 Seth: Can't that.

1:36 Mark: I mean. Yes, it took labor to make the machine anyway. So we'll talk about why then. Introducing machines doesn't actually improve the lot of the labor in capitalism, etc.

1:48 Wes: And really, really, historically it did. Yes, but not at the time for English people. Shall we begin with fetishes? And I can catch us up a little bit.

1:59 Mark: Yeah. If you want to review and get us up to around 171. We said page.

2:04 Wes: Yeah, so we had talked about his idea that commodities have this mystical character, this character that transcends sensuousness in a way. They are metaphors or they're signifiers for something else. And what their signifiers for is a particular type of social relationship between producers. And in particular, what they represent is the idea that different types of concrete labor, like weaving or coat making are just fungible. They're just reducible to each other, or they're exchangeable, and they show up right in the exchangeability of commodities.

So when we look at commodities and think about the value of commodities, or think is too strong a word to kind of have a sense of the value of Commodities. We see them inherently as exchangeable, and that's what makes them a commodity. But what they're representing, in a sense, is the idea that labor is exchangeable. And in that sense, they are kind of a picture of alienated labor. They're almost like a dreamlike metaphor for alienation. So we got to the point where he was contrasting that and saying, well, that's specific to capitalism. And there are other forms of organization like the family, where that's not true and it's not right.

So say on page 171, we have one near to hand in the patriarchal rural industry of a peasant family which produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen and clothing for its own use. These things confront the family as so many products of its collective labor. But they do not confront each other as commodities. And they don't confront as commodities because the family, right, sees these products, when they produce the particular products according to this natural division of labor that happens within the family according to their social roles, they see them not as exchangeable.

It's not like I'm going to, hey, Mom, I'll give you this if you give me this. But they just think these are the products of the collective labor of the family that belong to the family. And that is going to be a pivot point for one of our rare glimpses into positive account of communism.

4:15 Dylan: Can we dissect that a little bit before we move on?

4:18 Wes: Yeah.

4:19 Dylan: So it's not a very long part, but he just assumes that. That there isn't any kind of exchange that effectively goes on in a family. And it seems like there's probably two. One is the fact that they are embedded in an economy. So the reason they're tilling isn't just for creating food for themselves. Right. They're having to exchange that outside of the family. Some of the stuff they're doing is in order to bring in resources. They're not making plows themselves. They're not going out and getting ore and turning that into smelting it and turning that into a plow.

They're not fully subsistent. So there's an aspect that the family's having to go and do stuff to interact with the rest of the world. And so some of what they're doing, at least as a whole family, is commoditized. And then is it really the case that there's nothing that's effectively implicitly exchanged or even in fact, you see that when those exchanges aren't fulfilled in families that lead to them not functioning? If people aren't Fulfilling their roles and fulfilling the duties of those exchanges, even if they're not as are they that far from being Khmer, especially in a

5:37 Wes: farm, Dylan's had it up to here with his freeloading family members.

5:42 Dylan: Well, no, I mean, well, but I mean look, when the kids are told that they have to go feed the pigs at 5 o' clock in the morning and then at 2 o' clock in the afternoon and then 8 o' clock at night and they have to do that, is it wrong for them to also expect that they're going to get fed themselves back home? And if they don't get fed themselves

6:00 Wes: back home, if you don't feed the kids, you're not going to get your commodities. Well this, I'm making fun of it, it's a good point. I'm just, it's funny.

6:08 Seth: So. Yeah, no, I think we get it. I think the question, I would respond to that by just saying is that the same kind of exchange though? Would Mark say that's not the same kind of exchange as we see in say, what did he call it in fragment machines? Small scale commodity producers. Right. So it's not, you're not exchanging commodities what you're exchanging and it's not wage labor. Right. Like if you live on a farm and you have to do work on the farm because that's what you eat and live off of. Right. It's not quite the same thing as a independent producers creating commodities and having that kind of exchange, even pre money.

So we might say, yeah, of course there's exchange going on. It's just not. The dynamics of the family are not the same as the dynamics of a capitalist commodity economy. And Marx has precedent where he would say commodities are specific to capitalism that exists in this particular era or whatever. Families have existed forever. And we've talked about feudalism and you can talk about slave, Athenian slave economics and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, of course there are some dynamics, exchange dynamics, call it an economics of the family. It's just not the same.

7:29 Wes: Yeah, I think, you know, that's a good point. He's already talked about feudalism. Right. So it's not just the familial arrangement that reflects, that's an arrangement in which commodities don't appear. It's the same thing in feudalism, even though there are services and payments in kind in a sense. Right. So the serf is working for the lord and giving a certain amount of his production to the lord and maybe nominally as a rent for land or something like that. Right. But it's not the same. There's something different in this for Marx from actually using money and going out and buying things and then also producing something with a view to getting money and going out and buying things. So even if the family feels more like feudalism, it would be the same situation. There would not be capitalism and there would not be commodities.

8:26 Dylan: I think that all that's fair and there is something critical about the generation of labor used to generate money as opposed to something closer to the exchange of other forms of labor. But it makes me think that the distinctions. It seems to be awful rosy in terms of the kinds of implicit agreements that have to come in on here and the value that's being part of the value that's being exchanged. And this is why you would. People would get annoyed with, well, are you really going to pay your kids to do the dishes? Shouldn't they just do the dishes because they are part of the family kind of thing? That whole conversation presumes that there is a different kind of vat, that there's a corruption of money and exchange of money for activities that ought to be part of the value exchange that one has as part being part of a social unit.

9:25 Wes: And this, I think, Dylan is really going to come up under communism because it's going to be more spelled out so. Right. So how do you distribute the rewards of labor between people? And historically, it was a disaster as well. If you're not going to use money to figure it out, then if you're thinking of the products of labor as a collective property, as joint property, there's still a distribution problem.

9:47 Dylan: Yes.

9:47 Wes: To be solved. So we'll get to that with this next section.

9:50 Mark: Yeah, I didn't think we were going to get to this in discussing page one of the reading, but I. Whenever this has come up in the past about what human nature is and how fungible it is, I know Dylan is very much, you know, you go to the. That there's competitive drive is somehow central, so that the idea that once you get rid of formal property relations or something, then, well, everybody's just going to cooperate and just seems extremely naive. And you know, you have to. If there's more than one person involved in something, then you have to have some sort of practices and mechanisms for not regulating it. Not necessarily a law that you'll have extreme sanction, but you have to have some sort of incentive, even just customs worked out such that the social machine can work.

10:41 Dylan: Yeah.

10:42 Wes: All right, shall we get to the communism?

10:44 Mark: Yes. So here Marx says very little about communism in this book or really in any of his writings. Yes, because he thought that the. Even though he's very influenced by like the French utopians, the socialists, he just thought if I just even like Plato's Republic, if I just spell out here is the kind of society we should ultimately be shooting for. He just thought that was a bad way of going about it. That that's very naive think that you can bend the laws of nature to your will. So a lot of things, people accuse communism, accuse Marx of this utopianism is not.

Marx was very much aware of this. And so he trying to. Let's just understand how these mechanisms work, how the progress of history looks like it's going to unfold. And you know, it's definitely a moral imperative to point the way to show like, yes, we can have a more humane world, but don't start by and hear how in our future society everybody is going to live and how the exchange is going to work.

11:44 Wes: He's very anti utopian and we got a lot of that in the 1844 manuscripts. But I think he protests a little too much and there's a lot of implicit utopianism in what he's doing. He just knows that it's going to look touchy feely and he wants to rebel about against that idea and say no, this is about, this is science and this is about what's historically determined. And he doesn't want to be charged with utopianism. And I think that in part is why he's so militantly anti utopian and why he's so virulently critical of Proudhon and other quote unquote crude.

12:28 Dylan: I mean, is it part of it that that utopianism smacks too much of idealism and he's so stridently precious about his materialism against idealism that he would similarly protest. I'm not an idealist, but I agree with you. I think that he protests too much in this respect.

12:50 Wes: And we should recall the way he Talked in the 1844 Manuscripts with People's very perception of things being transformed. Right. Remember all that talk and we're going to be in touch with our species essence. And so he was a little less careful about that, hadn't fully rejected Feuerbach at that point. Yeah, he's very anti utopian on the one hand, but sounded quite utopian as well in the 1844 manuscripts. I think he abandoned that type of talk. But now we're going to get here, we're going to get this sketchy as kind of general and not detailed depiction of what communism involves here.

13:32 Mark: But sorry, I have to detour us because, Dylan, your equation of idealism in terms of we have a moral ideal or a political ideal that we're shooting for, and idealism in Hegel's sense of everything is an idea and not a material thing. Either those are just completely different or they're related in a really interesting way. And we have never really talked through how those two could be related. Because if everything is Berkeley, there's nothing about metaphysical idealism that says anything about politics whatsoever. But Hegel's idealism, of course, was not mere Berkeley and idealism, and it was not mere fiction idealism. It contained as part of his system this the destiny of history and the greater self consciousness of mankind as being the point of all history. So, yeah, how did you see those two as related? Why did, why are you equating those?

14:24 Dylan: Well, I wouldn't have characterized my point as the way you summarized at the beginning, but at the end where you're pointing to the arc of history, that to me sounds like utopianism. It seems a lot. I mean, it seems like directly related to it and not in terms of. Not in terms of utopianism where you would just point to a perfect world that you imagined, but a utopianism where you understood that that's where we were going. Yeah, and that's what I would. You know, Hegel, I agree with you and Marx too, even this is why he protests too much. His whole view that there is that capitalism is a waypoint on the economic pathway to communism is a path of history argument is that there's the universe and it's going in a direction and I am a mechanism that I need to participate on that pathway.

So it's a teleological utopian view of the evolution of the universe and it might as well be God in there for all practical purposes. For Marx, even though he completely denies it, having that external force of the universe is moving in that direction and I will be a mechanism of it, he is saying, I, that's what's going on. And I am a prophet of communism in that respect. You know, his utopianism feels just like that. In the same way that to me, the way you characterized Hegel, it's the same. And so to me, him protesting against the accusations of utopians is because it cuts too close to the bone.

He feels like his materialism saves him from this, from this point of view, from his utopianism, his idealism, that, oh well, I'm not an idealist because I believe in real things, real labor makes A real difference and his materials. But it doesn't because his materialism is just a manifestation of his utopianism to me.

16:31 Wes: Well, it's tending in the same way that for Hegel things tended toward perfect self consciousness or consciousness of the absolute. Here consciousness of the absolute is replaced by certain social relations and relations of production. And that's what will ultimately resolve the contradictions that that is where the dialectic is headed. And so communism is that final steady state where all contradictions have been resolved and corresponds to self consciousness in Hegel, which is really about the self consciousness of God and. Right. And if we do read this, read Marx teleologically, that then teleology implies some end, some ultimate good towards which things are tending, which is typically associated, identified with God, at least in Aristotle and arguably Hegel as well.

17:28 Dylan: So yeah, so that's where I was coming at it from. I think that there is a very interesting argument to talk about. It's trying to talk about directionality. Is there a direction of history or direction of human social evolution that is strongly aimed? And Hegel clearly articulates that, just as west just said, it's God evolving, not evolving in the sense of a genuine evolution, but progressing okay.

17:57 Mark: And that's enabled though by nous. Right. By the character of it as idealist in the metaphysical sense of absolutely. That it seems really hard to have. No, we're going to make this all materialist, but yet it's still directed. Because if you make it materialist then it should be like Darwin, where okay, we can see advance. But we know if we talk about Darwinian evolution as aiming toward humanity, that that's just the bastardization of Darwin.

18:22 Dylan: Like it is a bastardization.

18:23 Mark: No, it is wandering hither and thither based on just historical circumstance, which seems to be how history is actually in some ways played out.

18:32 Dylan: I agree. I'm just saying that Marx, this is the. We started this detour on the. Marx doth protest too much about his being against his anti utopian view. And I think that to me he does protest too much in that his utopianism, his reaction against it to me is understandable because he wants to identify himself as a materialist in a particular way.

19:02 Wes: All right, so let's read what he says here about Communism. Bottom of 171. Let us finally imagine for a change an association of free men working with the means of production held in common and expending their many different forms of labor power in full self awareness as one single social labor force. All the characteristics of Robinson's labor are repeated here. But with the difference that they are social instead of individual. All Robinson's products were exclusively the result of his own personal labor. And they were therefore directly objects of utility for him personally.

The total product of our imagined association is a social product. One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social, right? So new machinery and other means of production. But another part is consumed by members of the association as a means of subsistence. This part therefore, must be divided amongst them. This problem of distribution I was talking about. The way this division is made. Will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production. And the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers.

So then he talks about giving the share to individual producers. Based in part on labor time. But we would have to take into other, presumably other factors as well, right? Like how skilled is the labor. We'd have all the same, we have lots of distribution problems here. With how things are divided up between people. So the social relations of the individual producers. Both towards their labor and the products of their labor. Are here transparent in their simplicity in production as well as distribution. And that transparency means that they are not deluded by the fetishism of commodities.

20:48 Seth: So kind of to foreshadow the conversation about machines. So first off, social instead of individual. So that's just the metaphor. And then there, I think one way to think about this is the difference. The notion of utility or use value versus exchange value. So in some sense, the communist model is going to change the dynamic relative to the capitalist commodity model. About where the priority is between use value and exchange value. And this will also talk when we get into the notion of surplus labor, but also surplus production. In the sense that in the communist model.

Just in the same way that the isolated individual Robinson would not produce anything for the purpose of exchange. Because A, he has nothing, he has no one to exchange with. But also that expenditure of labor to create surplus value doesn't make any sense. Because he would rather use all labor, all of his labor. Producing things that have immediate value, AKA utility, use value. And so if you take that model and you what Marx is saying, kind of imagine that in a broader society. Where what we're doing as a society is producing what we need to survive.

I don't want to say survive, because that makes it seem like it's subsistence, right? But imagine an economic model where we don't produce surplus for the purposes of exchange and accumulation of wealth. What we produce has instead a focus on utility. When we make something, we intend it to be used by Somebody, if not immediately, at least in some meaningful way. And we're not producing surplus for the purpose of accumulating wealth so that we can then produce more surplus or exchange. Right.

22:58 Wes: We're not producing commodities for exchange. So we're producing use values for the community in the same way Robinson is producing use values for himself. We are now just thinking of Robinson as the community Borg the collectivity. And we're producing instead of saying, oh, I'm going to make this thing so I can give it, you know, exchange it for money and so I can get stuff for my subsistence and that whole thing. I'm thinking as a laborer in this ideal community in terms of I am making a use value for the community. Our labor is something in common and our product is something in common.

So it's really interesting in that the point ultimately seems to be psychological. It's our comportment to our work. Right. If I'm working in one mode and looking at my products of my labor as something for exchange, that's alienated. But I could be doing the exact same labor and just think of it differently. Think of it as for the collective and no longer be alienated seems quite far fetched. I don't want to get too critical at this point.

24:11 Dylan: If we just pick a couple sort of concrete examples, it would mean that for your community, somebody or some buddies would create as many axe heads as were necessary to chop wood by the number of people in your community. And you wouldn't create any more axe heads than were necessary.

24:31 Wes: And what's necessary would be determined by a central committee. Be a command economy. Right. Instead of the market.

24:37 Dylan: That's an interesting case because I don't think Marx is. I don't know. In the family mode, you wouldn't be imagining it being decided by a central committee, but what you would be there, it would at least be ad hoc. We need another axe head because Joe's family got bigger and his daughter's now 13 and can start chopping wood out in the backyard kind of thing. And Joe's got his axe head that he's using for his chopping that he.

25:05 Wes: Well, he basically says. I mean, the rest of that paragraph is kind of about, well, how do you figure out how much you need? It's not the market doing it. He doesn't mention central committee in a command economy, but does seem to be implicit.

25:21 Seth: Yeah, well, there's nothing that says that you can't have a decentralized mechanism for determining need. You don't have to immediately run to centralized Management, I want to agree with you.

25:35 Dylan: Except then I'm going to bring up immediately there's a conversation to have whether the production of certain things requires there to be centralized effort. Okay. I mean, I picked axe heads for a reason. Axe heads are sort of in this middle ground, but they're already going to be super hard for individuals to do. If you start talking about I'm going to get a stone and I'm going to flake it and then tie it to a stick, that individuals can do that. But mining metal and then turning it into. Through a process and putting aside even expertise to generate access, much less even the most basic machines of the industrial revolution, put aside any of the stuff that happens in the early 20th century. Those things are not possible without centralized driven effort.

26:30 Mark: The centralized effort seems like it is necessary for. Are we the person who knows how to make the axes and just makes axes all day? Maybe after we have enough axes, maybe they should be going doing something else. But I mean you could see them making it upon request. So the decision, if it's a small enough community, that's the key, then you could just. If somebody needs an ax, they go to the person who knows how to make axes. And so you don't need a central committee.

26:56 Wes: Well, I think Seth is right in principle. There might be other mechanisms in a central committee in a command economy. And I think this was a subject, from what I've read, this was a subject of intense debate among communists that Marx himself participated in. And it wasn't clear to me where Marx actually came down on this because he, as usual, was kind of hard to pin down. Right. Did Marx think this was going to work as a command economy or not? I think that's up for debate. One might be an anarchist, in other words.

27:29 Seth: Yeah, but I think Dylan makes a good point. And this goes back to. So we talked about Robinson, who's the individual. Then we've talked about family and whole family dynamics. And then there's small scale tribal units. If you think about a society that hits a certain scale where you might say something to the effect of, look, you can't operate this kind of society at the level of tribal or village kind of exchange. It's not like we have a farmer, you know, we've got the farmer, the blacksmith. Right. The clothier, the cobbler. Because what Dylan was describing about axe head making and talking about mining and all that, that right there requires machinery, it requires capital because it requires an investment to build out the infrastructure.

Which then I think the. So maybe the question Here is. I think all of us could easily imagine in a society of a village of 50 to 100 people, a kibbutz, if you will, you could imagine this type of a model working. And in fact, there are examples of it in Israel right now. But as at a certain point there's a scale and the needs of the society grow. It's like at the point where in order to meet the needs of a broad society, you have to introduce infrastructure mechanisms that require investment of capital.

29:06 Dylan: Well, you need.

29:06 Wes: And also you need price mechanisms for distribution. Right. From our episode on Von Mises. Right. Prices are just like hormones going through the body. They're messengers. They're a way of communicating something so that as an emergent property, what the needs of production can be determined. We figure out how much to produce and what to produce via price mechanisms. And rather than from something top down.

29:37 Mark: Wes, I think you just gave someone an orgasm. So it was Hayek. We have not had a von Mises episode and we're not going to have a von Mises episode.

29:44 Wes: Sorry.

29:45 Mark: Don't ask.

29:45 Wes: Sorry, Hayek. That's what I meant to say.

29:49 Dylan: So I think there are two things that we're talking about here. One is the prices and just the way in which the goods get distributed and how many do we have to make and that kind of thing. But part of my point was the very making of things of a certain level requires a kind of organization that doesn't strictly come from the economy. It requires an organization of individuals that has a different kind of economy to it. To me, that you're not going to get. They're surely related to one another by. Well, I guess it comes down to this. The reason why you have certain technological progressions has to do with the benefit the development of those technological progressions provide to people doing them. It's clearly not just because of the benefit for the community.

30:43 Mark: Right. Relative surplus value is what I wanted to make sure we got these ideas out at some point of we increase productivity, we make workers work longer hours because the capitalists want more money. The first couple hours, first five hours, whatever depends on the industry, depends on the state of things that the worker works. The worker is sort of just recouping the salary that you're going to pay for that worker. And then there's a little more that like is recouping the past, the money that went into the machinery and the money that goes into the basic materials.

And then anything above that is potentially profit or to be reinvested. And so the. There's an Absolute overall. And this is Marx's analysis of what is wrong with capitalism. Why it's exploitative inherently. Doesn't matter if the individual capitalists. It's not because they're greedy. It's just that the system, the incentives are built in to get as much. You're paying only the exchange value for the workers working day, but yet you're getting much more use values. The more innovation you can install in terms of machinery, in terms of greater division of labor, in terms of just organizing your workers to do things as efficiently as possible, the more then the more profit you can get out of them without necessarily.

You could, but without necessarily having to pay them anymore. But you do that, especially if you can gain an advantage over your competitors. So I'm doing it. I'm gaining more surplus value relative to others in the market. Once everybody institutes that innovation, well then the price just goes down. You know, the value of the thing created just goes down.

32:21 Wes: Yeah. So if I have a labor who's producing a certain amount, me as a factory owner. And part of the. What I can sell that for goes as wages to the laborer and part of it goes to my costs. And then a big part of it goes to profit. And the idea is that profit is just something that we're stealing from the laborer. That's the surplus. Right. They're really producing that. And I'm taking. And so if I introduce a machine that doubles the productivity of the laborer and doubles my profit, instead of that extra profit going to the laborer, it just goes to me.

And Marx ultimately thought that would tend towards pauperization of laborers until the class. The conflict rose to the level of revolution. Of course, that's not what happens. And this is. I don't. Economists don't think that profit works this way in part because it presumes this objective, this theory of value where the value of something is objectively related to the amount of time and labor that went into it. When economists today see value as entirely subjective.

33:29 Dylan: Yes.

33:29 Wes: And think about it in terms of marginal utility and other concepts like that which we should do an episode on one day.

33:37 Dylan: Yes.

33:38 Wes: So the end of this. So we got this picture of communist society. And then he launches into Christianity as most suitable for a society of commodity producers. Because it's a cult of man in the abstract. This is kind of Feuerbachian, Right. If God is just a projection of man's properties, in a way, Christianity is just a cult of the perfect men. And that delusion will only go away when practical social relations are transparent, which is to say when labor comes under the planned control of freely associated men. So I think that's worthwhile reading that passage.

The religious reflections of the real world can in any case vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man and man and nature generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life process, that is the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men and stands under their conscious and planned control. This is one other indication that we may be talking about a planned economy. Right? And again, transparency.

What's meant here is that we aren't under the spell of the fetishism, which is ultimately what fetishism ultimately does. It's a vehicle for ideology, right? So it tells us that this is just the way it is. Here are commodities, they're exchangeable. This is the way it is by nature. When Marx wants to say no, this is a part and parcel of capitalism, which is a specific historical stage. It's not necessary and natural. It's going to go away. And when it goes away, the way we look at these products, the way we look at our products of our own labor is actually going to change.

And the fetishism of the commodity will

35:41 Mark: actually go away at the end of that paragraph. This, however, so having a freely having communism requires a society possess a material foundation or a series of material conditions of existence which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development. So I think that it doesn't say here that having this, these material foundations means we'll definitely have communism, but it's at least a necessary step. It's funny, I had been seeing the Feuerbachian the species being, if we want to in our discussion earlier today here about the transition from Hegel to Marx, that if Hegel thinks that the end of history is us becoming as spirit self aware, well then a Feuerbachian adaptation to economics would be we need to become aware of ourselves in our species being.

It seemed to be something that Marx and his earlier work agreed on. So in other words, commodity fetishism is pitting us against each other. That we're seeing. Right. Capitalism creates divisions where there should not be some. What really realizing our essential nature as humans as is that we are one people. We should be working toward the common good. That is something you will, if you look deep in your heart, free of the blinders of capitalism, you will see that you actually want to work. You want to be of use to your society. Man is a social animal.

And so really yeah, it's just a matter of freeing us from current social conditions so that then we could recognize that and be. That's what full self consciousness would be. So that's the response to oh no, man is essentially competitive and we just want to have one up over everybody else. We want to have more status than everybody else. Oh no, that's just the blindness of our past. That's this is something we are, it's in our deep in our telos to overcome.

37:40 Wes: So we go from consciousness of God and Hegel as self consciousness to consciousness of man and Feuerbach as self consciousness. And here it's consciousness of community.

37:51 Seth: I mean ultimately I feel like Marx, much like so many people we've read over however long it's been, 15 years, you know, it's like they're clear headed about the analysis but when they're faced with the conclusion of what they. They can't handle it. They can't. If we think back about how we started this series, the theses on Feuerbach, Marx says man were historically materially produced. You want to change people or society, you got to change the conditions. And when you get to this stage where what we're reading, I'm not seeing that. I'm seeing some kind of idealized, aspirational picture of what he thinks the next stage of history or whatever is going to be.

But the direct bald faced consequence of what he's saying is human beings will be whatever we make them, we make ourselves into. And if we've come to awareness that that's the case, then we can decide how we want to structure society and our immediate surroundings and all that stuff to create the human beings and the human nature that we want. I don't think there's anything essential or Marx hasn't done any work that suggests that there's essential human nature. In fact he's very much tied to the idea that, I don't know, maybe there's a teleological aspect that floats through there.

But anyway.

39:27 Dylan: Well, he doesn't think there's essential human nature. He thinks that it can be changed. The force of history might be teleological, but in fact human nature will, what human beings are will get changed by what the economy is along the way.

39:42 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Our self awareness rides on top again of material conditions. It's worth reminding ourselves of that passage. That mark's. That Mark. Sorry, Mark. That mark just read.

39:54 Seth: Oh, I got this.

39:55 Wes: You're 1x away from being a Commie

39:58 Seth: note he's Marx Linsenmayer for me for

40:00 Wes: the rest of the. But it. Right. And that I think this is the realistic part of Marx. As I've said many times before, what happens as technology advances. That's really a lot of what the material conditions are about. What happens when technology becomes so powerful that we have what is essentially an unlimited free labor pool that doesn't require human beings for the most part. Initially he says that you'll end up with pauperization and capitalists taking the profit from that for themselves. But there's a limit to that before the means of production just become collectively owned.

And whether or not you think that's true, you do have to. This technological advancement problem is something people ought to think about. What is going to happen, right. With AI, for instance, if AI really reaches that level of general intelligence and we can just have AI do everything, doesn't that mean we can then we all hunt in the morning and be poets in the afternoon and have exactly what Marx foresaw and in a way doesn't. Isn't the implication that that's actually necessary, that we have no choice, that some form of communism is going to ride on top of that material condition of infinite available free non human labor?

I don't know. But I don't think Marx is crazy for wondering about what happens at that point. It's like a singularity in a way. He didn't foresee artificial intelligence, of course, but he had the foresight to say, okay, what happens if technology does reach this virtually unlimited power?

41:45 Dylan: I put a little bit differently and Mark, he framed it and he put me on one side of this argument which I put aside whether I agree with that, but of there being individuals are all free floating entities that are inherently competitive. And you have that free market kind of argument that will work out however it is. And then you have the other side of the argument that we're all social beings and we're part of a collective action. And in fact stronger than that, the interpretation of the power of technology is really the power of the influence of our collective whole upon our individual selves.

Because that technology doesn't arise from any one individual. It arises through collective action of one sort or another and becomes a new force or presence within individual lives. It's a little bit like the one versus the many argument, the individual versus the community argument, the whole versus part argument. In another form of that dichotomy, are we individuals who are acting primarily as ourselves, that happen to be an environment that incidentally is social or are we deeply embedded and in fact the force of. And the thing we're beholden to is the whole community.

And it seems to me that this problem ends up being really the intertwinedness of that because there's feedback mechanisms and technology is a perfect example of that feedback mechanism. Technologies get developed into the world and then they end up affecting individuals. But it's of course, absolutely true that individuals and groups of individuals are the ones who develop technologies. So when we talk about the success of the capitalists, the challenge that we have is that their money, their harvesting of surplus value and becoming wealthy is only made possible in the context of the rules that are enabled in that economy, to use Seth's phrase.

And how do we manage the distribution of those benefits within our society? And as we can see with having those benefits be funneled to individuals who happen to run companies, there's something that feels. Can feel very broken about that because they are clearly not the ones who are solely responsible for those technologies in any way. It's impossible to argue they happen to be the way the rules are made, the ones who end up deriving benefits from it.

44:25 Wes: Yeah. So this idea of just creating new rules for distribution is. And I know you know this, Dylan, but. Yeah. One that Marx rejects. Right. Keeping capitalism. And then he rejects that, trying to fix it. But if you wanted to give an alternative, if you thought Marx were right that as technology advances and right at a certain point, if we're talking about artificially intelligent robots, those robots can be the creators of new technology as well. So you get a new feedback loop. But it's. Does that really solve our social problems? Not if you think that status or Thomas or whatever you want to call it, recognition continues to be a problem.

In fact, it may amp up status problems. Right. If people have unlimited. If everyone had unlimited wealth, what are they going to do? First of all, you know, what are they going to do with their time? Idle hands are the workshop of the devil, that sort of problem. But also it doesn't necessarily get rid of competitiveness. It may amp up competition for status. That'll be the one scarce thing that people will want to use to distinguish themselves. And it may not be right that being a doctor is going to be status conferring, since the robots are doing that.

But whatever it is, and it may be something very minor about, you know, do we crack our eggs on the big end or the little end, thinking of Jonathan Swift there. But if we think that status and power, and power dynamics and power relations between groups is Actually a big driver of discord in society. It's not necessarily the case that the communist stage would get rid of that. In fact, it might worsen it.

46:09 Mark: All right, well, let's wrap up part one here and hopefully we can move very quickly to machines in part two. If you want to hear that immediately become a Partially Examined Life supporter. There are a number of options@partiallyexaminedlife.com sport if you sign up through our website or through Patreon, then you'll have a special feed that will give it to you right now. If you want to, just click that button. If you're using Apple podcasts and start paying us through Apple, that's also good. You'll eventually get all the same content, but you still will have to wait until next week to get part two. Thanks, everybody, for listening.

46:40 Wes: Thanks.

46:41 Dylan: Thanks.