Ep. 361: Marx on Machines (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: Hey, it's the Partially Examined Life episode 361, part two. We're going to move right on to Karl Marx's fragment on machines. We've already been sort of getting into a little bit how we think machinery affects. Yeah, interacts with the labor process. How it should free us up all this time yet. Because, well, the capitalists own the machines. They want to choke every moment out of their workers. It actually dehumanizes them. And he gets very vivid in here about. Especially in the way, I don't know, you know, we could reflect on how this reflects on how machines work now. But in a assembly line sort of set up, how. Yes, it reduces individual workers to a cog in the machine that you are getting very specialized. I really know how to move this one part from here and put it over there. Like that's what I do all day. And so I'm really good at that.

1:01 Wes: No, I just want to go back to this image of choking the labor out of someone. It's not even squeezing. Joking.

1:08 Dylan: It's like loons, right? Loons. You know, the birds that they fish with and in Japan, right, is that you have a boat and you have loons on leashes and there's a ring on their neck so that it's big enough to allow the fish, the smallest fish, to go down. So when the loons go down and get food, they can get their food, but then the bigger fish get stuck and then they go and they cause them to regurgitate. That's how they. How you can fish.

1:34 Wes: That is horrific.

1:36 Dylan: It's true.

1:37 Seth: That's true.

1:37 Wes: I hope that's just a product of your demented imagination.

1:41 Dylan: It is absolutely true. In fact, I sat On a boat when I was a teenager, when I had the opportunity to visit Japan, and I was in a boat and I had a fish that had been caught by a loon.

1:52 Mark: All right, so you have some gross loon experiences. Does anybody else. I worked in a factory for a summer. I was on an assembly line in packaging. Not assembly, but it's, you know, it's part of the. Does anybody else have factory Feel like you have some cred in this, in knowing how this works in the world?

2:10 Wes: No. I was a busboy, which is pretty terrible. And that was like the highest position I could rise to because that was my level of skill in the service industry context. There's no way I was ever going to make it to waiter. But no, no factory work. So what was your experience with factory work like?

2:26 Mark: I mean, I managed to. Initially, I was in the packaging group. This was just a summer thing at the company my dad was worked in sales for, but it was a big gasket company. And so they'd have these packages of like, oh, yeah, this. We have to make all these things, put them in a shrink wrap of four number fives and six number threes. And so just little widgets. And so it was me and five other people like putting these together. So I have to put the number fives and the number sixes on there. And so we would just do that. And then somebody would feed it through the shrink wrap machine and we just do that.

And I managed to talk myself after a little while to like, somebody else was pulling garbage, industrial garbage tins around the whole factory. Like, can I do that for half the day? And then he can do this for half the day. So we kind of worked out a thing so I could be one kind of laborer in the morning and another one in the afternoon. And I got to see the rest of the factory where it really stunk of fiberglass and was awful. But the packaging room itself actually was very clean.

3:26 Wes: And so did you love it?

3:28 Mark: No.

3:28 Wes: Love that job?

3:29 Mark: No. I much preferred the pulling garbage part because then I could finish up really quick and go hide in the bathroom for an hour.

3:39 Dylan: This is before there were cell phones that you could sit on the toilet and play.

3:43 Mark: You could bring a book. I brought a book with me.

3:47 Wes: It's funny because when I did a brief nine months of building wooden boats in Maine, and then there were other as being part of that community speaking of communism, because we were creating the boats to sell them to sustain the community, I had other, like, menial labor to do, like raking or feeding the pigs. And I found that I much prefer the menial labor because I could think about things, other things. But when I was doing the boat building, because it's so difficult, it's not like. Or even like, we did some framing, we did some other carpentry, which is easy and you don't have to think about it.

When boat building, you are. Every part of you is focused on craftsmanship. And you can't just be distracted to have your mind go elsewhere. You're trying to make. Do these, for instance, difficult saw cuts to create ribs that are curved in a boat and have them fit perfectly and all that stuff.

4:40 Seth: And it.

4:41 Wes: Yeah, I didn't like my mind being if, okay, I'll do knowledge labor or I'll do menial labor. But I don't want both at the same time. Which is funny because. Right. That in a way, is that kind of craftsmanship. It's kind of the type of thing that I think gets idealized in Marx. Right. Here we are. I have a trade. I have a non alienated relationship to this beautiful object that I'm making. And I know that some people love it, by the way. But for me, I was just fantasizing about making widgets in a factory. So I could think about other things while I was doing it.

Just kidding. I'm sure it was horrific. But that's. You know, this is kind of a lot of what the fragment on machines is about is the way in which machinery gets in between us and the products of our labor. Right. And the way he starts this out is that it's not that the machines are our tools. You might think of machines on analogy to tool use. Right. So like me using a chisel or something to do woodworking. But it doesn't actually work out that way. We, in fact, are being. We become cogs in the machine. We get the tool is using us. Ultimately, if we're labor, it's not we that are using the tool anymore.

5:57 Mark: So it seems like a lot of modern machines would not count as machines. In his right. If I have, I'm using a printer. If I work at Kinko's or whatever, then what do you think? I mean, it doesn't.

6:08 Seth: So how coincidental that the first quote I have right here at my hand mark addresses that very point.

6:14 Wes: Page 53, it's got Kinko's right in does even workers at Kinko's are oppressed.

6:22 Seth: Okay. Page 53, not as with the instrument which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker is itself the virtuoso with a soul of its own. So it's not a direct analogy to what you're saying, but essentially the technical term here would be machine versus instrument or tool. So insofar as the printer is being used instrumentally by you to accomplish a task, it is not a machine in the sense that it is producing something that you otherwise would have been producing with your living labor.

Right. So that's really the distinction here, is we're not talking about things that workers use to accomplish the task where the responsibility for the production of that commodity or the accomplishment of that task still lies with the worker. It's where the entirety of the task gets taken, the responsibility gets taken over by the machine. And at best the human being then becomes instrumental to the machine, like just making sure it's oiled properly or that

7:38 Dylan: isn't there different people doing these things? I see the point about there being when you start to use a machine, especially complicated machines that you become, obviously you can't generate the product that you are in some way setting in motion. And you also become a kind of subject to that machine in that in order it makes demands on you in very specific ways. You have to replace the ink and the ink cartridge.

8:08 Wes: Right.

8:09 Dylan: But I mean, aren't both things happening? You have the product of the machine that's intended printing in this case. Right. And as the person, the entity driving the machine and sending the information to the machine, you are part of that process. And then there's also the tending to the machine. In that case, the machine is the product itself as opposed to being the machine for making a product.

8:38 Seth: Yeah. So let's. I think if we're going to run down this example, we should distinguish between the printer you have in your home office that you like, print forms for your kids, school that you have to sign releases or field trip forms and things like that. So imagine that your job was to hand write out documents that would then be distributed somewhere. And that's what you did. You're a scribe, you're a scribe.

9:10 Dylan: Pre 16 and 44 or whatever is when the printing press was invented.

9:15 Seth: You're a scribe, you're a scribe and you get paid for being a scribe. And then the capitalist comes in and says, hey man, I just got this amazing new thing, it's called a printing press. And you know how it takes me 20 scribes to make 100 pamphlets an hour, and now this one machine can make 100 in 10 minutes. Okay. And he's like, but I'm not going to fire you. Don't worry. Your job is to make sure that the little letter blocks line up. And when we change, we move the block, we swap out the blocks and make sure papers fed in and all that. That's the analogy we're talking about here versus this is your printer in your home office kind of a thing that you use?

10:00 Wes: Well, I think the. Yeah, the printing press is less alienating than the printer. Right. Because a lot of this has to do this point in the argument with where is the skill? So we should remember that a chisel is a machine. All the tools we use are machines. But he's going to be interested in particular in this essay with the. With automated machinery. So if I'm using a tool, there's a sense in which I'm just using it to transmit my own skill. If I'm using a chisel, I have to know how to use it. And believe me, it's not easy. If making a wooden boat, you have to know how to use it to fashion the product that you're fashioning.

And it requires a lot from you. And you can take pride in the work and ultimately. Right. See yourself in the. In the object. But as machinery gets more and more automated, that's less and less the case. Right? Because. So if it's just turning on a button or pressing print, then I'm no longer transmitting my skill. All the skill lies in the machinery. And the tendency of capital. Right. Is going to be to leech out skill from the worker, in a sense, and transfer it all into the machine so that we no longer get that same satisfaction. I think at the point where you have a printing press and you're putting the blocks on, that's kind of an intermediate stage where at least there's quite a bit of skill involved in running an old printing press and doing layout and all that stuff.

There's still that involved. But if it's just printing on a printer, it's something even worse.

11:36 Seth: Yeah, so I hear what you're saying, Wes, about that version of the analogy. We definitely want to say that Marx's point here, ultimately, is this, that remember that the whole system he's described for the last two months we've been talking about him, or however long it's been, is the relationship between the laborer, the producer to the product, and it starts out as unalienated sort of unmediated labor, where you make your own stuff and you barter and trade and whatever, and then you start making things for somebody else and getting wages in return.

And you become alienated, right? It's important that the individual human being is connected in some way to the product of their work. And the point of this whole essay, he's talking about the application of the use of automated machines which remove entirely. It's almost like higher order alienation. It's not just like you're not just alienated from the product of your labor now you're alienated from labor. Like you're not even laboring anymore. The living labor is no longer there. Like you said, everything that you have, all your skill and knowledge and ability, as well as society's scientific and technological knowledge, is embodied in this machine.

And the machine is the thing that's actually producing the product. The labor is now resident in the machine and not in the living individual. And maybe at the early stages, like you say, there's a transition where you're no longer writing, you're no longer the scribe, but maybe now you're the block setter, the typesetter, and then we don't need that anymore. So you're no longer the typesetter. Maybe now you're just the, you know, the machine watcher, the greaser. And all you do is add oil or make sure these gears don't grind or whatever. And then at some point, maybe all you do is just raise the flag.

Your job is just to push a button when something goes wrong and somebody else comes. And then the machines are like self healing, right? Or whatever. But the reason I'm kind of mentioning all this is that when I was trying to explain what we were talking about to some non philosophical friends here, and I was saying like, oh, you remember labor theory of value? And now he's talking about machines. And almost immediately, all of them immediately get that. Yeah, but what if it takes you five hours to make something? And what if it takes somebody one hour to make something?

Right? And like, okay, I get it, I get it. But I was thinking about like now you have these AI. If you have to go to school for four years and get a college degree so that you can do something in an hour. Like let's say you go to school to become an architect and that means that you can design a house in four hours, you can actually produce the blueprint for a house. I can't do that, I'm not an architect. Right. And we were talking about this labor theory of value, four hours of labor time Right. And it's like, oh, it's actually not four hours of labor time.

It's four hours underwritten by four years or six years of college and education that gets you to the point where you can produce four years of labor time. And I think what you were just talking about, Wes, and I'm sorry, it's taken me a long time to come around back to this, is that knowledge, that expertise, that societal. It's embodied in you as an individual, as an architect. But really it's the science, it's the technology. It's all those things that is getting embedded in the machine. That is where. And then the question becomes, okay, we thought you could only do it for physical labors.

Like when Marx is writing, he's thinking about automated machines that take over jobs for physical laborers. But we're at the point now where we have automated machines that can take over the labor of knowledge workers as well and embody that. I could train ChatGPT over the next six months or a year to take my place on PEL.

15:32 Wes: Really? I don't think it's there yet, but it could be there one day.

15:36 Mark: If I'm going to get. Are we going to start managing our absences by. I'm going to train.

15:41 Seth: Yeah. I'm going to make a Seth bot.

15:42 Mark: I'm not going to read Stirner, but I'm going to train ChatGPT just to fill in for me with Stirner.

15:49 Seth: It would be a very interesting. Oh my God. So we should all do this and then we should create a spin off podcast that's just the four of our AI agents having a conversation with each other.

16:02 Wes: Yeah, that's going to be. That's so depressing to think about.

16:05 Seth: But the partially automated life, I don't know why would it.

16:10 Wes: But you know, AI reaches that point where it. Right. Seth, you can go do poetry instead of being on the podcast. But more aptly, the comparison is instead of Mark being in the widget making room. Right. If robots could entirely do that and he would have time to do real work that satisfies him, which presumably Pel is. It's not pretty far away from alienated labor, hopefully. But so there are. Right. Marx. Ultimately there's that enormous benefit to automated machinery. Marx is not just anti automated machinery. Ultimately that is what makes communism.

That is what will make communism possible. There's no communism without automation. But in the meantime and during the capitalist stage, it gets pretty horrific. Right. You know, if you think about the kind of working conditions that Marx is thinking about, people just Doing this horribly repetitive labor. And it's more than oiling machines, right? It's like running automated looms. And you see, you don't get the satisfaction. Or textile machines. You don't get the satisfaction that you might from making textiles the old way. You are just doing something very repetitive and actually quite dangerous.

So he will call at this point in the argument, he often uses this phrase, objectified labor. Right? It's objectified in the sense that machines are also the products of our labor. But ironically, they then appropriate our living labor. They start doing labor. It's a product of labor that then labors and not only labors, but appropriates living labor and supersedes its efficacy. It's more effective, it's more powerful. And it replaces the forms of labor that we've been doing for millennia. It just makes them obsolete, those forms of labor that connected us to the products of our work.

Now, you know, you might say in the, like the printer example, well, you know, I'm working in an office, obviously, I'm not just pressing print all day. If I'm doing knowledge work, I'm using years of education to do something. It's. That's not simply repetitive. It requires. Right. If I'm a programmer, it requires my ingenuity and problem solving. So there's the whole aspect to automation and the kind of new domains of labor that technology opens up that Marx just hasn't addressed here. And he doesn't, I don't think foresees at this point.

18:46 Seth: Right. So the point you were making earlier was too, is that at this stage, when you introduce these more or less fully automated machines that replace the labor, the living labor of the individuals, those individuals. Now in the capitalist model, those individuals become superfluous to the production process. And from the capitalist perspective, the machines are the pathway to. They now essentially become. He uses the term fixed capital, but they're the mechanisms by which capital can produce a vast amount of surplus goods. In other words, you're able to accelerate the productive capability and simultaneously your expense and your operating challenges, your operating margins and what have you go down because you don't have the labor cost.

But he hints at that this is kind of the onset of large scale cap. There's a name for it where instead of mercantile capitalism, industrial. Industrial capitalism, right. So you're going to see the people who can harness the power of these machines are the ones that are going to be able to massively produce commodities and scale and grow. And you're going to see the marginalization of smaller producers and Whatever, that's the example. That's what happens in the capitalist model. What you were saying was, is in the communist model, the machines are actually liberators because by freeing us up, by freeing the individuals, instead of the individuals being like cut loose and then having to find a source of income and whatever, now they have somebody.

Obviously you would not purpose. And again, this goes back to our last episode. The machines would not exist to produce surplus commodities. They would be pointed towards creating whatever was necessary for comfortable sustenance of quality of living for everyone. So that everybody could write poetry in the afternoon and paint in the morning or whatever it is that we would be doing.

21:02 Mark: There has to be some fishing, there has to be some suss that it can't just, just be poetry and painting.

21:07 Seth: No, now that we have automated machines, we don't have to do anything productive.

21:12 Mark: And if they show up and push the button for an hour, maybe not.

21:17 Dylan: Yeah, there's the challenge that I see being put forward in the fragment on machines, that there is real efficiency generated with machines. And then it becomes a distribution problem of, with a couple dimensions of what to do about that efficiency and how to distribute it. And you have one that was mentioned where it's the fungibility of the workers involved means that to the extent that the workers are effectively just being machines, then you just throw the old machines out and bring in new machines. And the new machines are less carbon based machines and more mechanical machines.

And there's a kind of moral problem there. Right. And what Marx frames it in terms of the value of the work has been because the value of the work is derived from the labor time. And there's the complicated question of what the value of that is within his labor theory of value. But you have that problem, the fungibility of the workers. And then you have the problem of capitalism itself demanding a kind of constant growth. So in order for capitalism to work at all, you don't have a model that effectively is a stasis model. It's a constant growth model.

So you can't fund the mechanism of a capitalist machine and have it just feeding the people. And so you won't have the generation of new machines without that. In fact, you won't even have the maintenance of machines without the constant growth aspect of it.

23:03 Wes: Well, if your population is increasing, your economy has to be growing. Sure, unless your standard of living is going down. But I just wanted to say the arc of this essay, this whole thing about leisure time is part of this essay. The arc of this essay is towards under capitalism. All this surplus that's produced by automated machinery is kept by the capitalists and lends itself to the pauperization of workers. Work becomes more and more horrible and less skilled. And you just have to keep workers at subsistence levels. But that creates a contradiction that undermines itself.

So automated machinery is an important part of the dialectic. It helps create the contradiction that'll lead to capitalism undermining itself and naturally going into communism. Where leisure time becomes the measure of value. Wealth is to be measured in surplus leisure time, he'll say later on in this essay, rather than in surplus labor time. We'll think of value in terms of leisure. And that is leisure to work on. Whatever it is that is genuinely gratifying to us and none alienated. But we need automated machinery to get there. And. But the main point is, you know, this thing will resolve itself.

He'll often talk very teleologically in this. He'll talk about capital, this capital that. It almost sounds personified. And capital is just Marx's version of Hegel's notion. Capital is the. At least for this stage, right, is the telos that drags everything along with it. So why is automated machinery happening? Because of capital. This sounds very different than material conditions producing the superstructure. This is one of the tensions within Marx where sometimes he sounds very teleological, as if some concept, some teleological concept were dragging material conditions along with it.

Machinery comes about because of capital. That's what capital requires. And this is. This fragment on machines is one of the places where the teleology really, really sounds quite potent.

25:19 Mark: Isn't capital just a short way of expressing that there are material conditions? I guess we'd have to define what material conditions are. I mean, that some people own some things. And then there's a mass of people that don't really own anything. Those are definitely some material conditions. The fact that they're. Yes. The amount of resources they have.

25:41 Wes: The appropriation of living labor by objectified labor, of the power of activity which creates value by value existing for itself, which lies in the concept of capital, is posited in production resting on machinery as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion. So capital posits machinery, right? Like this is all very German idealism sounding. This is all like Hegel or Fichte, where self consciousness writ large posits the material world outside of itself. Or for Hegel, where the concrete falls, somehow falls out of the conceptual.

That's the template that Marx is working with here. And the idea seems to Be that there's this, the concept of capital for which machinery is right. That needs. Leads necessarily to automation machinery. I'm not saying this is the only tendency within Marx, but it is here. He does talk this way in this particular essay. I think ultimately his considered view is in terms of material conditions, deep down running things. But he has not, at this point in the Grundrisse, shed this Hegelian influence yet. So this is all through the essay. And I think it's difficult to understand unless you understand this word capital as working this way.

There's something inherent in the very nature of the concept which produces the. That again, drags the material conditions with it.

27:16 Dylan: Yeah. Just to underline that in the middle of the page. In machinery, objectified labor confronts living labor within the labor process itself as the power which rules it. And then a little bit further down, the increase of the productive force of labor and the greatest possible negation of necessary labor is the necessary tendency of capital. The transformation of the means of labor into machinery is the realization of this tendency. Yep.

27:45 Wes: Now Mark might be right. Maybe we could say, okay, well, that's still reducible to material conditions. We could set up a bunch of efficient causation mechanisms to account for what he's talking about in teleological terms here, just as we do with evolution. We might talk about. Casually talk about evolution in terms of sound teleologically. Right. Nature selects, quote unquote. But we could always reduce that to efficient causes if we need to. I think Mark is right. We might ultimately say, make that kind of argument. So in that case, talking teleologically about the tendency within capital is just a convenience.

28:25 Seth: Well, yeah, I wouldn't want to reify some kind of teleological drive, but I think you could cash this out in terms of what Dylan was saying earlier. Right. It's not a realization or a manifestation of the tendency of capital or whatever. Because there's some like this is the natural end and we can predict. It's more like given the constraint, so to speak, of growth, like given that capital requires growth, it's inevitable that science and technology are going to be codified in machinery. In other words, because this doesn't happen accidentally.

Right. We could spend our time and energy applying science and technology to other things, like going to the moon or something like that. But in the same way that commodity capitalism determines the structure of society by determining labor's what we create and our relationship to our work and each other and whatever, it also then conditions science and technology. So what are we going to do with all this knowledge? Are we going to cure cancer? Are we going to go to the moon? Are we going to try to build carbon scrapers to get the stuff out of the atmosphere?

No, we're going to try to figure out how to take living labor and automate it into a machine so that we can eliminate the need for living labor. That's the application, and that's just what you would expect when you look at the way capitalism or capital functions. So it's not that it's any kind of cosmological, teleological end. It's just, of course, dogs are hungry, they find food on the street, they eat them. That's just the way things are going to go.

30:20 Wes: Right, so that's an example of the kind of reduction I was talking about, but it's not clear to me. And he doesn't, I don't think he talks about growth as in GDP growth. Right.

30:27 Seth: No, I was referring back to Dylan's point.

30:29 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's one reading. I'm not saying that that's not a possible reading of this, but he doesn't say that explicitly. Right, so then why is. Right, so the necessary tendency of capital is to increase the productive force of labor and then to negate necessary labor. Right. So in other words, to reduce the amount of labor time it takes to produce any given product. And then the question is, why is that the necessary tendency of capital? Is it because capital needs growth, in which case. Right. It needs GDP growth, in which case why does it need growth? And if it's not that, then what does that mean? Why is this the necessary tendency of capital? Is it just a psychological fact? Is it the capitalists need more and more profit? This is left undefined.

31:16 Dylan: Yeah, I've wondered this myself about capitalism because it doesn't, you know, on the face of it, it doesn't seem to be a necessary condition of capital exchange that there is always growth. It seems to be a secondary condition on it.

31:32 Seth: What if we change the terms? Let's not talk about growth, let's talk about wealth. So is the accumulation of wealth a function of capital? Is that something that do. And then the question becomes, okay, well, how do you accumulate wealth? Well, you accumulate wealth through surplus value. And so how do you do that? You make more things or you make the same number of things cheaper. And so if capital essentially in its nature moves towards the accumulation and concentration of wealth, then this automated making labor more productive efficiency, all that stuff is just part of the natural mechanism of wealth accumulation.

32:17 Wes: Right. So this is another Reduction example, Right. If we want to reduce the teleological concept to efficient causes, it's a reduction to the psychology of capitalists. They're greedy. They want more and more surplus.

32:30 Seth: I didn't say that.

32:31 Wes: No, no, greed.

32:33 Mark: Well, Marx, it's the incentives.

32:36 Wes: It's a word that Marx has used. Right. So in the 1844 manuscripts. It's just my example of one way of talking about the psychology. So whatever word you want to use, we're talking about the psychology of capitalists as a way of explaining why the necessary tendency of capital is towards automated machinery. Right. They want more and more surplus. So the use of machinery allows them to do that now. And maybe that's plausible. But another way of looking at this is just science produces technology. And this is more in keeping with the historical determinism version of Marx. Right. Rather than the teleological determinism. Science reduces technology and technology increases the power of production. And that pushes things along. And we see capitalism as a product of. Of that, not capitalism as making that happen. I just wanted to point to this tension within Marx. It's not, you know.

33:31 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, but in this tension. But I mean, don't both of those things go hand in hand? That the tendency for the capitalist, on the one hand, yes, is surplus. Right. But it's also. It would be surplus themselves, but also the competitive aspect where one capitalist can gather the surplus of another capitalist from under them by producing the same thing more efficiently or the better machine. And the question about the progress of science and capitalism is that they're going to be deeply intertwined with one another because necessity is the mother invention.

Wanting to make more money is one of the mechanisms, one of the reasons for generating more technological solutions. At the same time, as you learn more about how your science develops more in kind of a fundamental way that will generate the possibility for new tools, and those two tools will generate the possibility for new ways of understanding how to build new stuff. Right. The ability to blow glass technologically and make certain kinds of vessels was materially related to the ability to do research into electricity and magnetism because you're able to create vacuums, tubes that you can do those studies with.

And you have to be able to do that.

34:59 Wes: The next stage in this argument, talk about objectified labor confronting living labor as a ruling power. So it starts to sound a lot like Feuerbach's human nature or theologian's God. He even calls it alien, right? Automated machinery or objectified labor is this alien force now that stands over the laborer subsumes appropriates.

35:27 Dylan: So now we're really imagining the factory with lines and lines of looms. And the factory is the monster that's feeding on the laborers who are coming in to feed the machine the threads and load it up in order for the machine to create the rugs and the textiles. And that objectified labor in terms of the looms and the factory itself is all now looming over, consuming.

36:04 Wes: That's great.

36:04 Dylan: The living labor.

36:06 Wes: Also, machinery becomes a normative power. Right. It starts in the same way that human nature is a normative power. What. Here's the standard that I have to live up to. Machinery tells us what we have to do with our time, what is required for the machine to function. The new sorts of labor we're engaged in, whether it's oiling the machine or whatever much more complex versions of that is defining and governing our behavior. And later on he'll even say, right. It defines the trajectory of sciences as well. The requirements of capital ultimately will alter the trajectory of science because they create new needs for different types of technologies.

36:45 Seth: Right.

36:46 Wes: Yeah. So automated machinery really takes on this godlike significance here.

36:52 Dylan: Yeah. So I'm beginning to see a little bit more how the force of capitalism matters here than just the machines. If we go back to the question of creating more things than I need for the sake of exchange, that's going to be the thing that drives functionally enslaving people to work 12 or 15 or 18 hours a day in a textile factory. Because you would never do that if you're making hatchets for your community. Even if you made a couple extra. There isn't the force to say, I need you to make a thousand hatchets this week because there isn't any. You're absent that force of the exchange value created by it that creates other forms of wealth that you can get other stuff with that's just absent in that. That other form of exchange.

37:49 Seth: Yeah.

37:50 Dylan: Or non exchange.

37:53 Seth: There's also another aspect to this. Page 55. The accumulation of knowledge and skills of the general productive forces of the social brain is thus absorbed into capital as opposed to labor, and hence appears as an attribute of capital. Right. And more specifically a fixed capital. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But so what you see is, right, the idea that, oh, we've moved from the state where you're a blacksmith, so I'm, you know, first you're self producing then, now you're working for me and I'm paying you for your blacksmithing skills. Right.

To now. That's all been your skill set has all Been absorbed into the machine. And instead of acknowledging that the knowledge came from and all new knowledge comes from labor, that figures it out. I, as the capitalist, are like, look what I figured out. I figured out blacksmithing. Right. Like, in other words, it appears as though labor was never involved. It was just me and my machines.

39:05 Wes: Well, also, so I think what he's thinking of here when he says absorbed into capital, so the accumulation of knowledge and skills, it's something that might happen in the individual worker. You develop a skill to do something new. But in objectified labor, in automated machinery, that skill gets absorbed and. Right. So when we create a powerful computer that perform some certain function, it's the computer that has the skill and the knowledge and skill that we as a society needed to create. That machine gets put into the machine rather than into the next generation. Right. Rather than using the new knowledge.

39:49 Seth: Good point.

39:50 Wes: And transferring that into an individual, it gets transferred into the machine. Now, this is inevitable.

39:54 Mark: Right.

39:54 Wes: It happens even with writing, as you could see kind of Platonic critique of writing here, which is that the collective knowledge of society can't be held by any one individual. It always gets absorbed into technology. So the social brain becomes an artifact. It becomes either books or it becomes machines or whatever. So, and I think Marx realizes this, this is an inevitable factor, but it just becomes very, very exaggerated with automated machinery.

40:25 Dylan: But it's interesting because it does end up being a platform on which the individuals are able to stand. Right. Learning calculus in 1725 is different than learning calculus in 2025. Right. And that has to do with a version of this accumulated. I'll call it capital. It might be a little bit analogical, but I don't know how much it is. It's at least accumulated technological capital is being embedded into the artifacts and the processes that are part of our society that then the individuals are able to start from. People aren't having to invent on their own calculus. They're able to go and learn it. And in fact, that becomes a new standard in order to continue. Right. And this is true for all kinds of things. Ability both to use the tools, but also even to leverage them intellectually ends up becoming.

41:26 Wes: Yeah, you could walk into a library and say, look at all this capital.

41:30 Dylan: Yeah.

41:31 Wes: It's knowledge of previous generations that I can now use. And even in relationship to machines. Right. We can do that because it's not all of our interactions with automated machinery are just, you know, assembly line interactions. I need an enormous skill set to interact with. Say, if I'm a programmer with A computer in a productive way. So I think, yeah, this is a good point. This education of future workers. Absorption of the social brain into machinery is actually a feedback loop and a dynamic. We don't just get the intellectual pauperization of workers through absorption into objectified labor.

We get new sorts of skills. In other words, we get knowledge work. We get new sorts of skills being developed in workers. And this is the kind of people argument people make with chat GPT. Yes, chat GPT may take over certain forms of labor, but then new forms of labor will come about. We gotta feed chat GPT. We gotta make it feel good about itself, become smart enough. We gotta give it therapy, you know, worship. Worship it.

42:42 Mark: So just like we talked about the fetishization of the commodity, we could definitely talk about the fetishization of machines and the fetishization more generally of capital. Because machines are just part of capital, part of what the capitalist is bringing to the table. And so capitalists justify their taking of surplus value by looking what I'm bringing to the table. I'm the one who's investing the money. I'm the one who has the. The intellectual property rights. I'm the one who has the. Maybe the actual ideas that is making this whole enterprise come together.

You workers are just sort of replaceable. But you can't replace me, at least in this enterprise. You could try to go to a different enterprise and be part of a different company or whatever, but I'm the one bringing this. But per the labor theory of value, all this, every bit of capital is ultimately reducible to somebody's labor in the past. So it's the mechanists that made the machine, the engineers that came up with the designs for the machine. All this, even your own expertise as an individual worker is because you put in that time, your past labor in educating yourself.

I'm just thinking in terms of these sort of groom, we say, looking at how we are building ourselves by using, you know, the food that you were eating while you were in school was part of the past, which in turn, the food was somebody else's labor, the result of that. So it's all labor all the way down. So everything that we think of, oh, well, this is expertise, this is intellectual. This is money coming to the table. This is added risk. It's all just labor. And so the question of it is, does the capitalist sort of deserve, even if they originally, they must have started in a position where they could buy, where they had acquired initial wealth through theft, and that's the only way that they can then be in the position to offer others opportunities.

44:34 Wes: Well, I just, you know, I think it's worth. Before wrapping up, we'll just, you know, or as we wrap up, highlighting again the trajectory of the essay that I mentioned before, which is that we get this contradiction, this self undermining contradiction in capital. And I think this is on page 63. So here's a quotation. Capital itself is the moving contradiction in that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time on the other side as sole measurement and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labor time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form, hence posits the superfluous growing measure as a condition question of life or death for the necessary.

So ultimately, right, people, the implication of being able to produce a widget in half the time is that it should free up your half your time ultimately for leisure time. It's not what happens at first, but that's the trajectory. And ultimately that's after the stage of pauperization, after the stage where capitalists steal all that extra surplus. Ultimately the contradiction will become too great. And necessarily the means of production, including all this automated machinery, will be owned collectively rather than by a few. And then all that surplus can actually accrue to leisure time.

But you see how, by. You see how automated machinery makes all of this possible.

46:15 Seth: Yeah. So he also, towards the end of the essay, I saw there's quite a bit on those Pages between about 55 to 60 about how again, once you start replacing, he sometimes says necessary labor. But it's like once you replace living labor with this automated labor via these machines that become fixed capital, right. They gather their own impetus to just continually produce, like repeat and just continually extend the production process. He says earlier on, it loses its connection to direct use. So in other words, like there's. When you have living labor or necessary labor making a product ostensibly for the use of the end consumer, there's still this tether to reality.

And probably, if we think back to a previous episode about this chain of production, distribution, consumption, right? In other words, consumption plays a decisive role in the whole mechanism of production. And he's suggesting, I think, that when labor becomes automated and you start to just have these machines that are fixed capital, the motivation, so to speak, of these machines is not to create a product for use by the consumer so much as it's just to replicate to produce. And so you kind of like the tethering that held the production process down to at least some form of actual use seems to disappear.

And then he mentions how. And that's when you see the shift from use value to exchange value. Because really the whole point of production is simply for the purpose of exchange. And you're not really concerned so much anymore about use. You just want to sell what you make. And presumably you also lose connection to innovation and potentially course changing. Because now you've made this investment in a machine that can make X's. Doesn't matter whether people want X's anymore. You got to find some way to. To sell them. Right?

48:29 Mark: Right. You got to expand into new markets. You gotta create consumer demand.

48:35 Seth: Right. So, but Wes, to your point about how this whole process, like you say, is necessary because ultimately we require automation to create the conditions by which human beings have leisure time or free time. But he says at the end of the essay, free time, which is both idle time and time for higher activity, has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject. And then he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline as regards the human being in the process of becoming and at the same time practice experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.

So the takeaway there is if you are thinking about human motivation and human subjectivity and human nature in terms of the. As is the human being under commodity capitalism or industrial commodity capitalism or whatever, and you're unable to conceive of what that individual would do in the conditions of leisure and idle time. It's because you have to understand that the creation of the possibility, the conditions, creating the conditions whereby an individual can actually experience idle and leisure time will fundamentally change that individual's subjectivity.

And you aren't going to be talking about the same kind of individual that you are under commodity capitalism.

50:26 Mark: Just to clarify one term that you made earlier. So necessary labor, that's the other part. That's not the surplus labor. So it's just the labor necessary for the worker to replicate, to support himself. So what you're actually paying for, which of course, yes, when you improve productivity, then the worker, it's fewer workers. It's maybe one person operating the machine other than 10 people doing the work. And that one person produces the sustenance that they would need in an hour of work rather than five hours of work as it would have been under the old system.

51:02 Wes: Right.

51:03 Mark: So presumably you just have more surplus labor. It all goes to the capitalist. I think there's a lot of we got to shut down here just for time reasons. But I think probably we could muse more about given what we said here. What do we think the solution is? Whether it is the sort of Andrew Yang freedom dividend comes back to me of like leave capitalism in place, let them have their but then just tax the shit out of a wealth tax basically because Marx was right the the line between rich and poor. He was not right about, you know, workers only getting subsistence wage and their wages getting ever lower so that they'll have to revolt.

That's not, you know, there has been some trickle down but at least especially with this tech boom we have such an expansion or do we need some. Is ownership really the issue? I don't know. There's lots of practical stuff I'm sure other we could read something about or just use the next night cap to theorize about. Any other closing thoughts just on what we read here?

52:04 Wes: Well, just the truth is that capitalism has dramatically increased the standard of living for people worldwide. And I think even many Marxists would acknowledge that. And that became a problem for Marxism, the fact that pauperization did not happen. So they're right. And that's. You see that in later Marxists you see a move to a cultural critique. It becomes more and more about alienation and the right big screen TVs and the standard of living and all that stuff that just becomes bribery. The excess leisure time that becomes a way of creating complacency among workers. So it's not pauperization, it's not just you being on a subsistence wage, but it's still you being deprived of your full humanity.

52:55 Mark: You good, Dylan?

52:56 Dylan: I'm good.

52:57 Mark: All right. Well thanks everybody for listening, for making your way through this series. We'd love to hear what you think. Yeah, we'll use a nightcap or something too. We've already gotten some interesting responses by Marxists which was sort of I reflected in my intro that have I been radicalized by this? Like I was kind of radical in the first place but you know, never to the satisfaction of the Marxists among our listening audience and who want to deny hopefully your comment there, your comment there about capitalism making us will head off some of those.

Oh, I can't believe you're spending time with Marx. Capitalism has been such a boon for us. You wouldn't be doing this podcast without capital. Like yes, we recognize all that stuff but we're interested of course in I'm still not don't want to do a Von Mises but in investigating different avenues of this insofar as we are going to spend any more time with economics, which I'm sure there'll be a little

53:49 Wes: more before we die. I mean, we do have decades and decades more of this. So there's plenty of time for Von Mises. Plenty of leisure time for Von Mises when.

54:02 Seth: So it says, like, I don't even know why you're talking about this. Capitalism has been so great. Look at what's done for the standard of living. It's like, I don't even know why you guys are reading Augustine. I mean, or, you know, whatever. It's like religion has done so much. Look, look at what religion has done for society. Look at how it's shaped and help us over all these years.

54:25 Wes: Great. Now it's not just the socialists that hate us, it's religious people.

54:30 Seth: Is it not possible for something to have two different effects or to be two things at once?

54:35 Dylan: No, Seth, no. There's only one answer ever.

54:39 Seth: That's the problem. For 56 years, I've just been thinking that way, not realizing that the world

54:44 Dylan: is simply you and your multiple points of view. What the hell?

54:48 Mark: Yeah, and next time we're going to read some of the Bible. Speaking of religion, we're reading Ecclesiastes and we have a guest on that has written a book about it. And so we'll introduce him to you next time. But, you know, it's supposed to be the most existentialist book of the Bible, so it's not just. We're not just going to go through the Bible. There's just a couple points that it seems like this was an important one to do. You can reach out to us pel at partiallyexaminedlife. Com, make a comment on blog posts, reach out through Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, to let us know what you'd like us to cover or give us any other feedback you may have. Good night, everybody.