Just Whose Machine is it Anyway?
It is of course a platitude that true prophets needs to speak from outside, or from the wilderness. If you take a prophet into the palace they become a mere soothsayer, or even worse a focus group. It is only in the desert that their eyes burn white hot with what will be. This is certainly the case with Marx. The mainstream stodgy Marx of the last century, be he found in the alleged political practices of the Eastern bloc or even the lecture halls and debating chambers of the university, was a mere fraud. A thinker who might have meant so well, and whose prophecies were at best follies, or at worst the license for tyranny. But the same Marx, who is now excluded and marginalized (apart from a few of us diehards), is clearly the great prophet once again. But now the prophecy is not a matter of political reform (or at least not directly) so much as the deep problems of machines.
In no doubt the great chapter fifteen of Das Capital, Marx considers in detail, and with very great humour, the effect of machines upon human beings. The basic argument is apparently simple enough (and one which Marx deserves the credit for inventing). Machines de-skill a labour force. Now of course when stated baldy, we all merely nod. Of course they do - we all know that. And yet Marx’s point is very subtle. To deskill is to demand quantity of workers over quality. The effect of deskilling is then to transform the way that families operate. Heads of families stop being the bread winner, and become rather the gang masters. Children are bred as pliant workers, and go into the factories, to earn money for their parents. The tragedy of deskilling is not the loss of quality jobs so much as the destruction, in the name of progress, of entire ways of life. Moreover Marx notes, with a very great deal of bitter irony, that most attempts to reform this situation ended up by increasing the overall power of the industrialist. In his day the factory acts, which restricted the number of hours which children could work, led to a greater intensification of the working day. The same child was simply made to work so much harder, while the middle classes smiled and thought they had done such a very good thing.
The modern parallels are of course striking. The only difference between us and our great great grandparents, is that we conveniently hide our poor, not in streets we never go down, but in nation states so very far way. The only time we see their oppression or poverty is when some report forces it on our notice. Then, as our forebears did, we stumble around looking for Good things to do that will not cost us too much. However, the cynical Marx would point out that the evidence of the oppression and poverty of others is in fact everywhere, even if we read it differently. No shirt or pair of trousers can be made, however wonderful the production process (or as Marx would say, even given a wonderful production process) for the kind of prices we pay, unless at the other end there is a sad old tale of oppression and crypto slavery (however we might dress it up). Nagging reminders of another’s oppression stare out from almost every shop window, almost as assuredly as if they were actually selling slaves. The only difference is of course that we in our lusts for bargains, choose not to see it…
On a slightly different note, it is very difficult not to see a Marxist dimension to the problem of climate change and development. It has been one of the hidden contradictions within the West that we assumed that everyone else would not demand the amount of cheap oil and gas, we ourselves had come to expect. We hectored the rest of the world from our privileged position, saying that they could be like us, if only they played our game, all the while basing our lifestyles on the assumption that they would not. The minute India and China threaten our hegemony over Oil we start to talk about Peak Oil, and environmental change. Now the latter of these is a reality (and the former always might be), but this concession to truth is surely only part of why we are now hectoring the Third World about the problems of over energy use (and demanding that they are responsible, in just the way we never ever were). One needs not be too much of a sceptic to suggests that a considerable part of our motivation lies in the fact that we are also, by this hectoring, maintaining our position of privilege: We in effect boast that, although we might have to now share a resource that was once all ours, we can still claim that we know how to use it best! A far more cynical Marx would add here, that we were really behaving as any member of the middle class does when faced with the fact that they might lose their wealthy privileges: We invent reasons why others have little or no right to them. And one of the problems which the good Marx would note about our situation is that, as with many cynical moves, there is a hard nub of truth in our claims (ice caps really are melting); and it so even though they also serve our own interests. The problem which we now face, is then to allow others to understand that truth independently from our cynical attempts to exploit it to our own advantage. A challenge which, with our ‘carbon trading’ schemes, we are not even close to addressing.
However brilliant and biting this Marx no doubt is, it is only a fraction of the prophecies held within chapter fifteen. Perhaps a far richer set of themes revolves around exactly what deep changes, machines bring to humanity. The problem of machines Marx argues, is never that they replace humans, so much as that they absorb them. A machine is therefore very different from a mere tool. With the tool, man is master, and the tool his mere agent. With the machine by contrast, human action is taken up and ramified across a series of other movements. A child is merely the ‘motive power’, who by turning a crank operates a thousand sewing machines or pin makers. Humans stop being simply what they are, and become caught up very subtly in their technology, from which it becomes harder and harder to differentiate them. We dissolve into our own technology, and create a curious hybrid reality. Here perhaps it is useful to pull out four clear and problematic features of this hybridisation.
Firstly, there is the deep problem of what it means to live in a world where machines are not only piled up layer upon layer but also are self generative. Marx is very clear on this last point, - that machines not only design other machines, but also define the parameters by which those others are needed. To invent a machine to operate a thousand sewing machines, is to need a machine capable of making ten thousand needles. Moreover Marx suggests, that as all machines hook up into each other, each machine will also always be a part of some other machine’s processes. Indeed the entire economy, both global and national will become as if it was a machine. In all these whirling cogs and bubbling chemicals anything to call humanity becomes hard to simply discern. Or somewhat better, one invents (again courtesy of one’s technology) different orbits, different movements one is human in, both profound and silly.
For example, all humans are said to be part of a modern technological wonder, the Genome: in which one’s very being, the claim runs, is caught up within an elaborate series of chemical processes. Alternatively, identity is summed up in being a car driver or internet user or mobile phone-phobe…To ‘Be’ human becomes to be caught up in a shifting web of technologies. It goes without saying that many of the definitions thrown up by differing technologies contradict one another. For example it is the scan that reveals the smiling baby in the womb, which demands one changes where one thinks that humanity begins. One worries at the abortion laws, and does so in spite of the fact that the science as to whether there is anything so really special about twenty weeks is not clear. And also, in spite of the far trickier problem of whether it is better never to have really been, than to be born a into life of possible neglect and suffering – something that remains quite unsolvable…
That is, the real problem raised by technology is, Marx claims, not that humans are simply dissolved into machines, so much as that humanity itself dissolves into a very large number of competing ways to be human. The effect will be that it becomes impossible to simply do anything without other spheres of one’s existence being caught up in the action. One might aspire to think globally, but act locally, but can be sure that, in most of the local actions which one attempts, other organizations (other ways of globalization) will muscle in, and whisk one’s actions away to also serve their own purposes. For example to campaign against plastic bags on a local level, is to run the risk that a local newspaper, which sees a profit to be made, will run with the story. In itself harmless (or even useful), enough, but that same paper might also be part of a national group with quite other concerns... The profits made in the cause of the environment, can then be ploughed back into campaigns that can only harm it!
The second change which machines bring involves the natural. Machines, Marx argues, are remarkable in that they bring the very forces of nature into the production process. The Natural is pondered over and plundered at will. Humanity thereby replaces a relationship to a God, whose role it was to define human’s position in nature, with processes that define the natural itself as a mere adjunct to human production. Hence nature is expected to simply lie down and take it; and we all find the idea that it might not do so, almost too worrying to think about sensibly. The effect is that we treat any naturally caused problem as if it were a mere technological glitch. Our mantra is, that nature has merely become restless, and so all we need to do is to invent a new system of spurs and whip to ride it with, and we will be off again. Our sole concession to the natural is that it might be better, until our new whip is devised, to ease up on our current processes a little…
The third point arises as the corollary of the last. Natural forces are only bought into the production process, as human labour itself becomes almost a natural force, and in two respects. On the one hand, once machines are able to invent other machines, then instability and revolution are a perpetual part of the system. Each product, each process is only good until the next one comes along. Waste is therefore a necessary by product of the system (mobile phones here must be the almost paradigm case….). On the other hand and even more deeply, each machine embodies, Marx suggests, all the processes that led up to its creation. It crystalizes many times, and many different machines within its structure (which was always a product of history as well as invention). In making machines, past human labour becomes itself as it were a natural force, which can be taken up and used to transform the world. History is thereby rendered at once tangible and yet problematic. No westerner can walk down the road or put on their clothes without being caught up in the legacy of history. History is everywhere silently beckoning. Perhaps it is to make sense of this quiet power that the West appears obsessed almost as never before with history – be it in genealogy or ‘what the Romans did for us’.
However it needs also to be remarked that there is a far less whimsical effect of this history, felt by those who would wish to think it otherwise. I mean here those who might look to the past, and to its old technologies to revolutionalize the present. Technology distorts the past, by joining together two quite distinct elements. On the one hand there is the past of the skilled worker, and on the other, of the cooperative work force, and to attempt to escape the present by looking at the past, risks being caught up in the gap between the two. That is. there is a tangible contradiction between community built projects, and skilled works of craft, a conflict that can threaten the best schemes of the well intended, who can so easily demand the highly skilled work for mere love…
The fourth and final point Marx raises, is the one that stalks our current nightmares. Although Marx does not quite put it this way, there is nothing in his argument that means that it applies to humans alone. The same model, is just as applicable to nature itself. Nature is, from this perspective, no infinite machine, so much as an agglomeration of numerous machines, all criss-crossing each other. Human force or natural force are all part of nature, not in some divine sense but rather because nature was already acting as a machine to create other machines, and with them other revolutions. And humans are themselves caught up as merely a cog in that machine. It is this machine, which takes up not just the intended consequences of human labour, but also its unintended effects, as it silently builds ever new machines. Our current nightmare is of course that these new machines will find very little role for us within their processes. This is perhaps the real nightmare of climate change – that we matter not at all to the revolutionary processes which drive nature onwards.
If Marx is a prophet once again, what is he the prophet of? One might be tempted to say machines, and the silent revolutions they effect. And yet this was only half the picture. For Marx was also the prophet of the deeply uneasy and mistrusting relationship which technology opens up between production and political life. Humans naturally mistrust their machines; and moreover Marx suggests, are at least partially right to do so. The rub though lies in the nature of that ‘partially’. For Marx the central challenge, that only communism could have a hope of solving, was which elements of machines could be trusted (and when)? But of course Marx was far too canny a prophet to say how one could reach such a happy resolution, knowing as he did that that point could never be reached in one simple violent throw of the revolutionary dice, but would rather require a gradual process, and change. Hence in a very real sense we are still caught up in his prophecy, and our challenge is the challenge of all adepts to a master, - that we must slowly become worthy of the prophecy itself as we gradually explore what it might mean. Our only problem is of course that this will take time, and as the prophet also always warned, time just might not be on our side…
