We seem to live in a new machine age, a world in which automation, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and the “robotization” of the economy are causing machines to gradually displace human laborers. Where will those millions of menial workers go after our economies have been thoroughly digitized, more completely embedded in what Benjamin Bratton (2015) terms “the Stack,” that is, a planetary-wide matrix of computing power? But just as we begin to think about this terrifying prospect, Marx is already there, waiting for us, as Foucault once said of Hegel, ready to puncture the notion of total capitalist mechanization. Marx is ready to stop us in our tracks, when he writes in Capital concerning the limits to how machines replace human labor. In some particularly advanced industrialized countries, Marx writes, machines are adopted on a sufficiently large scale that they end up “creat[ing] such a superfluity of labour” that wages end up depreciating by the traditional laws of supply and demand. But when machines replace human hands and minds, wages are lowered to such an extent that it no longer becomes profitable for capitalists to replace human labor with machines; it would be more inexpensive to pay for wage-labor than to invest in automation (Marx 1976: 516). Thus, by their very actions—introducing machinery that cheapens labor below the price of those very machines—capitalists tend to generate social circumstances that undermine those selfsame actions: Machines undermine the adoption of machines by way of a social mechanism – the wage. In fact, this might be the central methodological thrust of Marx’s Capital: All things turn into their own opposite.
