In Marx's Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse</i
... 8 Como afirma Bellofiore, este texto "pareciera estar fundado en una visión acorde a la cual la reducción del tiempo de trabajo contenido en una mercancía individual sería equivalente a una caída de la extracción de trabajo, la cual es el fundamento del capitalismo" A partir de este problema el autor sostiene: "No creo que esta perspectiva pueda ser mantenida, al menos desde el punto de vista de Marx en su obra madura: pero, fundamentalmente, tampoco desde el punto de vista que los Grundrisse en sí mismo presenta." (Bellofiore, 2013: 31, traducción propia del original). 9 Al respecto, Toscano (2007) encuentra que existen tres vertientes dentro de esta corriente de pensamiento: una corriente autonomista "clásica" (representada por Hardt y Negri), otra línea "naturalista" (encabezada por Virno) y otra denominada como "espiritualismo diferencial" (relacionada con Lazzarato). ...
En este artículo se analizan las transformaciones de la clase trabajadora en el capitalismo, poniendo en relación las tendencias hacia la descalificación, la difusión del trabajo inmaterial y la intelectualización de una porción de los trabajadores. Para ello, se estudian los aportes que Marx hizo a su estudio y las interpretaciones de sus textos realizadas por Harry Braverman y el posobrerismo. En primer lugar, se analizan los capítulos de El Capital dedicados al estudio de la cooperación, la manufactura y la gran industria. Luego, se reseña el análisis que hizo Braverman sobre las transformaciones de los procesos de trabajo, señalando algunos de los límites de su tesis del deskilling y marcando las líneas de continuidad entre las ideas de este autor y la visión presentada en El Capital. Después, se estudia el fragmento sobre las máquinas de los Grundrisse, marcando las contradicciones que este fragmento presenta con respecto a los abordajes antes mencionados. En este marco, se estudia la interpretación de este texto formulada por los autores del posobrerismo, marcando también las continuidades entre la teoría posobrerista y el fragmento sobre las máquinas. Por último, se propone una interpretación en * El presente artículo resume un capítulo de la tesis elaborada por el autor para la Maestría en Ciencias Sociales del Trabajo de la Facultad de Cs. Sociales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), defendida en Febrero del 2016. Este trabajo se realizó en el marco de una beca doctoral del CONICET y como parte del proyecto UBACyT titulado "Las relaciones centro-periferia en la etapa actual de la mundialización. Impactos sobre América Latina y Argentina". Se agradecen los comentarios a las versiones anteriores de este texto realizadas por Damián Kennedy, Juan Martín Graña y Claudio Katz, y las observaciones de dos evaluadores/as anónimos/as que ayudaron a mejorar el artículo. No obstante, las ideas presentadas a lo largo del texto son de responsabilidad del autor. ** Licenciado en Economía, magíster en Ciencias Sociales del Trabajo y doctorando en Ciencias Sociales en la UBA.
... Más concretamente, se han abordado temáticas correspondientes a aspectos más concretos del Tomo 1 de El Capital, así como atinentes a tópicos de los tomos subsiguientes y de los manuscritos anteriores a la versión definitiva de la crítica marxiana.(Arthur & Reuten, 1998;Campbell & Reuten, 2002;Bellofiore & Taylor, 2004;Moseley, 2005;Bellofiore, Starosta, & Thomas, 2013). ...
El presente trabajo examina la conexión entre el método dialéctico utilizado
por Hegel y el utilizado por Marx a la luz de los debates marxistas recientes.
Se sostiene que ni el contenido ni la forma del método utilizado por Hegel
pueden ser apropiados acríticamente para el desarrollo de la crítica
marxiana de la economía política. Más específicamente, se sostiene que
en la obra de Hegel puede encontrarse un ‘núcleo racional’ dado por el
descubrimiento de la forma más simple de auto-movimiento que tiene lo real.
Sin embargo, asimismo se sostiene que por tomarse como punto de partida
una forma del puro pensar descubierta mediante un acto de abstracción
absoluto, dicho ‘núcleo racional’ queda expuesto bajo una ‘envoltura
mística’ y, por tanto, en relación de exterioridad respecto del movimiento
de lo concreto real.
El artículo sostiene que la dominación abstracta e impersonal y la violencia abstracta son dos momentos constitutivos y básicos de la moderna sociedad burguesa. Desde de la producción teórica tardía de Karl Marx, en especial, a partir del capítulo del dinero de los Grundrisse y de fuentes secundarias ancladas en una lectura categorial de su obra, nuestros hallazgos dan cuenta que la formación social capitalista se define por su carácter altamente abstracto, el cual presupone la subsunción de la interdependencia social al capital como relación social dominante de la modernidad. Esto, por un lado, supone que los individuos se encuentren envueltos en estructuras de dominación social (abstracta e impersonal) y, por otra parte, que los media un tipo de violencia determinada como sed abstracta de valor.
Marx’s analysis of capitalism gives central place to machines. Machines are one of capital’s primary means of increasing the productivity of exploited labour in order to extract as much surplus value as possible and thus serve as “weapons against working-class revolt” by degrading, devaluing and controlling labour (Marx 1990, 563). Marx held that continual competition between individual capitals compels those firms towards the introduction of machinery and replacement of human labour, tending over time, towards an increasing “organic composition of capital” (Marx 1990, 762). While the dynamics of the organic composition of capital are more complex than can be adequately portrayed here, they do not imply a linear transfer of work from human to machine, as the introduction of machines has been shown to often generate a need for new categories of labour (Gray and Suri 2019). That being said, Marx held that there is a fundamental identity between capital and machines. He clearly calls machines the “material foundation of the capitalist mode of production” as well as “capital’s material mode of existence” and (Marx 1990, 554). Thus, for Marxist analysis machines and capital may be understood as the antithesis of the human being. Machines are “dead labour” (Marx 1990, 342) while capital is an “alien power” (Marx 1990, 716). It seems that Marx found the new steam-powered automatic machines of his time especially troubling, if one is to judge from his poetic language on the topic. He describes dead labour “in the automaton and the machinery moved by it” as stepping forth and “ acting apparently in independence of [living] labour, it subordinates labour instead of being subordinate to it, it is the iron man confronting the man of flesh and blood” (Marx 1994, p. 30). Yet it would be inaccurate to say that this pessimistic appraisal is the sole Marxist perspective on technology. According to Marx’s dialectical thought, machines can assume a positive role insofar as their evolution is a component of the revolutionizing of the productive forces and the socialization of labour. The most extreme reading of this perspective on Marx’s work is drawn from the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, where Marx appears to speculate on a highly automated future capitalism in which “the means of labour has not only taken the economic form of fixed capital, but has also been suspended in its immediate form … and the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skillfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science (Marx 1993, 699). This scenario, Marx contends, expresses precisely the contradiction at the heart of capital. As capital strives to “reduce labour time to a minimum” it simultaneously “posits labour time … as sole measure and source of wealth” (Marx 1993, 706). By introducing so many machines, capital eventually cuts itself off from exploited labour, the source of surplus value, and thus “works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production” (Marx 1993, 700). While the precise import of this passage is highly debated (Fuchs 2016; Heinrich, 2013, Marques, 2022) it, in any case, indicates that the analysis of machines from a Marxist perspective is not simple – indeed several more dimensions could be elucidated, including the oft-repeated charge of Marx as technological determinist (Mackenzie 1984). It is worth noting that, as Marx explains, technology can assume different social forms, not only the specifically capitalist social form which currently prevails. This fundamental understanding led him to point out that workers should avoid revolting against machines. The real enemy to be fought, he explains, is the social form of technology which bends it to exploitation. In Marx’s words, “It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilizes those instruments” (1990, 554). Contrary to charges of determinism, Marx explicitly advocates for class struggle against the subsumption of labour under the capitalist social form of technology. This special issue of Eptic is focused specifically on the technology of artificial intelligence (AI). For all his technological acuity, Marx could not have foreseen the rise of the contemporary approach to AI called machine learning (ML). And while there is a long tradition of Marxist research on technology, there is, of yet, relatively little on AI specifically. Marxist research on AI goes back to the 1980s, and the first era of the AI industry. Machine learning had not achieved demonstrable success yet and instead the industry based its hopes on “expert systems” or programs in which the captured knowledge of experts could be implemented and made available on demand (Myers 1986). From this early era, three broad threads of Marxist research on AI were already visible. The first thread saw in AI the extension of previous automation technologies and Taylorist practices of labour deskilling (Cooley 1980; Morris-Suzuki 1984; Berman 1992; Ramtin 1991). The second thread saw AI as perhaps more hype than substance; as an ideological weapon for capital to intimidate workers. As Athanasiou (1985) put it, AI was best understood as “cleverly disguised politics”. The third thread focused instead on the potential of the advanced data processing capacities of AI for the implementation of socialist economic planning (Cockshott 1988). We can see these same themes in more recent Marxist research on AI – as well as new ones. The first thread remains a prominent line of thought. Dyer-Witheford et al. (2019) and Steinhoff (2021) offer book-length studies which investigate AI as, primarily, an automation technology with novel capacities for capturing the skills and knowledge of labour. The second thread also retains interest. Authors such as Benanav (2020) and Smith (2020) argue that AI’s capacities for the replacement of labour are overblown, serving mostly to distract from a stagnating capitalist economy. Third, Cockshott (2017) continues to pursue the use of AI from socialist planning. Somewhat related is research which advocates the use of AI to produce a “postwork” socialist society (Srnicek and Williams 2015; Bastani 2019). Beyond these three threads, there is a relatively small but growing diversity of Marxist research on AI (several collections now exist: Moore and Woodcock 2021; Fehrle, Lieber and Ramirez 2024). The contributions collected here fall within the three threads but also without. We hope the inspiring and thought provoking articles published in this special issue can shed light on the dialectics of artificial intelligence. Enjoy your reading!
This special issue of Eptic is focused specifically on the technology of artificial intelligence (AI). For all his technological acuity, Marx could not have foreseen the rise of the contemporary approach to AI called machine learning (ML). And while there is a long tradition of Marxist research on technology, there is, of yet, relatively little on AI specifically. We hope the inspiring and thought provoking articles published in this special issue can shed light on the dialectics of artificial intelligence.
Die liberale Ordnung westlicher Demokratien schlittert von Krise zu Krise. Das politische Versprechen subjektiver Freiheit und demokratischer Selbstbestimmung verkehrt sich zunehmend in sein Gegenteil, in die Kontrolle der Subjekte und eine politische Ohnmacht gegenüber dem Bestehenden. Im Anschluss an Hegel und Marx untersucht Leonie Hunter die tragische Struktur dieser Verkehrung, indem sie die Überwindung der politischen Krisenhaftigkeit unserer Zeit als Aufgabe einer komischen Kritik liberaler Ordnungsbildung ausweist. Denn die Kritik am gegenwärtigen Scheitern des politischen Liberalismus darf nicht dem autoritären Libertarismus überlassen werden. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Esta é uma tentativa de refletir sobre os comentários críticos de Leite, De Paula e Corrêa (2023) sobre o recente esforço de reconstrução do debate em torno da troca desigual no campo da teoria marxista da dependência, que aparentemente deixou incompleta e imprecisa a nossa leitura do problema básico do que é troca desigual. Entendemos que isso contribuiu para algumas interpretações errôneas da nossa abordagem, para além de ter exposto diferenças interpretativas reais. Por outro lado, talvez parte das dificuldades decorra do fato de Leite e outros construírem um debate paralelo conosco e com Neto (2011). Isto pode levar a um debate confuso entre duas interpretações que, embora tenham pontos em comum, não são necessariamente convergentes em todos os aspectos relevantes. A nossa abordagem ao problema da troca desigual parte de uma leitura precisa da constituição social do valor; claro que é possível que a nossa tentativa não tenha atingido a clareza necessária.
While pedagogies emanating from the Marxist tradition have been proposed and debated, this essay argues that Marx had clear pedagogical logics of his own that he laid out by articulating the differences between inquiry and presentation or, said differently, between studying and learning. This essay presents these logics as they play out in Marx’s writing and research, focusing particularly on the Grundrisse notebooks and the first volume of Capital, each of which accord different primacy to inquiry and presentation. To show the political logics of Marx’s pedagogies in practice, the essay draws from Lenin’s conception of the Communist Party as an educational form tasked precisely with navigating between Marx’s pedagogies. A case study follows, of the historical and contemporary experiences of the Chinese Communist Party as it has directed and yielded to Marx’s pedagogies.
THE DOUBLE INVERSION - THE CONCEPT OF FETISHISM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMYKarl Marx’s critical analysis of ‘the secret of the fetishism of commodities’ – according to which the universal domination of the commodity form makes social relations appear in the form of relations between things – is today widely regarded as a central element of the critique of political economy. The concept of fetishism was generally neglected until in the 1920’s, and the debates around this concept did not really take off until the 1960’s. Since then, there have essentially been two predominant interpretations of Marx’s concept of fetishism: on the one hand those who regards fetishism as an ideological phenomenon, as something that has to do with the way in which social reality is represented for and in the social agents. On the other hand there are those who insists that fetishism refers to a certain displacement or inversion at the level of social practice itself, and not its ideological representation. In this article, I review these conflicting readings in the light of a close reading of Marx’s use of the term fetish(ism) in all of his writings from the Grundrisse (1857) onwards. I argue that Marx used this term to refer to an ideological phenomenon, and that he was right in doing so. I also point out that this does not entail subscribing to a naïve view of ideology as false consciousness or class manipulation that can be abolished by enlightenment and criticism.
RESUMO No trecho dos Grundrisse, conhecido como Fragmento sobre as máquinas, Marx discute o papel do conhecimento coletivo, que ele chama de intelecto geral, em processos de produção da grande indústria, onde a automação industrial tende a expulsar do processo de trabalho o único agente capaz de criar valor: o trabalhador. Nesse exercício de reflexão, Marx imagina que essa contradição poderia abalar as bases do modo de produção capitalista e abrir uma janela para sua superação. O intelecto geral de Marx é o ponto de partida do artigo, que tem como objetivos: (i) analisar a controversa hipótese acerca do intelecto geral que Marx registra nos Grundrisse; (ii) apresentar a origem da expressão intelecto geral, que data do começo do século XIX, décadas antes do seu registro nesse manuscrito; e (iii) revelar como Marx supera aquela interpretação alguns anos depois, ao expor suas conclusões sobre o papel da ciência e da técnica nos processos de produção capitalistas. Este artigo estabelece uma interlocução com algumas reflexões de Matteo Pasquinelli e Michael Heinrich, entre outros autores, em confronto com os escritos que Marx nos legou.
Neste artigo exploramos a hipótese de que a teoria da revolução de Karl Marx não está fundamentada unicamente na luta de classes. Nos seus escritos econômicos da maturidade, e mais particularmente nos Grundrisse, é possível identificar um prognóstico do processo de desintegração do capital e da formação do valor que acabaria por tornar anacrônicas e obsoletas as relações sociais vigentes no mundo contemporâneo. Tal processo não estaria, necessariamente, vinculado à ação política das classes sociais, mas seria intrínseco à lógica de desenvolvimento das forças produtivas sob o capital. Assim, no limite, poder-se-ia falar em duas teorias da revolução que se complementam em Marx. Assim, procuramos, aqui, confrontar a teoria da revolução presente em O Capital com aquela sugerida pelos Grundrisse, no seu famoso “fragmento sobre as máquinas”.
According to Marx’s unfinished critique of political economy, capitalist relations of production rely on what Marx refers to in Capital as ‘the mute compulsion of economic relations’. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that this constitutes a distinct form of economic power which cannot be reduced to either ideology or violence, and to provide the conceptual groundwork for a systematic theory of capital’s mute compulsion.
This essay revisits the question of alterations in Marx’s view of method from the 1857 “Introduction” to Capital. In the wake of the belated upsurge of interest in Marx’s notebooks of 1857–8, posthumously published as the Grundrisse, a dominant interpretation has been developed in Marx scholarship which characterizes the method of the “Introduction” as an ascent from the (transhistorical) abstract to the (historical) concrete and, upon such characterization, stresses the mature Marx’s departure from it. Rereading the 1857 “Introduction” with an emphasis on the theoretical import of its examples, I argue, against this interpretation, that although this text does not provide a fully worked-out account of method, it nevertheless offers invaluable insights into some of the central methodological problems with which Marx was concerned and in response to which his dialectical method was developed. In particular, I highlight what could be called Marx’s critical historicist approach to the categories and argue that this approach, together with his specific understanding of the process of the reproduction of the concrete in thought, constitute the lasting pillars of Marx’s dialectical method, in the 1857 “Introduction” as well as in Capital. Finally, in a concluding section, I re-examine the methodological status of the commodity and argue that the post-1857 emergence of the commodity as Marx’s favourite starting point does not represent a fundamental change, or a reversal, in his view of method.
This paper reads Marx’s distinction between the method of inquiry and presentation as distinct and Marxist pedagogical logics that take the form of learning and studying. After articulating the differences and their current conceptualizations in educational theory, I turn to different interpretations of the Grundrisse and Capital. While I note the differences, I maintain these result from Marx’s alternation between learning and studying, to the different weights Marx gives to both. Marx sought to understand, articulate, learn, and relay the precise logics of capital, of its contradictions, and of how the working class has and can seize on these contradictions to institute the revolutionary transition to communism. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t do this because no one can fully delineate and learn about capitalism so long as it exists, as capital is by definition a dynamic social relation. I show how readings of both books are products and productive of Marx’s own pedagogical constellation through their content and form of presentation. The argument is that this is a political and constellational pedagogy that’s contingent and singular rather than resolvable and unifiable.
The article retraces intellectuals’ self-perception within early Italian operaismo and is based on the periodicals Mondo Operaio , Quaderni Rossi, and classe operaia, and on the writings by Panzieri, Asor Rosa, and Tronti. Operaismo was a political tendency that found fertile ground in the Italian non-orthodox Marxist political milieux as a response to the accelerated industrialization and the consequent harsh working conditions in factories between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. It deemed factory life the focal point of contemporary capitalist society, raising criticism against the Italian Communist Party, and supported workers’ councils rather than top-down led unions, investigating the lives of laborers at their workplace in times of so-called neo-capitalism. The article highlights the idea of a coincidence of theoretical and practical levels in the organization of class struggle, and the denying of universal values by taking the one-sided point of view of the workers. It also posits that surveys published in these periodicals, which nowadays are still significant sources for studying the industrial environment of the time, must always be considered in the light of the conception of both the role of intellectuals and the function of culture in society.
Capital, as self-valorising value, abstraction in action, Hegelian syllogism or self-organisation of economic rhythms oriented to the unique goal of profit production, is based on the reversal of subject and object in capitalist society. The producer is subjugated to their own social relationship that acts as a subject and treats them as its object. The fetishism of social reproduction manifests itself more clearly in structural crises, in which the system persists only through accelerated social regression.
Many reasons have been advanced why Capital remained unfinished. Marx's bad health seriously hampered his research and writing, but this was much more so in the early 1860s, than in the 1870s. Also, after 1872, Marx's other commitments had become much less time-consuming. During the decade and until his death, Marx studied agronomy, geography, geology, ethnology and mathematics, making extensive notes, but his scientific output was relatively small. Other reasons that have been advanced are allegedly incorrect solutions to theoretical problems, such as the transformation of labor values into prices of production, the secular behavior of the rate of profit, the expanded reproduction of the capitalist economy, or how non-capitalist societies would evolve. Except for his theories of expanded reproduction, and economic and financial crisis, which clearly awaited further elaboration, most of these reasons are unconvincing. However, being a perfectionist, Marx was permanently searching for new material to further substantiate his theory, accumulating notes that he was unable to integrate into his manuscript of Volumes II and III of Capital .
En este trabajo se realiza una reconstrucción crítica de la historia de las interpretaciones de la explicación marxiana de la renta diferencial de tipo II. En ella se muestra que la interpretación actualmente hegemónica dentro de la teoría marxista, en contraposición a como se la suele presentar, está lejos de ser única e incontrovertible. A su lado se encuentran al menos dos interpretaciones relevantes, una de las cuales ha imperado desde las primeras lecturas de la explicación marxiana hasta fines de la década de 1970. En el curso de esta reconstrucción se presentan cada una de estas interpretaciones, el contexto histórico en el que surgieron, su difusión y los debates que han suscitado. En el caso de la interpretación actualmente imperante se analiza en particular la evidencia textual que la misma presenta como justificación de su filiación marxiana. Finalmente, se realiza un balance crítico de las distintas interpretaciones.
Marx and Gramsci remain two of the most constant presences and inspirations for those on the left. Yet there is a persistent sense that we have still to get them right. Perhaps this indicates that sources like this are now fully classics, to be returned, and returned to. In the case of Marx and Gramsci, a series of major works published in the Brill Historical Materialism series breaks new ground as well as returning to older controversies, both resolved and unresolved. Apart from remaining arguments concerning the status of materials unpublished in their own lifetimes, the major tension that emerges here is that between the task of immanent, contextual philology and the challenge of reading ‘Marx for today’ or ‘Gramsci for today’. The tension between text and context, and the question of what travels, conceptually persists.
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