Someone was saying that even if using machines becomes cheaper than using humans, capitalist will still use humans because

"automation constitutes constant capital and human labour is variable capital

The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall disproves that fact"

What do those mean?

  • AmarkuntheGatherer@lemmygrad.ml
    2·
    3 days ago

    One cannot theorise about concepts that haven’t been established yet, that’d be assuming facts not in evidence, as it were. We don’t have a concept of what artificial intelligence would be any more than FTL or matter converters.

    Marx referred to Antipatros writing about the water wheel being used to grind corn, thus freeing the slaves formerly tasked with this, a notion he decries, saying Antipatros and the rest understood nothing of political theory. You can clearly see he’s talking about automation like the sewing machine, cotton gin, or the assembly line. (anachronistic, I know) In fact, his quote from Aristotle about shuttles that weave by themselves wouldn’t have been interpreted as actual intelligence by any reader until the last ~50 years.

    So Marx not only didn’t theorise about artificial intelligence, he was talking about automation that was happening in his time, he couldn’t have. As an intelligent man, Marx extrapolated current and historical developments, but didn’t engage in speculation, which AI still is.

    • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
      4·
      2 days ago

      That’s not the passage I was referring to.

      Marx quite explicitly refers to automatons and robots from these passages in capital. He directly humanises the machine and this is AFTER he talks about general machinery and the industrial process. So he is not talking about assembly lines and simple industrial machines.

      Notice how he differentiates “automaton” from “machine”. He is implying a fully artificial worker, which through this artificial nature, completely removes all of labour value from the equation of goods production.

      One can absolutely theorise about concepts that don’t exist yet.

      • AmarkuntheGatherer@lemmygrad.ml
        5·
        2 days ago

        I wasted too much time with the previous version of this reply and it was getting to long with to many references to the source. I’m choosing to believe brevity is gold.

        All quotes are from the economic manuscripts. First two here and the last one the chapter right after. Here’s the part between those first two quotes:

        In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker’s means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker’s activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine’s work, the machine’s action, on to the raw material – supervises it and guards against interruptions. 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.

        I’m sure you’ve seen episodes of it clipped from How It’s Made, or something similar. In many areas of production, the machinery performed most of the tasks and people are around to supervise the machines, press buttons and sometimes move stuff from one machine to the next. That’s what Marx is talking about, he’s extrapolating the cotton gin to talk about a machine that takes in cotton and shits out cut cloth or even whole clothing. (Example mine, obvs)

        The last one was tricky, cut up by itself like that:

        Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value.

        I think my case here is even clearer. A “process of nature” is recreated in a machine and performed the tasks previously done by the means of labour. The labourer moves to the side and supervises. There’s no hint now implication of intelligence on the part of what replaced the worker.

        This still ended up long so this post I’ll make actually brief: Before we had nukes we had the concept of bombs, even big ones, and we had chemical weapons. The bike therefore wasn’t a new concept for at least the half century before it was first deployed. AI not only didn’t exist, we don’t know on what shape it might. Therefore, any investigation of AI requires many layers of assertions that can’t be verified for some time. All we can do now is speculate, same as Asimov decades ago. This speculation isn’t entirely without value, but it certainly isn’t theory.

        • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
          2·
          2 days ago

          Thank you for the write up! That’s given me a lot to think about!

          Honestly the only confusing part for me would be Marx’s inclusion of “mechanical and intellectual” organs when referencing the industrial machine then. Computers would still be in their primordial infancy when Marx was writing capital, and I highly doubt he had ever heard of them, so it doesn’t feel like he was referencing a “programmed” machine. Even one programmed mechanically.

          That was mainly the line I was referencing when talking about how Marx humanises the machine and gives it a sense of self-autonomy. As why would a cotton gin require “intellectual organs”? Of which there is technically only one in the human body, which is the brain.

          • AmarkuntheGatherer@lemmygrad.ml
            2·
            2 days ago

            I completely agree with how you approached it, the quotes you provided gave me pause when I first read them. Although in context I’m quite sure Marx really wasn’t thinking about AI, I have no explanation for his choice of words. If I had to speculate, I’d suggest that he didn’t think some tasks (e.g sorting by colour) could be done without some measure of intelligence, but that’s just one idea.