6 - Fragment on Machines - Karl Marx

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The Fragment on Machines is part of Marx’s Grundrisse. Far more than "sketches" or furtherance of Karl Marx's major work, the Grundrisse originally considered a work in progress of what was to become Marx's central work. It is now known that examining the Grundrisse is like having access to Marx's laboratory of studies in the course of his extensive intellectual activity.

In Fragment on Machines, Marx discusses the material and immaterial related to labour, considering the transformations of the means of labor from a simple tool into technical machines and machinery, what he called fixed capital. The use value of the capital fixed, or the means of production is strict to its technological condition for the production process or the maintenance of the means of labor (691). In Marx’s reviews of the development of value into capital, he divides the labour process according to its material composition into three elements: material of labour (a substitute of the raw material), means of labour and living labour. All these three elements are essential moments of the labour process appropriated by capital. For Marx raw material and products are the circulating capital, and means of labour are the fixed capital. The living labour has a twofold nature, as a physical activity toward use value and a charge of human labor to produce exchange value (692).

The means of labor changed with time, and these changes resulted in the “machine” or an “automatic system of machinery” (692). This automation process is made of technological and biological connections where the workers are part of this as its “conscious linkages” (692). For Marx, the machine is seen as skilled and the worker as someone to guard it against interruptions. The machine dictates the worker’s activity. The means of labor are transformed into machinery and the living labor appropriated by capital as part of this machinery. The fixed capital existing as machinery appropriates workers’ creativity and cancels any connection between product and producer (694). According to Marx, social knowledge and skills are absorbed into capital and transformed into fixed capital, machinery. The worker is part of the machinery, is capital as well (695).

At some moment, the worker’s wage will be exchanged for products and this consumption is part of circulating capital (700). For Marx, the productive power of labour is transformed into fixed capital as something disconnected and independent of labour. For him, the circulating capital makes this lost connection between workers and promotes the necessary conditions for the continuation of the workers’ activity (701).  

Marx argues that improvements in machinery happen only when the sciences are already appropriated by capital; invention became a business (704). Thus, for him, the labour time destined to production is not anymore determinant to produce capital, but rather the dedication of science toward the progress of technologies (705).

Marx posits that forces of production and social relations are distinct sides of the individual and, according to him, both are means capitalized to leverage production. For Marx, social time, free time or “disposable time” is the antithesis to surplus labour time (708) and a measure of wealth (the concept of surplus value and how it is connected with unpaid labour and exploitation could be accessed in Christian Fuchs article Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet).

Thus, the Fragment on Machines points, not only to the capital appropriation of workers as part of the machinery, but shows the capital tendency to absorb social knowledge to develop fixed capital.

Works cited:

Karl Marx, “The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines),” Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 690-695, 699-711.

Fuchs, Christian. “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet.” The Information Society: An International Journal, 26, 3, 2010, 179-196.