Marx's Capital: Chapters 15 - The Machine

Today, I have compiled and studied some of the arguments about the machine in Marx's Capital 15 chapter. This is the theoretical basis and theme of my work, and it also helps the audience understand the meaning of the work.

“The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor to the worker himself.” (p557) 5g is an evolutionary machine, a completely crushed competitor.

“The division of labour develops this labour-power in a one-sided way, by reducing it to the highly particularised skill of handling a special tool. When it becomes the job of the machine to handle this tool, the use-value of the worker’s labour-power vanishes, and with it its exchange-value. "(p557) When artificial intelligence emerges, it replaces the use of tools by workers, and the value of workers disappears.

"meanwhile the original victims, during the period transition, for the most part starve and perish.” (p567-568) These eliminated labors, only those who face them are hungry and dead.

“We have seen how this absolute contradiction (namely the contradiction between the revolutionary technical basis of large-scale industry and the form it takes under capitalism) does away with all repose, all fixity and all security as far as the worker’s life-situation is concerned; how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands the means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his specialised function, to make him superfluous. "The large-scale production capacity brought by artificial intelligence and the contradiction under the capitalist private system will surely come, and workers will first become victims.

“The factory system’s tremendous capacity for expanding with sudden immense leaps, and its dependence on the world market, necessarily give rise to the following cycle: feverish production, a consequent glut on the market, then a contraction of the market, which causes production to be crippled. The life of industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation.” (p580) What followed was that because the workers did not have a salary, the overall demand of the society decreased, leading to market contraction and embarrassment. The capitalists faced only loneliness and bankruptcy.

“Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasingly the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility, The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development...the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.” (p638) The tremendous increase in productivity brought about by the arrival of artificial intelligence also means that the huge plunder of natural resources can refer to the smog of China, and you can probably imagine the future of the earth.

“[Capitalism] destroys both the ancient and the transitional forms behind which the dominion of capital is still partially hidden, and replaces them with a dominion which is direct and unconcealed. But by doing this it also generalises the direct struggle against its rule. While in each individual workshop it enforces uniformity, regularity, order and economy, the result of the immense impetus given to technical improvement by the limitation and regulation of the working day is to increase the anarchy and the proneness to catastrophe of capitalist production as a whole, the intensity of labour, and the competition of machinery with the worker. By the destruction of small-scale and domestic industries it destroys the last resorts of the ‘redundant population’, thereby removing what was previously a safety-value for the whole social mechanism. By maturing the material conditions and the social combinations of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.” (p635) Artificial intelligence destroys the living conditions of most labor forces while destroying the environment, eliminating the previous social balance, blood type conflicts and violence cannot be avoided, and the power to overthrow capitalist private ownership has matured in the process.

I am going to start experimenting to make the expressiveness of the work more in line with this one.