Marx & the Machines

Ownership, Automation, Art and Dickheads

Morning Comrades.

This is one of those rare moments where I tap into fleeting moments of internet rage because the rage bait worked on me and secondly, and this being the broader topic, it presents an opportunity to discuss a much broader subject that I find essential to our revolutionary purpose.

I am referring to OpenAI, the company that runs ChatGTP, having released an image generator that spurred a torrent of Studio Ghibli stylised images over the last days. Now, I could wrap up my thoughts on the matter in a very brief paragraph that mostly would revolve around profanity and me getting my baseball out of retirement to beat some sense into those mf’ers. What is being sold as AI isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s at best a plagiarizing machine that feeds on previous creations, one that does immense enviromental damage whilst brain nuking that last vestitudes of Western creativity, and there ain’t much left of that at best. It’s all bullshit and it at best will be revealed as badly run ( as always ) cultural psy-ops by some brain nuked incel over at the CIA. This shit always does.

Yet, this place wouldn’t be what it is of we cannot spent ten minutes getting into it past the reddit like dismissal of trash and dig deep enough to at least try to understand what it is happening and form an actual understanding of the questions posed.

With that, this isn’t so much about self-proclaimed “prompt engineers” - FUCKING LOLZ - utilising existing art to create shite but a deep dive into the proclaimed purposes of A.I.- automation, and then a conversation of ownership.

To start, Marx did in a way predict, or rather foresee the culmination of automation that we are currently approaching, predominately and hidden away in my own personal favourite pieces of writing, called “Grundrisse”. David Harvey has an incredible companion to this work for anyone wanting to dig into it ( please do ).

In a fragment of writing aptly named “The Fragment on Machines”, buried in the Grundrisse, Marx does pop off on the subject and again, not in the way you’d expect. It is extremely important to understand that automation, not A.I., has always taken place, it’s not new to our experience, and at the time of Marx’s writing was immensely present, in the shape of the industrial revolution aka the reason why we have entire towns in the UK Midlands that were stamped out of the ground because of automated cotton loom machines. This point, or rather the difference between automation and what is currently being sold as automated A.I. is important and we’ll tackle shortly.

Marx’s economic theory was based on the labour theory of value: that the value of a good is, at its simplest form, the necessary labour time to make it. In “The Fragment on Machines”, Marx tackles a question that is more relevant today than ever: how do we define value when the human labour required to create goods rapidly approaches zero? Or, put more apocalyptically: when AI has taken all the jobs, who is left to buy goods?

Marx acknowledges that automation has the potential to rapidly change the relation of capital, labour, and the means of labour/production. But more significantly, he seems to imply that the very act of automation transforms the framework he has established in previous texts:

“Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the… automatic system of machinery… set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”

Marx, Grundrisse 13

Did we just read Marx saying that the culmination of his economic framework is… robotics? In a way, yes.

The word “metamorphoses” is also important here. In the previous paragraph, Marx describes other changes in technology as mere “formal modification” to the means of labour. But automation is something else entirely — not a formal modification, but a metamorphosis. A deep, visceral change in form and function.

Caterpillar to butterfly. Acorn to tree. Man to machine.

The most surprising thing about “The Fragment on Machines” is that you’d expect some sort of “John Henry vs the Steam Drill” type dichotomy, with Marx taking the side of John Henry: muscle, sinew and sweat building society one swing at time. After all, which two symbols most closely symbolise Marxist theory? The hammer and sickle — manual tools that couldn’t be more antithetical to automation.

However, in the great battle of Man vs. Machine, Marx shockingly sides with the machine.

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… 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.

Capitalism thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.

Marx, Grundrisse 14

Marx is positing automation as a sort of “end of history” wherein goods have become so inexpensive to manufacture, and require so little labour, that the current model of capitalism falls apart.

Then, what occurs is:

…the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.

Marx, Grundrisse 14

To summarise, within the dialectical construct of materialism, history even, automation, be it in the shape of cotton construction to self-checkout machines at supermarkets ( aka how to survive this bout of inflation ), is to be expected and welcomed, as it will bring its own downfall. In the Manifesto, our boys say:

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.

And a fully automated society, where production is just that, automated, and the production is owned by the capital and bourgeoise class, we, will not have the means to buy what is created, meaning: revolution or bust. Or as Lenin said:

Sometimes history needs a push.

But that’s automation, and not specifically, the A.I. nonsense in the shape of ChatGTP and/or any of the numerous visual art generators out there at the moment that has entire industry workers spooked, and too many capitalists excited. It does, however, truly tie into the above.

The way I understand the reality of ChatGTP and the VA crap and how it works is that, given prompts, it “creates” versions based on what these machines can find online - i.e., existing material created by us. Thus, it is nothing new, nor original, but a mash up of millions of ideas, presented in an algorithm determined pleasing manner - I mean, all our likes in 15 years of social media were recorded, saved and be used for something, here it is.

Two immediate thoughts then, one, and it’s not the important one, it is not an artificial intelligence creating out of thin air but compiling existing work - and with that, secondly, it’s “theft” in the technical sense. I highlight that word because theft implies ownership, property and to me, that is where we come closer to the real discussion.

These tools are owned by corporations and people directly opposed to the socialist and communist concept of the future, not because they steal but because they own them and we do not. At the surface level. If “we”, the collective working classes, “owned” all automated production that is in part operated with A.I. then then generated profits would be ours, to share and use as we see fit. Cool. A nice, socialist idea on the path to a brighter future, one that I am definitely not opposed to. As we know, the reality is the exact opposite.

However, several questions arise out of this current timeline that we need to think on:

One: we are most entirely presented with A.I. based automation that serves only accumulation and regular increase of profits, not necessarily with automation that serves the planet. For example, what do I care that we have robots making cars when we don’t need cars in the first place?

Two: Seizing the means of production, i.e. the above point, no longer is enough going forward, especially in the long run. Yes, in the short term, in the gradual process of eliminating the capitalist concept of an economy, ownership by the working classes is a must, but then what? We know, latest by now, that if we continue with our current concept of production, economy even, even if it remains at a net zero output, that the effects of Global Warming will affect us all, negatively, in ways I cannot fathom yet. Great that we prols own everything if we in the meantime burn the planet to ashes. Nice. No, in all this talk of automation, with or without A.I. the initial question has to be: Do we even need this and if so, how do we make it so that it is a net positive for the entire ecosystem. Nothing that this current set of A.I. and / or automation promises takes that into account.

This is the predicament in which we find ourselves today. While we owe capitalism for having reduced all class distinctions to the gulf between owners and non-owners, Marx and Engels want us to realise that capitalism is insufficiently evolved to survive the technologies it spawns. It is our duty to tear away at the old notion of privately owned means of production and force a metamorphosis, which must involve the social ownership of machinery, land and resources. Now, when new technologies are unleashed in societies bound by the primitive labour contract, wholesale misery follows. Thus, whilst the majority of talk around these new developments in technology is based around the wet dreams of capitalist and their Stockholm Syndrome Fan Club it comes down to this: one, our ownership and then, secondly, assessing what it is need. Each according to their ability, each according to their need.

In the manifesto’s unforgettable words:

“A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

Maybe the Luddite’s had a point, in their time, but I doubt today. Still, in the end it comes to ownership and subsequently, erasing the construct and concept thereof. Apply that to, genuinely, everything and liberally ( no pun intended ) so.

Thank you, as always for your patronage, attention and time.

Yours,

Steven