MARX’S ‘REQUIEIM’ FOR SCIENCE!

“The fear that there will one day be established a despotism

based on science is a ridiculous and absurd fantasy. Such a

thing could only arise in minds wholly alien to the positivist idea”

·      Claude Henry Saint Simon, L’Organisateur

“All our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing

material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human

life into a material force”

·      Kar Marx, Speech at the Anniversary of the ‘People’s Paper’

In his own time, Positivist circles of Comte-ist orientation had accused Marx of having advanced ‘metaphysical’ ideas that are ‘anti-science.’ In fact he himself seems to have intimated the ‘end of science.’ In face of growing conflicts within capitalism, Marx critiques Ricardo – the best classical political economist – for “naively taking this antagonism for social law of nature. But with this contribution the bourgeois science of economics reached the limits beyond which it could not pass.” (Postface to Capital, I) What social antagonisms had revealed in practice and in theory were that the scientific claim to objectivity is a sham. “It was thenceforth no longer the question whether this or that theorem was true, but whether it was useful to capital.” This then “sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economics.” (Ibid)

Furthermore, says Marx, “the whole of modern science of technology” is brought into existence as a result of a process whose principle is “production in and of itself” without regard for the human element, or “without looking at the ability of the human hand to perform the new process.” (Capital, 1: 616) It is animated by “the drive to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man, that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier.” (Ibid. 527) Thus in the face of this science, the special skill of each individual “who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity.” (Ibid. 549)

It was not just the ‘young’ Marx who hailed Silesian Weavers destruction of the machines in 1844. In his greatest theoretical work Capital, he devotes an entire Section of the chapter on Machinery to ‘The Struggle between the worker and the machine.’ Here in a dramatic way, he makes a reference to the ‘Luddite movement’ and states that with the introduction of machinery, for the first time  “the worker fought against the instrument of labor itself.”(Ibid. 554)

Theoretically, Marx strikes back at the bourgeois economists who defend the capitalist employment of machines. Apologists such as Mac Culloch who state that “the contemplation of machinery in itself” demonstrates that machinery as such is free of internal contradictions, reproach their opponents for being the “enemy of social progress.” Machines, contents Marx, are no longer “the tools of man” but are “implements of a mechanism, mechanical implements.” (Ibid. 494) Machinery, wrote Marx, “does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous. It is a power inimical to him.” (Ibid.562) “Stop the machines,” Marx cites the cry of the workers, “at least during meal-times.” (Ibid. 357)

In the collective working of the system of automatic machines which Marx calls a “mechanical monster” with “demonic power,” “the subjective principle” is transformed. It is “an organized system of machines to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from an automatic center.” (Ibid.503) “In handicraft and manufacture, the worker makes use of the machine; in factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instruments of labor proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow… In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages.” (Ibid.548) Like the torture of the Sisyphus, it “exhausts the nervous system” and “does away with the many-sided play of muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity.” In “the house of Terror,” which is Marx’s designation of the factory, the “constant labor of one uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of man’s vital forces, which find recreation and delight in the change of activity itself.” (Ibid.460) The individual himself becomes “annexed for life by a limited function,” (Ibid.469) and “divided up and transformed into the automatic motor of a detailed operation.” (Ibid.481) This then constitutes “the spirit of the factory” where “the mind is least consulted.”

But to make sure that this does not just include physical toil, Marx adds that “even the lightening of the labor becomes an instrument of torture since the machine does not free the worker from work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content.” (Ibid.469) He then quotes G. de Molinari’s Etudes Economiques on the ‘labor of surveillance.’ “A man becomes exhausted more quickly when he watches over the uniform motion of a mechanism.” Therefore under the most developed form of machinery – “a vast automaton” - the inversion of the subject/object relationship grows into a “total antagonism.” As against the combined collective worker as “the dominant subject” with machines as the mere objects, now “the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely the conscious organs, coordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving forces.” (Ibid.544-45) Even ‘virtuosity’ as a totality of capacities, powers and abilities of the individual is now the sole property of the Machine.  “There appears nothing higher for itself, nothing legitimate for itself.” “It is the machine which processes skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it.” (Grundrisse, 693)

Labor as a purposive, conscious activity during which the producer enjoys the free play of his/her physical and mental powers, also makes instruments into “the body of its soul and thereby resurrects them from the dead.” (Grundrisse, 364) The worker interposes the instrument of labor “between himself and the object of his labor, and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity to the object.” (Capital, 1:283) However, the ‘metamorphoses’ of the instrument of labor from a tool to a machine, marks a turning point in human history. It is no longer the worker’s activity that determines and regulates the movement of the instrument but the other way around. Therefore, “The technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instruments of labor” gives rise to a “barrack-like discipline.” It alienates from him “the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power.” (Ibid. 799) In this sense, then, science as a potentiality “distinct from labor’ and as the manifest ‘will’ of an ‘other’ becomes a power over against the producer.

Now “the science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.” (Grundrisse, 693) Science, natural forces and the system of machinery unite as the “three forces” which constitute the power of the “master.” Specifically, then, the ‘spirit’ appearing in the form of ‘thing-hood’ is ‘another man.’ (German Ideology, MECW 5:171) Scientific detachment from and the opposition to the productive process of laborer are the foundation for the instrumentalization of knowledge itself.  “The knowledge, judgment and will … are faculties now required only from the workshop as a whole. The possibility of an intelligent direction of production expands in one direction because it vanishes in many others.” (Capital, 1:482) Hence, the purely “despotic form” of the capitalist direction of production.

Here “the workshop as a whole” is a microcosm of ‘Society” as a whole. Just as in the workshop where knowledge incorporated in the machinery appears as an external power to the producer, the accumulation of knowledge, and of skill in society, incorporated into capital, gives rise to an abstract “social brain” above and beyond the individuals. Thus, wrote Marx, “The social spirit of labor obtains an objective existence separate from the individual workers.” (Grundrisse, 529) Consequently, “the thing, which stands opposite him, has now become the true community.” (Ibid.496)

Given the ‘autonomy’ of the sphere of the instruments, this vast empire of the machines, the intermediative action, or “the cunning of reason” takes on a life of its own as if imposed by natural necessity. [“Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning may be said to lie in the intermediative action.”(Hegel. Logic, Par. 209)] The individuals appear to have been subsumed under an overpowering alien force that exists outside them as “their fate.” Not only “the social character of production is posited only post festum,”(Grundrisse, 173)but that’s also how “social reason” asserts itself. (Capital, 2:315)

Marx’s concept of “the all round development of the individual” whose labor appears no longer as ‘labor’ but as “the full activity itself,” is the exact opposite of abstract labor under capitalism. Man, of course, must satisfy a constantly multiplying need under all possible forms of society. This is what Marx calls “the realm of necessity.” Freedom in this realm consists in socialized individuals regulating their interchange with nature in a rational way with minimum labor and under conditions worthy of their humanity, where ‘nature’ looses its hostile and seemingly autonomous character as the domain of thing-hood. But even this always “remains a realm of necessity.” The realm of freedom “really begins where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends.” Beyond the realm of necessity, but with that as its ground and presupposition, begins “the true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself.” The shortening of the working day, concludes Marx, is its “basic prerequisite.” (Capital, 3:958-59) With “time set free,” a whole new ‘subject’ appears on the world historic stage “in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.” (Grundrisse, 712)