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?
This is what you can call an “academic marxist”.
The first point could be boiled down to: you can only extract profit from human labor. Machines can only pass on the value that was put in it by human labor. To ilustrate, imagine that human labor is like a fire, and a machine is like a bottle of water. The fire generates heat, and can pass it on to the bottle, wich can pass it down to something else, but the bottle will never generate heat itself. Its the same with human labor generating value and passing it on to machines, that can pass it down to other products, but the machones do not generate value themselves. For the capitalist to turn a profit they need to generate value somewhere, and if theres no lavor, theres no value being created; so it stays as a 0 sum game (wich means 0 profit).
The second point refers to the fact that every part of the economy tends to lose its margin of profit over the time. That happens for many reasons, but the important point is that: give enough time and any business will become less and less profitable. What that means in the context of what the guy was saying, i cant tell
But when Marx discusses automatons, and in the modern discussion of AI, wouldn’t a thinking machine be able to take the place of a human worker in creating value?
Surely an AI can create far far more value then was ever used to create it, especially if it learns and evolves.
You can’t exactly depreciate in an economic sense a thinking machine.
AI does not exist though, it is science fiction.
Not yet. But that’s the entire point of theorising.
Nuclear weapons, cars, jets, computers, and literally everything in the modern world was science fiction when Marx and Lenin were crafting their theories.
That’s why Marx had the foresight to loosely theorise automatons (AI). Something being science fiction should not stop us from pondering its implications.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
The AI follows the same logic, but instead of being a bottle of water its like a lake heaten to boiling temperaturas. It can pass a lot of heat onwards, but still cant create it on its own
But in your example that is not a true AI able to work outside of its programming. I am discussing a true, thinking, machine.
And if you say that a machine still has to learn that information from somewhere. How is that any different from a human?
Thank you so much for simplifying the message for me! I get it now!
Could you please explain to me what the terms mean, so I can understand what people mean next time they use it?
From wikipedia:
Automated machines thus are the constant capital. And human workforce constitutes variable capital.
Essentially, machines are not useful without human intervention. Machines can boost productivity of human labour, but they cannot produce value on their own regardless of their level of technical sophistication.
Sure, what terms you didnt get?
One thing to note is that machinery does not impart value onto the things they produce because they can produce so many things for a relatively low fixed cost. Marx equates the infinitesimal value imparted by machinery to that of the forces of nature. This is an important part of why the exchange value of goods produced by machinery drops dramatically.