Marx and the Robots

Jan-Peter Herrmann

Description

Marxist discourse around automation has recently become waylaid with breathless techno-pessimist dystopias and fanciful imaginations of automated luxury communism. This collection of essays by both established veterans of the field and new voices is a refreshingly sober materialist reflection on recent technological developments within capitalist production.

It covers a broad range of digital aspects now proliferating across our work and lives, including chapters on the digitalisation of agriculture, robotics in the factory and the labour process on crowdworking platforms. It looks to how 20th century Marxist predictions of the ‘workerless factory’ are, or are not, coming true, and how ‘Platform Capitalism’ should be understood and critiqued.

Through rich empirical, theoretical and historical material, this book is necessary reading for those wanting a clear overview of our digital world.

Introduction - Florian Butollo and Sabine Nuss

1. Automation: Is It Really Different This Time? - Judy Wajcman

Part I: Productive Force between Revolution and Continuity

2. ‘Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour’ - Elena Louisa Lange

3. Industrial Revolution and Mechnisation in Marx - Dorothea Schmidt

4. A Long History of the ‘Factory Without People’ - Karsten Uhl

5. The Journey of the ‘Automation and Qualification’ Project - Frigga Haug

6. ‘Forward! And Let’s Remember’ - Christian Meyer

Part II: Robots in the Factory – Vision and Reality

7. High Tech, Low Growth: Robots and the Future of Work - Kim Moody

8. Productive Power in Concrete Terms - Sabine Pfeiffer

9. Drones, Robots, Synthetic Foods - Franza Drechsel and Kristina Dietz

Part III: Digital Work and Networked Production

10. Networked Technology and Production Networks - Florian Butollo

11. Computerisation: Software and the Democratisation of Work as Productive Power - Nadine Müller

12. Designing Work for Agility and Affect’s Measure - Phoebe V. Moore

Park IV: Platform Capitalism under Scrutiny

13. Old Power in Digital Garb? - Christine Gerber

14. The Machine System of the Twenty-first Century? - Felix Gnisa

15. Digital Labour and Prosumption under Capitalism - Sebastian Sevignani

16. Artificial Intelligence as the Latest Machine of Digital Capitalism - For Now - Timo Daum

17. Forces and Relations of Control - Georg Jochum and Simon Schaupp

Notes on Contributors

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• COMPUTERS
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Employabilité, métiers et formations
• Communism
• Marxism
• General officer
• Political economy
• Economics
• Artificial intelligence
• Business
• General
• Networking
• Communisme
• Labor

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 février 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745344393
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Marx and the Robots
Brilliant. From factory to platform, from value to variety, the authors analyse the past, present and futures of work. Highly recommended for radical educators.
-Kendra Briken, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
An essential volume on digitalisation and platforms, moving beyond technology fetishism and technological determinism to highlight the contradictory nature of technical change within capitalism.
-Matt Vidal, Reader in Sociology and Political Economy, Loughborough University, London
Marx and the Robots cuts through the hype about automation and artificial intelligence to explain how technologies actually make it from the showroom to the factory floor.
-Aaron Benanav, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University and author of Automation and the Future of Work
Excellent ... summarises the entire breadth of the debate about Marx and digitisation.
- Soziologiemagazin
Stands out ... bringing a remarkably wide range of perspectives to debates often dominated by technological determinism and fetishisation. A compelling analysis of contemporary trends that combines theoretical sophistication with an unusual breadth of empirical detail.
-Virginia Doellgast, Professor of Comparative Employment Relations, ILR School, Cornell University
In this engaging and valuable collection, Butollo and Nuss show how Marx s lens on the industrial revolution can help us examine and interpret the digital transformation.
-John Zysman, Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley and co-founder, Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE)

First published 2019 as Marx und die Roboter: Vernetzte Produktion ,
K nstliche Intelligenz und lebendige Arbeit . All Rights Reserved
This authorised translation from the German language edition published by Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin and first published 2022 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Florian Butollo and Sabine Nuss 2022
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Automation: Is it Really Different this Time? by Judy Wajcman London School of Economics and Political Science 2017. First published in British Journal of Sociology (2017), reproduced by permission of Wiley.
High Tech, Low Growth: Robots and the Future of Work by Kim Moody, first published in Historical Materialism 26.4, pp. 3-34 (2018), reproduced by permission.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4438 6 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4437 9 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4441 6 PDF
ISBN 978 0 7453 4439 3 EPUB




This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Introduction Sabine Nuss and Florian Butollo
1 Automation: Is It Really Different This Time? Judy Wajcman
I Productive Power Between Revolution and Continuity
2 Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour Elena Louisa Lange
3 Industrial Revolution and Mechanisation in Marx Dorothea Schmidt
4 A Long History of the Factory without People Karsten Uhl
5 The Journey of the Automation and Qualification Project Frigga Haug
6 Forward! And Let s Remember Christian Meyer
II Robots in the Factory: Vision and Reality
7 High Tech, Low Growth: Robots and the Future of Work Kim Moody
8 Productive Power in Concrete Terms Sabine Pfeiffer
9 Drones, Robots, Synthetic Foods Franza Drechsel and Kristina Dietz
III Digital Work and Networked Production
10 Networked Technology and Production Networks Florian Butollo
11 Computerisation: Software and the Democratisation of Work as Productive Power Nadine M ller
12 Designing Work for Agility and Affect s Measure Phoebe V. Moore
IV Platform Capitalism under Scrutiny
13 Old Power in Digital Garb? Christine Gerber
14 The Machine System of the Twenty-first Century? Felix Gnisa
15 Digital Labour and Prosumption under Capitalism Sebastian Sevignani
16 Artificial Intelligence as the Latest Machine of Digital Capitalism - For Now Timo Daum
17 Forces and Relations of Control Georg Jochum and Simon Schaupp

Notes on Contributors
Notes
Index
Introduction
Sabine Nuss and Florian Butollo
Domin: What sort of worker do you think is the best?
Helena: The best sort of worker? I suppose one who is honest and dedicated.
Domin: No. The best sort of worker is the cheapest worker. The one that has the least needs. What young Rossum invented was a worker with the least needs possible. He had to make him simpler. He threw out everything that wasn t of direct use in his work, that s to say, he threw out the man and put in the robot.
Karel apek, R. U. R. (Rossum s Universal Robots) , Prague 1920
IS IT REALLY ALL SO DIFFERENT THIS TIME?
When the Czech writer Karel apek wrote his utopian drama Rossum s Universal Robots ( Rossumovi Univerz ln Roboti in the original), he could not have anticipated the kind of global conquest that robots were about to embark on. His play is about a company that sells artificially manufactured humans. Masses of these robots are used as cheap labour in industry until they actually start changing the world economy. Eventually, the artificial humans revolt and destroy humankind. The play is considered to be the origin of the term robot ; the utopia of an artificial human in the form of a machine gradually became a reality over the subsequent decades.
Even though human beings have certainly not been removed from the factory entirely, and modern industrial facilities have little in common with the humanoid robots apek imagined, automation has had a major impact on the world of work - from the highly automated processes in the automotive industry, the replacement of certain tasks by software, on to the so-called chat bots, text-based dialogue systems which replace or complement telephone service hotlines. The neologism Industry 4.0 today suggests another technological leap, given that new, more efficient generations of automated systems equipped with environmental sensitivity (sensor technology) and the ability to learn (artificial intelligence, AI) can be integrated via the so-called Internet of Things.
Although this may allow for progress in robotics, another central question in this context is that of the information flows, enriched with huge masses of data, through which individual companies and entire value chains adapt much faster to changes in consumer demand. The fields in which these technologies are applied have long ceased to be confined to the manufacturing of material goods. Automation through software increasingly refers to immaterial labour such as call handlers in call centres, processing in banks and insurance companies, and even in software programming. Moreover, cloud-based platforms, an IT infrastructure made available via the internet, allow for new forms of division of labour in the information space . 1 The range spans from intensive collaboration between highly skilled scientists in spatially separated innovation processes all the way to the fragmented tasks of precarious clickworkers.
Time and again, science fiction becomes reality , Brynjolfsson and McAfee write in their much-discussed book, The Second Machine Age . 2 Seemingly sudden or visible developments in technology appear to emerge as something unprecedented, as revolution , about which only one thing seems certain: that nothing will remain as it was. Scientists, specialised journalists and protagonists from the digital economy have been warning against technological mass unemployment, the takeover of power by artificial intelligence, or both. The backdrop to these predictions is that while computing performance steadily doubled over the first two decades of the digital age and led to a change in modes of production and consumption, the exponential growth of this technology will likely result in a qualitative sea change in the next few years. Kevin Drum is among the authors who speak of an AI revolution ; in his much-praised article, You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot - and Sooner Than You Think , he writes: In addition to doing our jobs at least as well as we do them, intelligent robots will be cheaper, faster, and far more reliable than humans. And they can work 168 hours a week, not just 40. No capitalist in her right mind would continue to employ humans. 3
Such a notion renders technology a fetish. Endowed with higher powers, it both descends on society from outside and revolutionises it - an inescapable technological determinism. Along these lines, Brynjolfsson and McAfee attribute the polarisation of the world of work between high-skilled and low-skilled tasks since the 1980s to technology itself, entirely ignoring the rapid deregulation of the Reagan era. More critical analyses likewise often trace social effects back to technological developments, as, for example, with those warnings of a looming full automation that can supposedly only be countered through the introduction of an unconditional basic income. 4
Some analyses critical of capitalism and oriented on Marx refer to the famous Fragment on Machines , a passage from the Grundrisse that Marx himself never titled as such. Here, it is asserted, as early as the mid-nineteenth century Marx already described and clairvoyantly predicted full automation as a way of overcoming capitalism. In these manuscripts, dating to the years of the first global economic crisis in 1857/58, Marx sought to swiftly sum up his years-long economic studies in the face of supposedly imminent revolution. In his treatment