Ex nihilo - Martin Burckhardt

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While cartoons portraying Karl Marx as a history ghost driver were en vogue after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's been apparent for some years now that the Specter of Marx's2 thinking is enjoying the best health. This is all the more astonishing given that the conditions under which his Dialectical Materialism developed belong to a bygone, almost fossilized era. Not only has communism failed, but after the trade unions, social democracy has also entered its phase of impoverishment. And because the New Confusion3 prevails, the Chinese communists can preach the capitalist dream – while, at the same time, the guardians of capital no longer have any qualms about entrusting themselves to the god of economics, Silvio Gesell's negative interest rate. In this coincidentia oppositorum, the historical conflicts of the different communist sects seem as cryptically enigmatic as the Scholastics' discussions about the gender of the angels. So how does it come about that, of all things, the founder of pure doctrine survived its demise? This question can be taken even further as Marx's figures of thought live on in a sphere that’s difficult to reconcile with the philosopher's previous history of reception – namely, the sphere where we speak of a digital revolution with its disruption and scaling. When Paul Mason proclaims post-capitalism referencing the Wikipedia omnibus (and fills halls with it), when the gig economy sociologists invoke capital – indeed, when even libertarian Silicon Valley believes the conflict between labor and capital can only be resolved with the idea of a universal basic income, there is much to suggest Marx's prophecy that capitalism carries within it the moment of its dissolution is coming true.

One text that plays a unique role in this context is Marx's The Fragment on Machines,4 – that, unlike in his subsequent Capital where he comes up with the class struggle’s basic constellation which divides the world into owners of the means of production and the exploited – the speculative observations of the Machine Fragment primarily examine the relationship between man and machine. Indeed, the worker is also mentioned, but as a power of action, he remains substantially contourless, less the bearer of a class destiny than the sufferer of a general, even a connection of existential alienation.

He owes what he knows about them to the British Museum Library, where he studied computer pioneer Charles Babbage’s Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) and Andrew Ure's The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), which presents the factory as a new form of warfare. In Prussia, the fate of the Silesian weavers bore witness to the fact that no place in the world would be exempt from this war. Their misery wasn't due so much to the malice of their employers as to the fabrics flowing into the country from England, which – programmed more than woven by Jacquard's punch card looms – were better and cheaper than any cloth spun by human hands. However, compared to Babbage and Ure, who were fundamentally hands-on practitioners, Marx's machine seems to point more to an abstract intellectual entity than a material machine body. This is precisely his text’s topic since it captures a metaphorical, socioplastic dimension that’s denied to the engineer's view – leading to the paradoxical conclusion that Marx's machine fragment is forward-looking precisely because its author understood comparatively little about the subject.

In reconstructing Marx's thought genealogy, it’s fair to say it ascends from the abstract to the concrete in the most beautiful Hegelian manner. While the young Marx is still entirely under the spell of Hegel's philosophy of history, Feuerbach's revelation – as Engels will say – serves him to turn the dialectic over from its head onto its feet, an upheaval that doesn't make too much difference in the case of a ladder to heaven, as the method remains the same; the only change is the direction of vision. Feuerbach teaches that it is not the gods who create human beings but human beings who create the gods. However, with this, a constructivist figure enters the theater of thought – or, more precisely: becomes visible in its mistakes. For insofar as it misunderstands its own creature as an idealized other, this theodicy turns into its negative: demonology, a general context of alienation.

When the Machine Fragment was written, Marx had exiled himself in London, Capitalism’s Machine Room of the times, living a marginal, almost precarious existence. Unlike Friedrich Engels, who ran the firm Ermen & Engels in Manchester, kept a horse, and pursued fox hunting, Marx was busy in the poorest and most cramped conditions scribbling for newspapers, namely informing the readers of the New York Tribune about the events of the times.5 And while his wife and daughters transcribed his illegible manuscripts into clean texts, he often scrounged together money for writing paper and postage. Between writing letters of solicitations, trips to the pawnbroker, and the British Museum's reading room, the idea of a great work revealing the earthly god's secret germinates: While Marx was already convinced as a young man that ‘real thalers have the same existence as imaginary gods,’ he now shifts the metaphysical battlefield to that of political economy: Capital is the ‘jealous god Israel’.6 who knows no other god but himself. His description of himself as a metaphysician of political economy in his critique of Proudhon is a very apt self-characterization. That’s why the bias that Marx is primarily concerned with materiality, or Being, is a fallacy valid only if we refuse to read his texts. It isn’t by chance that his texts are teeming with specters, vampires, and objects of fetish – entities not created in the Material World but in the minds of its inhabitants.

The times were calling for a grand narrative, or so it seems. In August 1857, just seven years after the first World's Fair, there was a quaking event carrying the pattern of future global crises occurring in a comparatively underdeveloped America where the Ohio Life Insurance Company was forced into bankruptcy, resulting in the stock market trembling of bank branch windows being overrun from withdrawals by their depositors. This crash's intensity was merely the flip side of the exaggerated hopes arising from the Californian Gold Rush and the mechanization of agricultural and textile industries, most notably in an emerging globalization through telegraphy and railroads. This state of worldwide interconnectedness quickly became apparent when the crisis’ reflexion spread to the Old World with American wheat prices plummeting in England, goods being stored in the ports that couldn't find a buyer, and the population of London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and other cities were also overrunning bank teller windows. As an attentive observer, ammunitioned by Engels with first-hand news, Marx realized Capitalism was growing into a global monster that would soon claim further victims. This apocalyptic moment, the expectation of an imminent overthrow, is the Machine Fragment’s leitmotif: I work like mad through the nights on summarizing my economic studies so that I at least have the basic outlines clear before the deluge.7

With his Economy of Machines and Manufactures, Charles Babbage produced a work representing a fixed intellectual star for Marx. Marx not only owes him the separation of the power machine and computerized machine, but Babbage also brings into play a perspective combining abstract economic thinking à la David Ricardo or John Stuart Mill with a profound knowledge of engineering and mathematics. However, even more decisive than a polytechnician's intellectual insights is how Babbage looked at the English industry from the Machine's point of view – as someone dealing with toolmakers in the day-to-day, who understands the need for standardized screw sizes; that is the need for standardized Machine parts. Despite lacking binary logic, Babbage's Analytical Engine model was the structural prototype of today's computer, with its working memory, steam-driven ‘mill,’ peripheral devices (such as a bell or printer), and a processor that would execute programs written on punched cards. But as an eminent political thinker who maintained relations within government circles, Babbage was aware of the implications of such a machine for the world of work. This is why it was natural for him to extend the concept of the machine to the whole of society – an interpretation that Marx endorsed.

The most significant merit of the Machine Fragment lies is that, following Babbage, Marx doesn’t think of the factory as a refined manufactory but as a symptom of the Machine – or more precisely: as a Rationality that hasn’t been thoroughly thought through, therefore still requiring human assistants. However, the idea of unmanned factories that have only become a reality today is anticipated here. This radical anticipation prevents Marx from seeing the Machine as

Insofar as it replaces the virtuoso, the Machine marks an act of complete privatization. It is “itself the virtuoso,” as Marx says, with its own soul and logic of locomotion. Just like the worker, the “needy capital” requires food – thus, the machine must be fed with coal, oil, and the like.

Although the worker may still be needed for the moment, from a structural point of view, he has long since lost out – because everything he does is determined by the movement of the machinery. The hand tool makes the worker independent – posits him as proprietor. Machinery – as fixed capital – posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated. Controlled by others and deprived of his means of movement, he becomes someone standing beside himself. Marx had already introduced the concept of alienation in the Economical-Philosophical Manuscripts from 18449 as alienated labor – but now, for the first time, a clear cause is added to this moment of de-realization. While the rebuke of the early work still owes itself entirely to moral indignation,10 the Machine Fragment takes a further decisive step. By grasping the inevitability of this process, Marx succeeds in recording the modern drama: the appropriation of living labor by objectified labor, meaning the worker is swallowed up and digested in the mega-apparatus, making any difference between human capital – as raw material – and the means of production disappear. The concept of alienation, previously used more casually as a psychological state, now becomes the key concept, which Marx speaks about as a subordination amounting to emptying and total alienation.11 As objectified labor, the Machine acts like a thesaurus, a working memory in which human contribution has been annihilated. While Hegel saw the World Spirit on horseback in Napoleon,12 Marx banished him to the interior of the Machine’s animated monster.

Machine and Capitalism are brother and sister, or using religious figures of thought: the Machine is to Capitalism what the Son of God is to the Holy Spirit. Capitalism has materialized in it – and revealed its laws – Capital is voracious, and at its heart pulsates a machine whose sole purpose lies in the absolute increase in value. According to Marx, this is the necessary tendency of capital; the historical vanishing point of Capitalism is Machinization: The realization of this tendency is the transformation of the means of labor into machinery.13 Consequently, the machine leaves the worker's figure behind – and realizes itself in an enormous apparatus, representing a negation of human labor. By producing the necessities of life in less time than would have previously been humanly possible, the Machine creates surplus working time, which benefits science and thinking about how nature can be ever more effectively exploited.

From an overall social perspective, the worker’s exclusion has a beneficial effect – at least, where it produces someone in the form of the scientist who advances the Machine’s perfectibility even further. When knowledge is materialized in formulas, patents, and algorithms, it leads to a new Machine metempsychosis, where dead work rules over living work. Seen this way, confining the Machine to the factory floor is a misconception. Au contraire – penetrating every fiber of social life, it proliferates and transforms the estate-based community into a Social Machine. If its domination is concealed as a Social Commodity, the moment of alienation in the Machine suddenly emerges. The black box is the grave from which the dead again arise. Consequently, Marx says in the preface to Capital: "We suffer not only from the living but also from the dead." And then further:

Although this horror image appears to be taken from Bram Stoker's Dracula, whose title character feeds on human blood and has gold pieces circulating in his veins, it’s nothing more than a visualization of working memory with the ability to resurrect foreign knowledge from the past. And because this happens in a rationally cold way, the Machine resembles the undead. Next to this monster of rationality (concealing its genealogy), the worker is left without any understanding. Only the shape of the coveted, flawless fetish shows him the loss of his unity – that he is locked out of history.

Instead of succumbing to the delights of this impoverishment theory, the dialectician Marx sets out to find a good side to the demon. Insofar as society gains a surplus of working time with the Machine, it leaves behind all necessities as it advances toward that sphere where freedom, leisure, art, and science reign. Consequently, Marx shifts from wealth to measuring an individual's disposable time. A nation is truly prosperous when, instead of working 12 hours, it works 6. Wealth is not the command of surplus working time but of the available time other than that used in immediate production for each individual and society as a whole.15 Insofar as this dictum anticipates the post-materialist concept of the wealth of our time, the Machine isn't merely symbolic death but also the vehicle of a miraculous resurrection – Marx sees in it the excellent means "for the emancipation of man and the recovery of humanity from alienation."

Of course, it's necessary to understand the Machine not as private property but as a social form, as a kind of communion that connects the living with the dead, but also the individual members of society with each other.

Certainly, under capitalist conditions, only the owners of the means of production benefit from the fruits of progress, while the pauperized worker is forced to work longer than the savage. Nevertheless, as an objectified power of knowledge, the Machine marks a kind of general intelligence taking control of relations. Behind the scenes, this processual contradiction has the effect that capital – quite unintentionally – reduces human labor to a minimum,17 resulting in societies emancipating themselves from labor altogether (which raises the contemporary dilemma that Fourier had already answered before Marx with his demand for a universal basic income.) Capitalism digs its grave in the form of the Machine, which makes man superfluous. What Hegel sees as a cunning of reason that surreptitiously takes over history, Marx sees as the Machine. But this means reason has fallen silent and become a black box, literally and psychologically.

The Machine Fragment clearly shows the Machine’s eminent significance in the Marxian oeuvre. It is not merely a form of social labor, but Capital’s incarnate. In this sense, the Machine goes beyond its material body; it becomes a social system of order, a matrix permeating all areas of society. As in Blüthenstaub, Marx develops the concept of a social Mega-Machine, which had already been introduced into thought by Novalis (in his Fragments): Thus, the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the master shipbuilder, who is able to embody this idea through heaps of people and the appropriate tools and materials, by making himself, as it were, a monstrous machine through all of this. Marx radicalizes this concept so that he no longer attaches any formative idea to the Mega-Machine but reinterprets it as an extraneously alienating demon working in things. Given this paramount importance, we might be inclined to believe Marx would have dealt more intensively with the historical genealogy of the Machine – but far from it. Because if he takes it as a given that actual machines...have existed since the end of the 18th century,18 he’s merely expressing his organicist prejudicial understanding of history, according to which the machine can only be the outgrowth since the end of the 18th century of an already distinctly capitalist tableau of bourgeois society.

That the beginnings of Capitalism can be traced back to the Wheelwork Automaton and the mechanical clocks of the Middle Ages shows that this rationality doesn’t originate from the urban environment – but from the Cistercian order’s spiritual isolation, a fact which must have slipped from a mind dominated by class struggle.19 This lapse wouldn't cause any further lamentation if Marx hadn't used it to create a metaphysics of the Machine that perhorizes and obscures it as the Big Other. Connected to this metaphysical battery, Marx effortlessly succeeds in shifting Hegel's sphere of reason into the Machine's interior – just as he can transcend society with it as a Social Machine.

Undoubtedly, the fascinoma with Marxian thought has survived over the essential categories of his work. While this may already be puzzling, the enigmatic peak is reached where Marx's figures of thought explain a world that would have seemed as alien and inaccessible as Mars, not only to the philosopher but also to the theorists of dialectical materialism: Digital Platform Capitalism. But what can Marx tell us about the logic of gamification, selfies, duckfaces, or the monetization of desire?

It is precisely against this backdrop that the significance of his Machine Fragment becomes visible. Out of all the Marxian categories, only the Machine has survived the passage of time – precisely because it hasn't been attached to a specific machine body but remained intact as a Phantasmatic Meta-physical Battery. Insofar it isn't much of a surprise that we're no longer dealing with the fossils of the 19th century, but with digitally dematerialized machinery that's dissolved into the clouds: If there are algorithmic owners on one side, there’s a crowd of users on the other who feed not only their time but also their every conceivable intimacy into the Machine. These data are the raw material for a range of new products. As an exemplary, take predictive medicine, where a pool of thousands of patients’ health data can be tracked for therapy response and predictive outcomes. Every user leaves a digital trace, and machine learning algorithms use data aggregation to generate new consumer models – where the work already performed in the software itself becomes simulations of the Social Reality.

The sharing economy's promise to improve the world, the freemium or open source models aren’t in any way an overcoming of Capitalism, but rather its refinement. Whereas the factory had organized muscle power exploitation, Capitalism now penetrates deeper and deeper into our areas of thinking and feeling, and into the relationship, career, and opinion markets – miraculously transforming logistics into a form of psychologistics. And owing to the inherent tendency of these platforms to form monopolies, an ever smaller group of means of production owners can exploit the work of thousands, even millions, of people. Consequently, their profits increase immeasurably. The attentive reader of the Machine Fragment isn’t only shown the antagonism between dead and living labor but also that the Machine appropriates its interior in an almost vampiristic manner.

The extent to which added value production has shifted from things to social relationships is exemplified in how you no longer need cabs to succeed as a cab company, as with Uber, just as a hotel chain doesn't need any rooms, as with AirBnB. The only thing essential is a platform connecting customers and providers. Not only does the provider increase their cut this way, but aggregated data can also be exploited to make the business model even more successful or to open entirely new markets. Platform Capitalism isn't even the New Economy’s ultima ratio but only an early, unfinished, and evolving realization of the constellation Marx defines as the antagonism between dead and living labor. Looking at the advances in robotics in recent years, it’s foreseeable that the takeover of human labor has only just begun. Because any work that can be digitized at will, sooner or later, it disappears into the museum of work as dead work – applying not only to physical but mental activities that can be outsourced to artificial intelligence and bots. Without wishing to stray into the prophetic, it can be said the conflict between living and dead labor as described in the Machine Fragment is escalating – and that Marx's portrait of the Machine as an undead greedily absorbing living labor formulates the Digital Age’s big question. In any case, it is foreseeable that society's disposable time will rapidly increase, and its armada of superfluous workers will no longer have the ability to influence this new world’s shape – and, thus, their living conditions.

Following Marx's logic, which states that surplus value is created only by people, Digital Downsizing amounts to a social auto-dafé – the destruction of all values upon which Capitalism is based: Labor, Meritocracy, and the like. Accordingly, the Spirit of Capitalism is destroying itself, as its reliable hyper-efficiency causes its suicide. If Marx, as heir to Hegel's philosophy of history, understands this as a kind of historical necessity, the Mega-Machine's contribution here remains strangely unclear. Taking the metric of our gross national product as an exemplar, the digital revolution is hardly reflected in the statistics; given its poor growth, we could argue that not much has changed in the last few decades. If, on the other hand, we measure the increase in IT speed, we have seen a billion-fold acceleration – after all, every smartphone owner carries around a tool far outstripping the computers used to fly to the moon.

Seen this way, we’re witnessing the emergence of a foreign body in Capitalism as an incommensurable variable eluding classical patterns of interpretation. The Machine Fragment's great advantage is that Marx doesn't act as a petty Business Economist but as a Metaphysician of Political Economy – thus grasping the social driving forces more precisely than many economists of our day. Because the machine doesn't exhaust itself in its rationality but carries within it a metaphysical vitality – that is a self-evidence contributing to not only the material conditions but also psychological forces submitting to its order; for this reason, the question should be asked whether Marx's causality (first comes the money, then the machine) shouldn't be reversed. If the Christian Middle Ages retrained God as a watchmaker by attaching the ontological proof of God to the Machine, this is the reason to attach the spirit of Capitalism to the Spirit of the Machine, Protestant Ethics. This would make Capitalism (resting on the pillars of labor, interest, and meritocracy – or property) an epiphenomenon of the Machine if you could conversely discover a matrix in the Metaphysically-charged Battery that creates a society in its image. Like hardly any other text, the Fragment on Machines approaches this insight. Admittedly, it also raises the issue of who owns the means of production, then only to sweep the problem under the carpet.20 Marx thus undermines the idea of Socioplasticity that’s anticipated in the Machine Fragment and instead indulges in the conjuring up of a blood-sucking vampire that animates itself by sucking in the life of living labor to live all the more...[he] sucks it in.21 This demonology falls short of the insight that the logic decided in the Machine has an emancipatory side that tends to contribute to Capitalism's dissolution in the first place. In fact, you could postulate – against Marx, but entirely in line with his Machine Fragment – that capitalism has long been dead. What is the basic formula of the digital revolution? x=xn.22

Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt

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Burckhardt, M. – Der Kapitalismus ist Tot (Er weiss es nur noch nicht) Marx’ »Maschinenfragment« und die Logik des Plattform-Kapitalismus, Merkur, Volume: 831, August 2018, Jahrgang 72. [Translator’s note].

Here, Martin refers to Derrida’s resurrection of Marxian thinking in the plenary address he gave to open a 1993 conference on the future of Marxism with its aporia of Whither Marxism?, titled Specters of Marx, which misses all the implications of our Universal Machines and their respective Psychotopes. See Derrida, J. – Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kaumf, New York, 1994.

This is a reference to Jürgen Habermas’ article The New Confusion [Neue Unübersichtlichkeit] published in Merkur, No. 431, January 1988, in which he announced the exhaustion of utopian energies within the intellectual space of the FDR. In L’Éducation Sentementale I & II, Martin references this turn as the moment of spiritual terra incognita that prompted his first attempt at thinking and the publication of his first essay, Digital Metaphysics [Digitale Metaphysik,] in 1988. [Translator’s note]

Marx’s Fragment on Machines is part of his unfinished manuscript of seven notebooks, called the Grundrisse, drafted between 1857 and 1858, as the working notes of his political economy. [Translator’s note]

In correspondence, the term smear is a leitmotif accompanying the newspaper business. Marx does not even exclude himself: ‘I'm just getting to your article, as I myself have been busy fabricating a smear about Spain.’ Marx to Engels on July 7, 1854.

This is from On the Jewish Question [Zur Judenfrage], published in 1844 as an essay by Marx reviewing two works by Bruno Bauer.

Marx to Engels on December 8, 1857.

Marx, K. – Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Books (1973), p. 614. Available online at: www.marxists.org.

"At home, he is when he is not working, and when he is working, he is not at home." Ibid., p. 621

"The simplification of the machine, of work, is used to turn the nascent human being, the completely untrained human being – the child – into a worker, just as the worker has become a neglected child. The machine takes advantage of man's weakness to turn the weak man into a machine." Ibid.

Grundrisse, Ibid, p. 396.

The Goethean transcription is much closer to Hegel's intention, who, with the original formulation of the soul of the world soul on horseback, lets the Schellingian influence come through above all.

Grundrisse. Ibid, p. 615

Capital I, The Marx/Engles Internet Archive.

This quote is not from Marx himself but from an anonymous writing from 1821, which he quotes (Grundrisse. In: MEW, vol. 42, p. 602).

Grundrisse. Ibid.

Grundrisse. Ibid.

The Misery of Philosophy. In Grundrisse. Ibid.

See Burckhardt, M. – Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung, Frankfurt/M, 1994, where I explain that insofar as the WheelWheel Automaton’s Universal Machine enables us to organize time and work in programmable ways, it also produces a Proto-Capitalist Social Order through interest, where time-becomes-money-becomes-time. But when we ask about the origins of the Machine, its history becomes much darker – in any case, it confronts us with the embarrassment that the Machine didn't initially appear as a material apparatus but as a scripturally rhetorical trope.

Interestingly, this is a process of naturalization: While Marx insists in the Machine Fragment that nature does not build railroads, he states in Capital: Originally, nature itself is the storehouse in which man, who is also presupposed as a product of nature, finds ready-made natural products for consumption, just as he finds in the organs of his own body the first means of production for the appropriation of these products. See, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie in MEW.

Needless to say, the major Internet companies, which have been dubbed the frightful five for some time now, have been facing these accusations with constant regularity.

Between 1847 and 1854, when Marx was germinating his idea of Capital, the British mathematician George Boole was engaged in transferring the logic of Jacquard's loom to number systems. Boole's idea was about switching from one number system to another and then back again, much like changing programs on a Jacquard loom – which necessitated the creation of a meta-language. As it is known, he began to encode the logic of presence or absence using the binary signs of zero and one. Now, each of these two royal numbers of mathematics has its remarkable properties of multiplication: if you multiply a zero by itself, it remains zero – if you multiply a one by itself, you get one. Formalized, Boole's formula is: x=xn. Already, the eye tells us that we are not dealing with equilibrium here but with the threat of proliferation – the processive contradiction that Marx anticipated with the law of the falling rate of profit. But in computers where reproduction is instantaneous and teleported at the speed of light, the unlimited utility of the additionally created unit is reduced to zero, and we suddenly find ourselves in a world of abundance. Not only does the machine produce products in its image, but it also serves as a memory that kills off living labor virtually. In this sense, the computer acts like an archaeological skull or repository of the human mind: a generic memory that can reanimate dead knowledge. See Burckhardt, M. & Höfer, D. – All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse, trans. Erik Butler, Massachusetts, 2017.

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