On machinic liberation. Materialist notes 2

Introduction

When considering the process of the withering away of capitalism, it is important to clearly understand its key contradictions, the machine self-movement of which is the reason for its emergence, development and completion. Why did these contradictions arise in Europe? And isn’t this a consequence of some deep difference between “European humanity” and the peoples of the southern and eastern countries who failed to rise to the capitalist mode of production?

In other words, was the event of the emergence of capitalism in 16th-century Europe a pure coincidence, or were there certain historical patterns that took place here? Deleuze and Guattari in “Anti-Oedipus” describe this problem as follows: “World history exists only as a history of chance. Let us return to that highly empirical question that modern historians know how to pose: why Europe, why not China? Discussing long-distance voyages, Braudel asks: why not Chinese or Japanese ships, or at least Muslim ones? Why not Sinbad the Sailor? The point is not that there is a shortage of technology, perhaps, rather, the desire itself remains in the snares of the despotic state, being fully invested. into the machine of a despot? “In this case, the merit of the West, squeezed on its narrow cape of Asia, is probably that it needed peace, it needed to get out of itself?”

In fact, historically, capitalism arose many times — Ancient Rome, China, India, Arab countries, Italian city-states: Florence, Venice, Genoa. The Peasant War in Germany was a prologue to the birth of European capitalism, since it was during its course that the Protestant ideology took shape, which later played a crucial role. But the first real victory of the European bourgeoisie was the Dutch Revolution, which combined economic, national liberation and religious-ideological interests. The further course of the formation of capitalism, be it a series of bourgeois revolutions — the Dutch, English, American, French, German of 1848 — naturally turned into a series of proletarian revolutions that solved the same problems in other ways: the Paris Commune, the revolutions of 1905, the February and October revolutions in Russia, finally the Chinese Revolution — which can be considered as a single line of continuous, permanent revolution, outlining the beginning and end of capitalism as a historical formation; be it colonization, neo-colonialism and the formation of an integrated world imperialism as a movement associated with the first Rousseauian-Derridean dialectic of supplement — naturally follows from the logic of the assemblage that is capitalism, and which begins with the meeting of two streams — labor and capital.

Deleuze and Guattari describe their meeting as follows: "At the center of Capital, Marx demonstrates the meeting of two "main" elements — on the one hand, the deterritorialized laborer, who has become a free and naked laborer, forced to sell his labor power, and, on the other hand, the decoded money that has become capital and is capable of purchasing this labor power. The fact that these two flows arise from the segmentation of the despotic state during the period of feudalism and from the disintegration of the feudal system itself and its state does not yet give us the external conjunction of these two flows, the flow of production and the flow of money. The meeting might not have taken place; free workers and capital-money could continue their “virtual” existence, each on their own side. One of these elements depends on the transformation of the agrarian structures that form the old social body, and the other on a completely different series passing through. the merchant and the moneylender, who existed marginally in the pores of this old body. Moreover, each of these elements brings into play different processes of decoding and deterritorialization, which have completely different origins: in the case of the free worker, such processes turn out to be the deterritorialization of the soil through privatization; decoding the tools of production through appropriation; deprivation of means of consumption through the destruction of family and corporation; finally, the decoding of the worker in favor of labor itself and the machine. And in the case of capital, the deterritorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction; decoding production flows through market capital; decoding states through financial capital and public borrowing; decoding the means of production through the formation of industrial capital, etc."

Accordingly, the birth of capitalism is preceded by a certain preliminary work, carried out at the limit of the previous historical formation, which Guattari and Deleuze (RU) characterize as despotic, consisting in the release of a stream of potential workers, free in two relations: from feudal serfdom and from ownership of the means of production.

At the same time, the struggle is driving force of world history, as stated in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party”. However, in order for classes to fight and move history, they must first exist — otherwise there will be no one to fight. The modern classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie — did not always exist. Where did they come from?

Division of the labor and indivisible humanity

An obvious product of the decomposition of so-called feudalism and other estate-class societies is the class of personally free small owners, artisans and traders — in other words, the petty bourgeoisie. In the course of competition, some small entrepreneurs run their businesses more successfully, while others run their businesses worse. As a result of market competition, the former get rich, and the latter go bankrupt, and in order not to die of hunger, they are hired to work for the former. Thus, the former become full-fledged capitalists, and the latter — proletarians. The former do not produce anything and only appropriate the products of the labor of the latter; the latter produce all material goods, ensuring the existence of both themselves and their exploiters.

At the same time, these facts are already enough to understand and refute the original humanistic attitude. After all, the humanistic attitude comes down to the idea that many possibilistic positions are not only tightly combined with the position of the real body, but also identical to it and each other. That is, that social existence as a capitalist, worker, citizen of a particular state, member of a party or trade union, marital status, presence or absence of higher education, and so on, is identical to a biological organism.

We have before us a typical example of ideology, that is, false consciousness. And since the original bearers of this ideology are the petty bourgeois, this ideology is called bourgeois. Since consciousness is conscious being, false consciousness is awareness of false or perverse being. The falsity or inadequacy of the existence of the petty bourgeoisie is expressed in the low level of division of labor, since the same biological body turns out to be the bearer of various activity positions, and the position of the owner of the means of production, and the producer and consumer of the product sold on the small-scale commodity market.

In the book “The Wealth of Nations” (Moscow, 1962, pp. 21-22), Adam Smith gives a classic example of how 18 different operations, previously sitting in the form of a craftsman’s pin on one biological body, scatter from it on many bodies, allow you to increase labor productivity by more than 200 times:

"To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.

In every other art and manufacture, the effects of the division of labour are similar to what they are in this very trifling one; though, in many of them, the labour can neither be so much subdivided, nor reduced to so great a simplicity of operation. The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. The separation of different trades and employments from one another seems to have taken place in consequence of this advantage. This separation, too, is generally called furthest in those countries which enjoy the highest degree of industry and improvement; what is the work of one man in a rude state of society being generally that of several in an improved one. In every improved society, the farmer is generally nothing but a farmer; the manufacturer, nothing but a manufacturer. The labour, too, which is necessary to produce any one complete manufacture is almost always divided among a great number of hands."

The identification of 18 different activity positions with each other, with the position of the owner of the means of production, and all of them with the biological body is an ideological illusion of the eye, possible only in a petty-bourgeois environment and completely excluded already in manufacture, not to mention large-scale machine production, in which involves thousands of labor and management transactions, not to mention property relations.

The humanistic idea that society consists of separate and indivisible people is a projection of undeveloped and undifferentiated production and legal relations onto a social structure that goes back centuries. Moreover, not only labor operations are highly divisible, and therefore different from the biological bodies on which they run. Thanks to corporatization, property relations also turn out to be divisible into hundreds of thousands and millions of individual parts passing from hand to hand.

To summarize: the non-existence of people as indivisible socio-biological subjects becomes visible in the flight of social positions in relation to each other and to carriers, which can be individual biological bodies, their groups, machines, legal entities and much more.

From which, in turn, it follows that not only crude biologizing humanism, which deduces the existence of states directly from the hierarchy of the wolf pack, the institution of the family from the biological division of the sexes, and market competition from natural selection, is false. Equally false is the sophisticated “Marxist” humanism, which, under the slogans of equality, social justice, the fight against alienation and love of humanity, justifies small private property, decline in qualifications and technological backwardness. I wrote about other similar trends: posthumanism, transhumanism and ideological anti-humanism in the article “Theses on Critical Humanisms.”

It would be interesting and useful to examine the reactionary role of “socialist” and ordinary humanists in world politics and economics. In the latter, their role is usually expressed in the construction of models of the “Robinsonade” type, in which all social activity is explained through the work and ingenuity of an individual person who, like Robinson on the island, does not depend on anyone and does everything himself: a Swiss, a reaper, and player on the pipe. It is clear that in reality such a subject never existed, and such a representation of the social economy is a figment of the imagination of illiterate economists who have not read not only Marx, but even Adam Smith.

In addition, the difference between social positions and their biological carrier has entered world cinema: in the film “The Shawshank Redemption” the main character, working for a greedy prison director, forges documents for him; and in the course of this forgery, they manage to create a “natural person” who has a birth certificate, a passport, a driver’s license, a bank account and much more — but who exists only on paper. Subsequently, this adventure helps him escape from that prison by transferring millions to the account of a fictitious person and robbing the corrupt director.

Conclusion

From here, in turn, it becomes clear that such an expression as “human-machine system” is essentially ideological, since it is based on the assumption that:

a) Society consists of humans, therefore

b) Humans really exist

c) Humans are different from machines, therefore

d) Connection between humans and machines is possible.

Since it is clearly shown above that theses a, b and c are false, then thesis d, derived from them, cannot be true. Indeed, no connection or relation between the existing and the non-existent is possible; and since man does not exist in the humanistic sense, then his connection with machines also cannot exist. This means that the problems that are now conceptualized in terms of human-machine connection should be described in some other way.

And it will be theme of the next article.