https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/on-the-origins-of-marxs-general-intellect

The rise of the collective worker

In Capital Marx replies to the Machinery Question by casting an extended social actor, the collective worker (Gesamtarbeiter), at the centre of the industrial theatre, whereas for the bourgeoisie it was an engineer with a steam engine. The figure of the collective worker replaces the personality cult of the inventor (individual mental labour) but also the idea of the general intellect (collective mental labour). Drawing on Babbage’s labour theory of the machine, which explains the machine as the embodiment of the division of labour, Marx asserts the collective worker as the true political inventor of technology. The ambiguous hypothesis of the knowledge theory of value of the Grundrisse, is finally grounded on an empirical basis: intelligence is logically materialised in the ramifications of the division of labour. The collective worker is a personification of the general intellect and, precisely, of its mechanisation.

Marx follows closely Babbage’s labour theory of the machine in both the Grundrisse and Capital, but only in the latter does he make use of Babbage’s principle of surplus labour modulation, which helps Marx to sketch the concept of relative surplus value and to measure the productivity of labour and machinery. Babbage’s principle as quoted by Marx is as follows:

The master manufacturer, by dividing the work to be executed into different processes, each requiring different degrees of skill or of force, can purchase exactly that precise quantity of both which is necessary for each process; whereas, if the whole work were executed by one workman, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the most laborious of the operations into which the art is divided. 66

Marx reverses the mystification of ‘the master manufacturer’ by restoring at the centre of the Babbage principle the collective worker who, needless to say, becomes now the main actor of the division of labour. The collective worker acquires features of a super-organism:

The collective worker, formed out of the combination of a number of individual specialized workers, is the item of machinery specifically characteristic of the manufacturing period. … In one operation he must exert more strength, in another more skill, in another more attention; and the same individual does not possess all these qualities in an equal degree. … After the various operations have been separated, made independent and isolated, the workers are divided, classified and grouped according to their predominant qualities. … The collective worker now possesses all the qualities necessary for production in an equal degree of excellence, and expends them in the most economical way by exclusively employing all his organs, individualised in particular workers or groups of workers, in performing their special functions. 67

In Marx’s language the collective worker becomes an ‘item of machinery’, a ‘social mechanism’, a ‘collective working organism’. 68 Vivid machinic metaphors accompany the reincarnation of the general intellect as collective worker. The prehistory of the cyborg can be read between the lines of Capital: ‘The social mechanism of production, which is made up of numerous individual specialized workers, belongs to the capitalist. … Not only is the specialised work distributed among the different individuals, but the individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation.’ 69

The ‘Fragment on Machines’ did not just emphasise the growing economic role of knowledge and science but also the role of social cooperation, that is, the growing role of the general machinery of social relations beyond the factory system. In a movement that resembles that of the construction of the Gesamtarbeiter within the factory, in the Grundrisse Marx sets ‘the social individual … as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth’ in the society to come:

[The worker] steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. 70

It seems that, with the transmutation of the general intellect into the collective worker, the prediction of capitalism’s implosion due to the overproduction of knowledge as fixed capital is abandoned by Marx. Capitalism will no longer collapse due to the accumulation of knowledge, because knowledge itself helps new apparatuses to improve the extraction of surplus value. Michael Heinrich has noted that in Capital ‘when dealing with the production of relative surplus value, we can find an implicit critique of the “Fragment on machines”’. 71 In Capital Marx appears to employ Babbage’s principle of the modulation of surplus labour to design a theory of relative surplus value that recognises capitalism’s capacity to maintain exploitation in equilibrium. According to Marx, surplus value can be augmented not just by reducing wages and material costs but also by increasing the productivity of labour in general, that is, by redesigning the division of labour and machines. If, according to Babbage’s principle, the division of labour is an apparatus to modulate regimes of skill and therefore different regimes of salary according to skill, the division of labour becomes a modulation of relative surplus value. Being itself an embodiment of the division of labour, the machine then becomes the apparatus to discipline labour and regulate the extraction of relative surplus value. 72 As in Babbage’s vision, the machine becomes a calculating engine – in this case, an instrument for the measurement of surplus value.

The machine is a social relation, not a thing

In the twentieth century Harry Braverman was probably the first Marxist to rediscover Babbage’s pioneering experiments in computation and influence on Marx’s theory of the division of labour. 73 Marx read Thompson, Hodgskin and Babbage, but never employed the notion of mental labour, probably in order to avoid supporting a labour aristocracy of skilled artisans as a political subject separate from the working class. For Marx, labour is always collective: there is no individual labour that is more prestigious than others and, therefore, mental labour is always general; the mind is by definition social. Rather than a knowledge theory of labour that grants primacy to conscious activity, like the one in Thompson and Hodgskin, Marx maintains a labour theory of knowledge that recognises the cognitive import of forms of labour that are social, distributed, spontaneous and unconscious. Intelligence emerges from the abstract assemblage of workers’ simple gestures and micro-decisions, even and especially the unconscious ones. 74 In the general intellect studies and the history of technology, these are the in-between worlds of collective intelligence and unconscious cooperation but also of ‘mechanised knowledge’ and ‘mindful mechanics’. 75 It ends up being Babbage who provides Marx with an operative paradigm to overcome Hegel‘s Geist and imbricate knowledge, science and the general intellect into production.

As already stressed, the distinction between manual and mental labour disappears in Marxism because, from the abstract point of view of capital, all waged labour, without distinction, produces surplus value; all labour is abstract labour. However, the abstract eye of capital that regulates the labour theory of value employs a specific instrument to measure labour: the clock. In this way, what looks like a universal law has to deal with the metrics of a very mundane technology: clocks are not universal. 76 Machines can impose a metrics of labour other than time, as has recently happened with social data analytics. As much as new instruments define new domains of science, likewise they define new domains of labour after being invented by labour itself. 77 Any new machine is a new configuration of space, time and social relations, and it projects new metrics of such diagrams. 78 In the Victorian age, a metrology of mental labour existed only in an embryonic state. A rudimentary econometrics of knowledge begins to emerge only in the twentieth century with the first theory of information. The thesis of this text is that Marx’s labour theory of value did not resolve the metrics for the domains of knowledge and intelligence, which had to be explored in the articulation of the machine design and in the Babbage principle.

Following Braverman and Schaffer, one could add that Babbage provided not just a labour theory of the machine but a labour theory of machine intelligence. 79 Babbage’s calculating engines (‘intelligent machines’ of the age) were an implementation of the analytical eye of the factory’s master. Cousins of Bentham’s panopticon, they were instruments, simultaneously, of surveillance and measurement of labour. It is this idea that we should consider and apply to the age of artificial intelligence and its political critique, although reversing its polarisation, in order to declare computing infrastructures a concretion of labour in common. 80

Pasquinelli