There is something particularly significant about a day in Karl Marx’s life. The memory of that day necessitates this present discussion.
“The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4 am Marx is still a wanted man in Germany and has spent ten years becoming increasingly depressed about the prospect of revolution. But now Wall Street has crashed, there are bank failures across Europe and he is scrambling to finish a long-promised book on economics. “I am working like a mad man right through the night” he confides, “so that I at least have the outlines clear before the deluge.””
In order to understand Marx’s state of mind at that point of time, I have used the above reference ad verbatim from English journalist Paul Mason’s book Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. The 8 notebooks that Marx wrote that night were later published in Grundrisse, which even Engels had never seen. The Russian Party collected these from the German Social Democratic Party in 1920 and later published them. Till 1960, the European world had no inkling about these writings. They were translated into English only in 1973. The times have changed; and this is the era of the ‘knowledge economy’. Knowledge itself has become a commodity. Needless to say, transactions in the world of global finance are now largely dependent on forms of cyber speculation. It is important to understand why Grundrisse is more telling than Capital, for people interested in foregrounding Marx in the cyber-world.
Let’s see what M. Nikolaus had to say about what Marx wrote on that fateful night: “When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on the cold night of 1858, scholars will admit that it challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived. It is called fragment on machine.” This topic is now much debated. That is because the directness with which Marx addressed the issue here has not been noticed later. In discussing the topic, Marx brought to fore the transformations wrought within man’s relationship with the machine. In explaining the shift from tool-based production to machine-based production processes, Marx had maintained in Grundrisse: “man inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor.” Keeping Marx’swords in mind, it becomes apparent how man moves from being a tool in the production process to a supervisor of the work of machines.
This transformation brought about a change in the working class. The machine is embedded with social knowledge, so in order to operate it the worker’s general intelligence will have to be developed; therefore, capitalism must always create conditions for the enhancement of general education. Today, a lot of machines have infiltrated the practice of rural agriculture. As a result, while a lot of children in the villages entered the world of labour earlier without attending school, now it is no longer possible. The parents of these children who used to be exempted from the anxieties of securing their wards’ educational futures cannot afford to be oblivious to this anymore. Rather, the truth is the opposite. Not only that, even the workers underwent a change. Marx observes in this respect: “handling egos was as much a part of an operator’s work as handling a telegraph key. Considerate, helpful operators made work easier; domineering,cavalier, or self-righteous ones made work more difficult.”
Marx has shown very effectively how the machine destroys the backward ego of the worker and modernises him. Modern-day communists should learn from the worker; they must understand why a dissolution of the ego is necessary. Talking of the telegraph or the self-acting cotton machine, Marx opined: “out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent of their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or application of science to production.”
This means that the enormous progress of organization, knowledge and productive forces has given birth to a new conflict. Consequently, the contradiction between social knowledge and capitalist controller of knowledge is more complicated than the one between wage and profit. Why then did Marx not follow this route?
This question needs to be raised more sharply today. Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist, said that labour will become a plaything of man. Marx had contradicted him by saying: “Free time has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and then enters into direct production process as this different subject…in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.” This means that for as long as the working class is the agent of social knowledge and of the machine, this is not possible. Marx believed, “liberation would come through leisure time”. The material basis for this will emerge only when the task of man’s daily upkeep is entirely taken over by the machine.
At that time, Marx saw that in order to escape the crises of capital,capitalists were travelling to the colonies. Therefore, when Marx started writing Capital, he identified the machine only as ‘constant capital’. He showed that surplus value may not only be extracted from labour (or ‘variable capital’) but also from constant capital. Immediately ,there was resistance against Marx; it was assumed that he was contradicting the first volume of Capital in this third volume. One understands that there is actually no contradiction, when one looks at ‘fragment on machine’. It was clear to Marx that the bourgeoisie was moving towards the colony without developing the productive forces to their limit. This is why he took up the case of India and China in his Capital. What was entirely Eurocentric in Grundrisse became international in Capital.Marx’s transformation can be explained by the fact that the revolution never took place in Europe. Anderson has demonstrated this very beautifully in his book Marx on Margin. Since Engels had no clue about this, his attempt at finishing the third volume of Capital after Marx’s death shows up a flaw to Anderson’s view. The latter raised a question about how Capital does not end with a continuity of Marx’s line of thought.
There is another question that arises here: why did Soviet Russia not follow the path traced by ‘fragment on machine’ and instead ventured towards ‘central planning’ – which is where both ‘hierarchy’ and ‘bureaucracy’ take root. Along with this, it is also time to ask today: why should man free himself from the world of production and instead work towards the resuscitation of nature? The challenge of Marxism now is to figure out how social knowledge might be harnessed by the common people in order to do both. It is for this that Marxist thought continues to be relevant and alive even today.
“মার্কসবাদের উত্তরণ কোথায় ও কীভাবে”। এই শিরোনামে মূল নিবন্ধটির লেখক –হর্ষ দাস।
ইংরেজীতে ভাষান্তর করেছেন- দেবাদিত্য ভট্টাচার্য।।
