Marx and the Machine Revisited: Rethinking Exploitation Beyond Technological Fetishism

Abstract Both mainstream and heterodox conceptions of modern technology suffer from ‘machine fetishism’: the illusory perception that technological devices are productive or powerful in themselves , rather than as products of global relations of exchange. A cognitive foundation for this illusion is the pervasive divide between the material and the social that derives from the dualism of nature and society in Western thought. Another is the proclivity toward scientific abstraction, as in the divide between the detached theoretical design and the concrete execution of industrial production processes. Such decontextualised design knowledge was epitomised in the work of Charles Babbage, whose principles for efficient production illustrate how similar considerations have been applied to the organisation of both its technical and its social aspects. It is also evident in Sidney Mintz’s insight that the organisation of colonial plantations provided templates for industrial factories. Paradoxically, Marx’s profound analysis of factories and machinery finally remained constrained by the Enlightenment divide between the social and the material and was thus conceptually confined to the British factory. It did not derive the productivity of British industry from the system-wide totality of global processes through which the factories were provisioned with inputs of embodied labour, materials, energy, and land from all over the colonial world. These inputs should be included in the machine as a total socio-material phenomenon. What were locally experienced and perceived as labour-saving machines should be reconceptualised as labour- displacing devices, acknowledging exploitative exchange relations very far beyond the factory.