general-worker

Marx's material figure in Capital representing the extended cooperation of labor as a super-organism connecting humans and machines.

1 chapter across 1 book

The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (2023)Matteo Pasquinelli

Chapter 4 centres on the relation between Babbage and another pillar of the political economy of the industrial age, Karl Marx – a relation which remains under-investigated.44 The chapter, like every other in this book, explores the imbrication of knowledge into material acts and artefacts, also reading Marx’s theories under this lens. In a famous fragment from the Grundrisse, Marx predicted that the progressive accumulation of knowledge (or what he called the ‘general intellect’) into machines would undermine the laws of capitalist accumulation and cause its ultimate crisis. Especially thanks to the interpretation of Italian operaismo after 1989, this unorthodox passage (renamed as ‘The Fragment on Machines’) has had a vast reception among generations of scholars and activists as prophesising the knowledge economy, the dotcom crash, or the rise of AI. The chapter uncovers, after decades of speculation, the origin of the idea of the ‘general intellect’ – which Marx first encountered in William Thompson’s book An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824). The chapter explains, more importantly, why this notion then disappeared in Marx’s Capital. In Thompson, Marx found the idea of the virtuous accumulation of knowledge but also the argument that once knowledge has been alienated by machines, it becomes hostile to workers. But it was in Babbage that Marx found an alternative theory to resolve the ambiguous role that knowledge and science had in the industrial economy. In Capital, Marx replaced the utopian expectations around the ‘general intellect’ with the material figure of the ‘general worker’ (Gesamtarbeiter), which was another name for the extended cooperation of labour. The figure of the general worker, as a sort of super-organism connecting humans and machines, marks in this book the passage to the age of cybernetics and its experiments in self-organisation. As a transition to the second part, chapter 5 briefly summarises the transformation of labour from the industrial to the cybernetic age, clarifying its bifurcation into abstract energy and abstract form (or information).

Chapter 4 explores the under-investigated relationship between Charles Babbage and Karl Marx, focusing on Marx's concept of the 'general intellect' from the Grundrisse and its origins in William Thompson's work. It explains why Marx replaced this idea with the 'general worker' in Capital, framing labor as an extended cooperation between humans and machines, which anticipates the cybernetic age and self-organization. The chapter sets the stage for subsequent discussions on the transformation of labor and the genealogy of AI through connectionism and self-organizing systems.