Grundrisse

by Marx, Karl (1993)

Key Passage

The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual livingworkers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of themachinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, butrather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mightyorganism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself asthe power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital.The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere livingaccessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour processin its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital. (p.693)

Keywords

No Keywords

Themes

"Fragment on Machines", Living Labour, Automation

Translator

Fowkes, B.

Citation

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