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Can Technology Alone Propel Us Beyond


Capitalism?
Paula Bach | January 3, 2021

A polemic with those who believe AI, robotics, 3D printing, and nanotechnology will overcome
class exploitation.

  

We present a preview of Paula Bach’s book — in preparation — on the evolution of “new


technologies” in relation to the economic crisis, the ontology of capital, and geopolitics. The
original title of this excerpt in Spanish translates as "Beyond Capital: The 'Historical'
Possibilities of Technology." The excerpt criticizes various postcapitalist positions, concluding
the second of the book’s four parts. The first part discusses the legacy of the collapse of
Lehman Brothers, deepened by the pandemic, as an objective condition necessary for
reflecting on the possibilities of the development of a new Industrial Revolution. The second
part is an empirical analysis of the current state of “new technologies” such as artificial
intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, nanotechnology, and biotechnology, and polemicizes against
the various positions taken by authors from different currents regarding the potentialities,
dynamics, and concrete conditions for these technologies’ transformation into an economic-
material force on a large scale. The third part discusses the future of human labor and the
diverse positions that, in a sort of shading from black to white, develop between the

conception of a kind of “circularity” and the idea of a “radical transformation” under capitalist
conditions, whose more finished version is synthesized in the idea of the “end of work.” The
fourth and final part introduces the geopolitical dimension, fundamentally with respect to
technological competition between the United States and China, considering, in general terms,
the relationships between technology, the economy, the spaces for the accumulation of
capital, and military questions.
In publishing this excerpt, we have removed references that
lose their meaning because of the absence of the remaining text. Nevertheless, the reader
should rest assured that issues not fully developed here are discussed in considerable detail in
the rest of the book. Further, some crucial questions have been clarified in endnotes. Finally,
some headings have been added to facilitate reading. Naturally, this text is intertwined with
the book as a whole, and while we consider this excerpt to be sufficiently important to warrant
advance publication, we apologize to the reader for any issues that may be insufficiently
explained.
***
One of the great debates today revolves around the question of whether “new technologies”
constitute what are known as “general purpose technologies.” That is, are they comparable to
electricity and the internal combustion engine, which emerged in the late 19th century and
revolutionized the entire economy and life of humanity from the 1920s to the period after World
War II? Here, I draw a counterpoint to this idea, criticizing it — justly — for its abstract idea of
the “economy.” This indeterminacy masks the specific characteristics, evolution, and current
requirements of capitalism, making it seem to be the natural — and therefore unique — form of
existence of the social relations of production. As a result, a linear vision of technological
development appears as prefigured in the very essence of technological innovations — or of the
“things” themselves. This way of approaching the problem has significant consequences for the
content, or the “imaginary,” of  such innovations.
If new technologies transform into a material
force and give rise to significant convulsions — of economy, politics, geopolitics, and class
struggle, in that order — whose final results are open, it is impossible not to imagine at least the
possibility of establishing qualitatively different relations of production that would lead to an
objectionable horizon for those “general purposes.”
Of course, such a perspective lies beyond
the teleological speculations of either Robert Gordon, Erik Brynjolfsson, or Andrew McAfee, or
others who, like Martin Ford, question the issue of “general purposes.” I have already criticized
the historical narrowness that presupposes — in Gordon’s case — the idea that the inventions
of the late 19th century are “unrepeatable” with respect to the fact that they “utterly
transformed life, including production and working conditions.” 1 If Gordon chooses to ignore
the negative capacity to “utterly transform life” derived from the implementation of capitalist
technology under “neoliberal” power relations, even while correctly pointing to its limited
benefits to humanity as a whole, he is even less willing to imagine a completely new state of
affairs in which recent innovations can deploy transformations of similar magnitude in a
progressive sense. But, as the author puts it well in his approach to technological development
during World War II, “necessity is the mother of invention.” It is a question that forces us to
think that the current limitations faced by the “new technologies” could be overcome both by
the reactionary needs of capital in search of new spaces for its accumulation and by much
more “desirable” needs from the point of view of the interests of the vast majority of people. If
the latter were the case, the development and transformation of current innovations into
material force, under the condition of superior social relations of production, have nothing to
envy compared to those enabled by the technologies of the end of the 19th century. It is
necessary to insist that, for example, the fusion of artificial intelligence and robotics could
enable a progressive liberation from alienated work, a question that — undoubtedly — allowed
this “utter transformation” of everyday life, production, and working conditions on a scale at
least similar to that produced by electricity or the combustion engine.
The “techno-optimists”
like Brynjolfsson and McAfee do not even wonder about such “utopias,” although they are not
shy about imagining an oxymoron such as the coexistence of capitalism and the progressive
elimination of all prices. For his part, Martin Ford, in a vision that is optimistic about
technological development but pessimistic about its social consequences, rules out any
possibility that the pace of innovation occurs in parallel with the realization of “broad-based
prosperity,” as happened in the case of electrification. It is a diagnosis that has nothing to do
with the limits for the valorization of capital but, once again, is mechanically and teleologically
determined by the essence of the new technologies. This is because information technologies
have the “unique capacity” to replace workers and tend to create “winner takes all” scenarios,
which will have dramatic implications for both the economy and society. 2
Although this
naturalization of the state of things is more categorical and evident among these types of
authors who, generally speaking, are part of the mainstream, it also has repercussions for the
logic of the “postcapitalist” authors — although with a different intensity and in a much more
g p p g y
labyrinthine way. Let’s look at that in more detail.

The Postcapitalists
Postcapitalist thought emerges as the result of taking the most extreme “techno-optimist”
thesis to its logical conclusion. The “techno-optimists” observe a practically unhindered
development of the “new technologies” in which the “zero marginal cost”. 3 is gaining ground
and the old “scarcity” is being progressively replaced by modern “abundance,” all in a relatively
harmonious coexistence with capitalism. The postcapitalists, for their part and in general
terms, also consider that this dizzying technological implementation is happening now. Unlike
the “techno-optimists,” however, they maintain that in the course of this process capitalism is
automatically losing its identity.
Paul Mason, for example, argues that information technology —
the most instrumental product of the 21st century — is dissolving the capitalist system as a
whole because it corrodes market mechanisms, erodes property rights, and destroys the
traditional relationship between wages, work, and profit. This is why, he argues, these
technologies are leading us to a postcapitalist economy. 4 According to Mason, companies’
survival strategy is “the creation of monopolies on information and the vigorous defence of
intellectual property,” along with “the attempt to capture and exploit socially produced
information.” 5 Thus, today’s “main contradiction in modern capitalism is between the
possibility of free, abundant socially produced goods and a system of monopolies, banks, and
governments struggling to maintain control over power and information.” 6 Technology thus
emerges as an independent variable that acquires a will and a life of its own, transforming itself
into a source of “abundance” — existing here and now — while the companies, banks, and
governments persist at its side as a sort of holdover or external obstacle to the process that
ends up partially restricting it. It is an independence entirely consistent with the assumption
that innovation and increased productivity are contrary to the increased “exploitation” of the
labor force in the context of capitalist social relations of production. 7 Mason’s logical
conclusion is that we have to “build alternatives within the system” and “radically accelerate
technological progress.” 8
Aaron Bastani, for his part, emphasizes the evocative idea that
capital needs to impose “artificial scarcity” to create a market in which the “marginal cost
tends to zero,” because otherwise no one could make a profit. 9 This idea is fine, but only if
“free reproduction” is understood as a trend that operates at the margins of the capitalist mode
of production. If, on the other hand, as Bastani suggests, we are faced with a process in which
the marginal cost of producing goods and services approaches zero in more and more sectors
— with the result that an increasing number of transactions are becoming free rather than
market-based 10 — then it becomes the law that advances toward the economy being governed
under circumstances in which, once again, technology seems to acquire a life of its own and a
“personality” in everything that is independent of the relations of production under which it is
subsumed. In this framework, as in Mason’s, the “new technologies” emerge as the deus ex
machina originating in the realm of abundance as opposed to the preceding realm of scarcity, 11
— leading to two key results. One involves losing sight of the relative character of the concepts
of “scarcity” and “abundance” while accepting the idea of “scarcity” on which bourgeois
economic theory is based. Conversely, and what is most interesting to highlight here,
technology — as in Mason — appears as the midwife of an unlimited “abundance” that is
alienated in the specific way in which the private ownership of the means of production governs
it and shapes it in its image and likeness. Remember, it is the private ownership of that
technology.
In this context, Bastani’s idea of the re-creation of “artificial scarcity” — as it
accompanies an “objective” generation of abundance unhindered by capital, which limits it only
by placing a “price” on it — ends up removing the problem from the terrain of production and
relegating it to that of “distribution.” It is an issue that once again, and quite naturally, omits the
essential role of the private character of the means of production and concentrates the solution
on the need to improve the conditions of distribution within capitalism. Therefore, in Bastani’s
terms, while a world beyond work and scarcity is on the political horizon, the most urgent task
is to break with neoliberalism by seeking viable alternatives within the system. 12
Finally,
although the vision of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future is ambiguous and
seems somewhat more aware of capital’s imprint on technologies, 13 it ends up giving the latter
equal, independent status. This is clear from the fact that, in the authors’ view, how capital
shapes technologies does not depend on the private character of the means of production —
that is, on the private ownership of technologies — but rather on “politics” as a concept
abstracted from those relationships. The authors point out that technology is not neutral and is
“political,” but it is flexible, which means that it always exceeds the purposes for which it was
devised. 14 Again, we confront the problem of limits. How far can technologies under capitalist
relations of production exceed the “purposes” for which they were created? Only at the
margins, of course. But Srnicek and Williams raise the need and possibility of promoting a fully
automated society that guarantees conditions of “abundance” within the very confines of
capitalism and as a precondition for a future postcapitalist society. 15 The lack of limits
p p p p y
attributed to technologies’ ability to exceed the “purposes” for which they were conceived ends
up making them an independent variable stripped of the apparently recognized way in which
capital molds them. So the postcapitalist “first demand” consists of the “political” demand for
a fully automated society that drives the current trend beyond the limits acceptable to
capitalism. By using the latest technological developments, this economy — the capitalist one,
recall — would aim to free humanity from the monotony of work while at the same time
producing ever-greater amounts of wealth. 16 What is remarkable is that all this would happen
within capitalism itself, or to put it more prosaically, while respecting private ownership of the
means of production. As the authors make clear, that is because while total transformative
change is not immediately possible, a commitment to the totality of power and capital is
inevitable.17
Taken as a whole, this way of reasoning — despite the authors’ claims —
presupposes “neutral” technologies and is crowned with the recurring idea that low wages
restrain the incorporation of innovations that allow for increased productivity.18 This issue does
retain an aspect of reality, but in its abstract, unilateral consideration — which therefore lacks
an understanding of it in all its dimensions — leads to an unrealistic appreciation of its
dynamics. On the one hand, it greatly underestimates the present capitalist structural crisis
and its two components: a shortage of profitable spaces for expanded accumulation and the
need to find new sources of cheap labor — or, in other words, to increase exploitation. Unlike
the particular conditions that unfolded in the 1990s, these aspects “restrain” massive
investment in technological innovation. On the other hand, they seem to interpret the
incorporation of new technologies — in the same sense as Mason discusses — as a sort of
“imposition” on capital. This conception ignores both the role of intercapitalist competition as
the engine of investment in new technologies and the increase in exploitation that is necessary
and derived from that investment, reaffirming once again the idea of technology as a force
independent of the relations of production. But the technological application and the
consequent reduction of socially necessary labor time for production are resolved, under the
aegis of capital, in an increase in exploitation — although in a manner different from the direct
reduction of nominal and/or real wages. The relative surplus value is the form through which
capital valorizes the creation of free time derived from investment in new technologies. In
Marx’s terms, its tendency is always, on the one hand, to create available time and, on the
other, to turn it into surplus labor. The negation of the particular ways in which capital
necessarily molds technologies in its image and likeness, their application, and the production
of wealth in the very act of converting available time into surplus value are the cornerstone of
“technological fetishism” or, in other words, of the consideration of technology as an
independent variable that is characteristic of postcapitalist thought.
The truth, though, is that it
is impossible to imagine the “general purposes” of technologies that exceed the logic of capital
without thinking about the need to subvert the private character of the means of production or,
in other words, the conditions of existence of capital itself. It is not — and cannot
be — autonomous technological development that leads to the dissolution of capitalist
relations of production. This is not some “maximalist” whim. It is an undeniable fact that the
historical capitalist drive to minimize labor time appears to culminate in the possibility of
reproducing certain digital goods and services — including certain means of production such as
software[[Mason, Postcapitalism, 222–23.]] and even energy[[See, for example, Jeremy Rifkin,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the
Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 121–23.]] — almost without the need
to add additional labor and capital. This is a question that cannot help but make us reflect on
Marx’s famous exposition — by now trite — in a paragraph of the so-called “Fragment on
Machines,” often evoked by postcapitalist authors:

As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth,
labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value
[must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has
ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-
labor of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head.
With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct,
material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.[[Karl
Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1857–61),
Notebook VII — The Chapter on Capital
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm);
emphasis in original.]]

But, again, today we are faced only with symptoms of a similar result. It is a trend that
manifests itself in the margins. While most postcapitalist authors — and even the “techno-
optimists” in the mainstream — more or less generally recognize this, the crux of the discussion
lies in the dynamics. Unlike these authors, I in no way consider that the development of this
tendency and its transformation into a law that dominates everything can be driven by the
“force of things” itself. How capital imprints its conditions on this tendency inseparably
intermingles the questions that have to do with the characteristics assumed by production and
the place of human labor itself — as I will now address.
Abundance vs. Unnecessary Work and Superfluous Needs
Without the slightest intention of invoking some sort of “authoritative quotation,” but rather to
understand Marx’s own reasoning — which, as we shall see, seems to be sufficiently
current — it is worth quoting the complementary paragraph to the “Fragment on Machines” that
appears just a few lines after the previously quoted text. It is something the postcapitalist
authors typically do not mention even for the purpose of taking it on with their own ideas. Marx
continues the idea presented earlier by highlighting that

capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labor time to
a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and
source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labor time in the necessary form so as to
increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing
measure as a condition — question of life or death — for the necessary. On the one
side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social
combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth
independent (relatively) of the labor time employed on it. On the other side, it wants
to use labor time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created,
and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value
as value.[[Ibid.]]

And a few pages later, he notes capital’s tendency “always, on the one side, to create
disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labor.”[[Ibid., emphasis in original.]]
It
should be noted here that there is a close relationship between this “conversion” and the
particular characteristics assumed by the production of wealth. In the first place, it is
necessary to distinguish between the technological capacity that reduces the time of socially
necessary labor for the production and reproduction of goods and services — as a generic
problem — and capital’s need to absorb labor time for its valorization, as a specifically
capitalist problem. This distinction of the “specific,” in the sense of what makes capital capital,
is precisely what renders it impossible to assume both an autonomous development of
technologies and the possibility derived from a progressive elimination of human labor. It turns
out that understanding technology in terms of its ability to create “use values” — and free up
necessary labor time — is one thing; it is quite another to understand technology as a means of
creating exchange values, which is the quality that is genuinely “useful” to capital. Capital is an
exchange value in search of ways to valorize itself, one that disregards “use value” rather than
seeing it as a necessary vehicle of value and surplus value — that is, of profit. Fixed capital
cannot generate entirely new “values.” That is why capital, on the one hand, seeks tirelessly to
reduce labor power as a “cost,” while on the other hand labor represents the only source of
genuine profit that capital — with the same will — seeks to increase.[[Paula Bach, “¿Fin del
trabajo o fetichismo de la robótica? (http://www.laizquierdadiario.com/ideasdeizquierda/fin-
del-trabajo-o-fetichismo-de-la-robotica/)”[The end of work or the fetishism of robotics], Ideas
de Izquierda, July 11, 2017.]] Precisely, technology as an instrument for creating relative surplus
value represents the tool of choice for combining this double aspiration even when, in the same
process, it erodes the rate of return and historically ends up — as is the case
today — radicalizing dissolute tendencies of capital itself, as expressed in the possibility of
reproduction at “zero marginal cost” or practically zero.
If, however, thanks to the incorporation
of technology, labor tends toward its progressive liberation at one pole, and even to its direct
elimination in certain sectors, capital seeks to maximize its surplus counterpart in every
possible variant. This is a complex process that takes place through a combination of
unemployment in certain sectors, an increase in relative surplus value — often intertwined with
increases in absolute surplus value — in others, and the recruitment of new sources of cheap
labor that generate, fundamentally, absolute surplus value.[[This is a combination of
mechanisms fully verified in the neoliberal decades.]] As capital incorporates new technologies
and adds increasing masses of surplus labor time, it creates — necessarily — and subsumes
under its aegis new tasks, jobs, and “needs” that are unnecessary, strictly speaking. And in this
process of making working time the “sole measure and source of wealth,” surplus labor
becomes increasingly superfluous as necessary labor decreases. This results in an exponential
increase of a “wealth” — or an “abundance” — that appears largely in opposition to real social
needs. It is here that the discussion with the postcapitalist authors takes on its most concrete
aspect, since the specific modes of production of “wealth” under the criteria of private
ownership of the means of production are not “neutral” but, on the contrary, adopt a format
that we could call “relative scarcity” in the face of those real needs. As David Harvey so acutely
observes,
Capital has systematically shortened the turnover time of consumer goods by
producing commodities that do not last, pushing hard towards planned and
sometimes instantaneous obsolescence, by the rapid creation of new product lines
(for example, as in electronics in recent times), accelerating turnover by mobilising
fashion and the powers of advertising to emphasise the value of newness and the
dowdiness of the old. It has been doing this for the last 200 years or so and
concomitantly produced vast amounts of waste. But the trends have accelerated,
capturing and infecting mass consumption habits markedly over the last forty
years, particularly in the advanced capitalist economies. The transformations in
middle-class consumerism in countries like China and India have also been
remarkable. The sales and advertising industry is now one of the largest sectors of
the economy in the United States and much of its work is dedicated to the
acceleration of the turnover time of consumption.[[David Harvey, Seventeen
Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
236.]]

Jeremy Rifkin, for his part, reports that in the course of the Great Recession of 2008–9, millions
of American families found themselves saddled with astronomical debts they had accumulated
during nearly 20 years of “wasteful consumption” in the largest shopping spree in history. In a
sense close to Harvey’s formulation, he observes that “millions of families began to look over
all the stuff they didn’t need and hadn’t even fully paid for and asked not just ‘why me’ but
‘why?’ It was a collective existential question — a soul-searching reevaluation of the nature of
modern life. ‘What was I thinking?’ became the unspoken litany of the so-called ‘consumer
society.’”[[Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society, 285.]] In this context, and in Rifkin’s thesis, the
notion of “optimizing the lifecycle of items in order to reduce the need to produce more partially
used goods has become second nature to young people.”[[Ibid., 288–89.]] The author
formulates the suggestive idea that the combination of the 2008–9 shock and the ascendancy
of the Internet and social networks is giving rise in sectors of the youth to a mentality of
“sharing” or “the common” as opposed to “private ownership” as the defining characteristic of
the capitalist system. This ends up being associated with the idea of “extending the lifecycle of
stuff by passing it on from user to user,” but which “significantly cuts into new sales.”[[Ibid.,
290.]] While the author’s thinking — as is that of postcapitalism in general — is characterized by
the “absence of limits,” this reflection that interweaves the characteristics of capitalist
production criticized here with certain manifestations in consciousness deserves all the
attention.
But returning to and insisting on the specific question of the “useful lifecycle,” let us
go a little further down the path laid out by Harvey (and more implicitly by Rifkin) to reflect on
the meaning acquired by that increasingly perishable character of “wealth” — in terms of “use
value” and “exchange value” — as it is subjected to the rapidly changing fashions imposed by
the needs of reproduction and valorization of capital. The interest in shortening the duration of
“durable goods” to a minimum — a contradiction in terms — or reducing the useful life of
consumption of these types of products suggests the idea of an increasingly contradictory
tendency between the needs of “use value” and “exchange value,” and not only as an internal
antithesis but also as an external dysfunction. It would seem that, in a dramatically accelerated
process over the last 40 years, the needs of “exchange value” tend to be increasingly opposed
to the “durability” part of the definition of “durable goods,” and, therefore, to a very significant
aspect of their “use value.” It is an aberrantly irrational scheme that needs to increase surplus
human labor time — when what is necessary decreases to a minimum — as part of the same act
that reduces the lifetime (one of the aspects of their “utility”) of the products it delivers.
This
contradiction, which naturally becomes more acute as the time needed for work is progressively
reduced, is itself responsible for falsifying the idea in which technology is seen as an
“independent variable” that creates “wealth” in general. The concrete characteristics adopted
by the production of goods and services under capitalist command confront the identification
of “abundance” conceived in abstract terms. There is no such thing as “abundance” that
unfolds alongside a capital that coexists with it only by limiting it through the imposition of
“prices,” while creating the conditions for its own dissolution and, therefore, of a “post” world.
Capital shapes the material characteristics of wealth in the very process of production, which is
subject to property relations and not only alters the conditions of its distribution — the
prices — that ultimately result from the former.[[While “prices” represent the form that
“distribution” takes under current social relations of property, distribution — before being the
distribution of products, as Marx reflected in Grundrisse — is the distribution of the
instruments of production. That is why the distribution of products is clearly only a result of the
distribution of these instruments, which is included in the very process of production and
determines the organization of production. See Marx, Grundrisse, Introduction — I. Production,
Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)
(https://www marxists org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01 htm) ]] Therefore we must
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm).]]
Therefore, we must

seek the key questions about the “artificial creation of scarcity,” not the sphere of distribution
of goods and services where Bastani delves into the “distribution” of the means of production,
or, in other words, their private nature. Many phenomena are inseparable from the degradation
of work, the proliferation of junk jobs, precariousness, and the increasing coexistence of
overemployment, underemployment, and unemployment. These include the increasingly
dizzying creation of superfluous needs and of perishable products whose “durable” character
functions as a characteristic of their “utility” or “use value.” They include the subsumption to
capital of vast sectors formerly outside the creation of value — whether in the form of the
extraordinary increase in patents, along with the “industrialization” of what were once personal
services, among others. There is also the application of artificial intelligence to advertising,
online sales, or finance on a massive scale — a reflection of both the difficulties of realizing and
producing value.
To a large extent, “unnecessary” work is aimed at feeding superfluous needs.
This apparent nonsense is a manifestation of the “general” way in which capital resolves the
tendency toward “zero marginal cost,” but that must be understood as intimately intertwined
with the current concrete obstacles it faces for its expanded accumulation. The “dissolution”
tendencies developed by capital itself — to the extent that they increase its
dysfunctionality — do not make capital “residual” and more “malleable” but, to the contrary and
together with the difficulties for its accumulation, instead intensify its aggressiveness and
irrationality. The prospects for the large-scale application of “new technologies” or their
transformation into “general purpose technologies” are inseparable from the dynamics derived
from the combination of these designs.
From every angle, it is impossible to assume an
autonomous development of technologies with respect to the relations of production that
contain those technologies. This utopia constitutes the main ingredient of postcapitalist
thought, whether in its more leftist versions, such as those of Mason, Bastani, or Srnicek, or
coming from Jeremy Rifkin, the original ideologue of the “end of work” thesis. A large-scale
investment in “new technologies” that would allow us to speak of a new “industrial revolution”
under capitalist conditions requires that at least two problems be examined. The first concerns
the increasingly irrational way in which capital will seek to resolve — while necessarily
preserving its laws — the progressive decrease in necessary labor resulting from the massive
application of “new technologies.” The second concerns the need to resolve the exhaustion of
spaces for new profitable investment, which became evident after the crisis of 2008–9 and
that — at least so far — has been exacerbated by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Without
a relative resolution of these obstacles and with a continuation of current conditions, any
further application of technology will be partial; radical transformations of the economy are
unthinkable — including, as a couple of examples, a substantive and large-scale transformation
of the main urban centers into “intelligent cities,” with totally self-driven vehicle fleets, or the
full development of the Internet of Things, which — among other things — would revolutionize
the production of all sorts of devices to effect a qualitative fusion of the online and offline
worlds. In the alienated view of the relations of production, technology allows for the
development of some kind of unsigned “abundance” that is “spoiled” only by the “artificial”
imposition of markets and forged outside the critical and concrete conditions of today’s
economy. This view results in simplistic characterizations that end up minimizing the distorting
role of capital in the very field of production itself. This manner of reasoning is, in general
terms, embodied in Rifkin-style propositions. The author of The Zero Marginal Cost Society
recounts an almost unbridled advance toward the “zero marginal cost” of practically everything:
from the meteoric rise of the Internet that reduced the marginal cost of securing information to
almost zero, followed by the dizzying fall in the marginal cost of taking advantage of solar, wind,
and other abundant sources of renewable energy, as well as 3D printing and online higher
education courses. In Rifkin’s world, the 3D printing revolution is an example of “extreme
productivity.”

As it kicks in, it will eventually and inevitably reduce marginal costs to near zero,
eliminate profit, and make property exchange in markets unnecessary for many ...
products. The democratization of manufacturing means that anyone and eventually
everyone can access the means of production, making the question of who should
own and control the means of production irrelevant, and capitalism along with it.
[[Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society, 156.]]

In all these theories, the logical consequence of viewing technologies as autonomous is that
capital is relegated to a more or less residual place, while the state assumes a neutral
character, stripped of its essential role in guaranteeing the governing property relations. The
development of the productive forces drives capital’s tendencies toward “dissolution,” and this
itself becomes a law that gradually becomes dominant within the existing relations of
production and ends up disintegrating them in the course of a more or less harmonious
evolutionary process. That is why, even in the most left-wing postcapitalist variants, the
yp y gp p
question of which technologies to develop and how to design them is posed as a “political”
issue. This question must be understood in terms of the unnecessary questioning of the private
character of the means of production. Occupying a position that the state is neutral (according
to the logic of these authors), the task of the moment becomes to accelerate technological
innovation and investment that necessarily ends up being “neutral” itself. That acceleration
will, on its own, end up developing automation, abundance, and finally, diluting the private
relations of production.
On Distribution, Production, and Human Labor
Although we must recognize that the postcapitalist authors have a relatively greater “internal
coherence” of thought than the “techno-optimists,” their technological fetishism — insofar as it
denies the fundamental laws of capital and the state as its instrument — ends up in a similar
teleology. This teleology shares with that of the mainstream — be it in its optimistic or
pessimistic sense — an extreme underestimation of the structural pitfalls revealed by the
2008–9 crisis. The weakness of real investment emerges, however, as the most acute and
immediate concrete dilemma facing the economy today. It is an issue that is closely associated
with the depletion of the sources of absolute and relative surplus value that, under a
multiplicity of circumstances and combinations, enabled the decades of growth — still
moderate — under neoliberalism. But the problems related to human labor, to “value” and
“surplus value” as the only genuine source of profit, are disappearing in all the postcapitalist
diagnoses, prognoses, and programs. In addition to the multiple references to “labor value,”
capital’s dilemma remains focused on the abstract and unilateral trend toward the
disappearance of prices derived from technological investment. The reduction of labor time to
the limit always appears integrated into the idea of “zero marginal cost,” but because in this
definition — adopted by the majority of postcapitalist authors[[Unlike Mason, Bastani, or Rifkin,
Srnicek and Williams do not use this concept in their work cited.]] and coming from the
neoclassical synthesis[[Mason even suggests, “Let’s admit, then, that only marginalism enables
us to build price models in a capitalist society where everything is scarce.” See Mason,
Postcapitalism, 157.]] — “labor” is interpreted only in its character of cost and not in its
character of source of profit, and price ceases to be the necessary vehicle of value, becoming
completely independent and taking center stage in the form of an indeterminacy. Thus, an
absolute disconnection between “price” and “value” is revealed, which takes shape in the
circumstance that capital appears capable of tolerating the “end of work” but not the “end of
prices.” Prices are decoupled from value determinations or, in other words, from human labor
whose technology-driven reduction is, as discussed earlier, fought in every possible way by the
needs of capital. In fact, these authors deny the contradictory unity of labor as a cost and as a
source of profit that constitutes a determining factor in the movements of capital. The idea of
“exploitation” understood only in the form of wage cuts and attacks on the system of social
protection and presented as opposed to the application of technological innovation in the
hands of capital — avoiding its particular modalities of increasing exploitation — is an offshoot
of the same reasoning in which wages always appear as a mere cost. Precisely, relative surplus
value — the extraction of which is particularly intertwined with the incorporation of new
technology and, therefore, with the conditions of production themselves — embodies the most
finished mechanism through which capital reacts to the decrease in necessary labor time,
combining the double aspiration of reducing wages and increasing profits, in relative terms.
[[The socially necessary labor time that machinery frees is not transformed into a available for
the workers but becomes an increased share of surplus value for capital. This naturally implies
a reduction in relative wages — that is, the proportion of the created wealth that the worker
receives in the form of pay — in principle by the same amount, although this does not prevent
the real and/or nominal wages from being increased at the same time. The magnitude by which
relative wages decrease and real wages increase — as well as the possibility of a reduction in
the workday that is never an automatic result of the incorporation of new machinery — is
subject to the “distribution” of the new wealth created and will depend, now, on the
relationship of forces between the classes. But relative wages, as a final result, must of
necessity decrease; otherwise, the owner of the capital would not benefit from the
incorporation of new technology.]]
It would seem that the tendency to identify labor only in its
“cost” aspect leads one to think of the entire movement from the sphere of circulation. Thus,
while wage “cuts” take place in the exchange, the reduction in relative wages — rendered
invisible by the postcapitalist authors — is generally negligible in that sphere and has a clear
origin in the field of production. In the same line of reasoning, the presumption of the “end of
work” becomes — in postcapitalist thought — a problem for the functioning of capital not
because it annuls the conditions of production of genuine profit, but only because the absence
of wages would lead to the depletion of consumer markets. This set of factors explains the fact
that, for these authors, the problems of capital tend to be posed — and find some kind of
solution — in the fields of circulation[[See the concept of “infocapitalism” in Mason,
p p
Postcapitalism, 158–61; the already-discussed idea of “creating artificial scarcity” — a term
coined by Lawrence Summers and J. Bradford DeLong — in Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury
Communism, 65; and the imposition of prices well above near-zero marginal costs and profits
in Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society.]] — and distribution — and not in that of production.[[In
his later Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek formulates an economic perspective in which the
terrain of production and value-labor regains prominence. See Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
(Cambridge: Polity, 2016).]]
This form of reasoning necessarily underestimates a pressing
problem of the present economy — namely, the scarcity of sufficiently profitable sources for the
development of new investments. Consequently, it suffers from a tremendous lack of
imagination — and historical memory — with respect to possible capitalist attempts to resolve
it. It is here that the discussion reaches its culmination. The contradictions that the
development of the productive forces pose in general terms to capital are one thing; the
concrete conditions, the specific circumstances, under which those contradictions are made
manifest are something else. To suppose that the development of the former will lead by its
own impulse toward the very dissolution of capital implies — in addition to everything noted
earlier — ignore, necessarily, the latter, that is, the place of the structural crisis opened in the
post 2008–9 period and deepened in the heat of the pandemic, the notable weakness of
investment in the “real economy,” the increasingly tense relations between the capitalist states,
and even class struggle action. The contradiction between the development of “new
technologies” and the scarcity of profitable spaces for their transformation into a large-scale
material economic force has invariably resulted in the extremely convulsive periods in which
those great forces have entered into action.[[It was very particular conditions that allowed the
diffusion of late 19th-century inventions into the economy as a whole, especially electricity and
the internal combustion engine, from the 1920s onward but particularly during the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s. Particular conditions also allowed the generalization of information
technologies — mainly originating in the 1970s — beginning in the mid-1990s.]] While we cannot
pretend to imagine the specific scenarios that will unfold in the future, there is no evidence
that a “third” or “fourth” — according to the various authors — “industrial revolution” or a
“second machine age” will take place without disrupting the conditions of the endemic, global
weakness that capital investment has exhibited for more than a decade. Such alterations do
not typically take place harmoniously, as history shows. The “final” results of the crisis of the
1930s and World War II on the one hand, as well as those of the late 1960s and early 1970s
together with the neoliberal offensive considered as a whole on the other hand, were, of course,
not determined by the circumstances of those eras. Again, there is no reason to presuppose
how “history” will be resolved this time, so teleological thinking — as usual — is out of the
question.
What is important to emphasize here is that the eventuality that the new technologies
achieve the status of “general purpose technologies” by qualitatively transforming the economy
under the “laws of capital” will depend, ultimately, on the possibility of regenerating conditions
that will allow expanded accumulation on a large scale. This will imply, in turn, subordinating
the development of productive forces that progressively free up labor time under increasingly
irrational conditions — at least, from the point of view of the great majority — not only in terms
of the characteristics of the exploitation of the labor force but also in terms of the specific
characteristics adopted by the production of goods and services.
This is not a “circular” story
as, in some ways, authors such as Gordon presuppose, but neither is it a “completely different”
world as the “techno-optimists” and postcapitalists claim from their different viewpoints. The
somewhat “partial” way that capital solved the problems related to its expanded accumulation
during the neoliberal decades, together with the growing contradictions posed by production of
value, have shaped the characteristics of the economy in recent years. The capture of new
areas of extraction of absolute surplus value, combined with an increase in unemployment and
a rise in relative — as well as absolute — surplus value, in which investment in technology
increased substantially, was accompanied by subsuming new areas (such as what had been
personal services or the expansion of patents) to the production of value. This process of
increasing space for the accumulation of capital operated in conjunction with the conquest and
creation of new markets. Even so, the persistence of relative limits to the production of value
gave rise to the exacerbated “financialization” characteristic of the period.
In the framework of
this tension and as formulated by David Harvey, the law of value constitutes the only restriction
that prevented the fall of capital into total disorder over the recent decades.[[Harvey, Seventeen
Contradictions, 116–17.]] That is, it persists as an organizing factor of the body of capital. In fact,
the absorption of extraordinary sources of supplementary surplus value — particularly over the
course of the 1990s and 2000s — operated as that very restriction on “total disorder” while the
gigantic “financialization” was increasingly moving away, although always up to a certain point,
from the determinations of value. But the problem, in any case, in the fact that this “restriction”
has been consuming itself and, ultimately, the weakness and structural crisis through which we
are going is revealed in the form of a relative but growing scarcity of the “organizing factor.”
Wh t ight ll “ t l gi l i i ” i th i t t i d ith th “ ti l i i ” f it l
What we might call an “ontological crisis” is thus intertwined with the “spatial crisis” of capital.

Mason’s hypothesis is that “the real danger in robotization is … the exhaustion of capitalism’s
250-year-old tendency to create new markets.”[[Mason, Postcapitalism, 160.]] This denies — as
a necessary consequence of presupposing technology as an independent variable — the
circumstance that the particular and concrete forms of technological development under the
logic of private ownership of the means of production and profit include the technological
application itself as an instrument both of the struggle for spaces for the accumulation of
capital and of the conquest and creation of new markets. The contradictions that capital faces
in expanding its reproduction are not, in and of themselves, a vehicle for its dissolution. They
instead lead to a greater aggressiveness toward the working class and the poor as a whole, as
well as to growing disputes between states, ranging from greater tensions to warlike conflicts at
various scales. The growing application of new technologies will be at stake as part of the
dynamic of these scenarios, in which the actions of the different states — both internally and
externally — will reflect that they are instruments of the various capitals, just as we see today.
In the postcapitalist conception, this intertwined dynamic disappears, and just as technological
development becomes independent of the social relations that shape production, so too do the
state in general and states in particular, logically, become “neutral” instruments independent of
those relations. From the extreme right, Rifkin presents a world in which “the struggle between
prosumer collaboratists and investor capitalists, while still nascent, is shaping up to be the
critical economic battle of the first half of the twenty-first century,”[[Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost
Society, 285. Translator’s note: The term “prosumer” is a portmanteau of producer and
consumer used to describe a consumer who is also involved in the design of a company’s
products and services.]] while “governments seem to be caught in the middle attempting to
serve two masters, one dedicated to a capitalist model and the other to a Commons
model.”[[Ibid., 327.]] From the extreme Left, Mason salutes the capitalist who “understands that
a world of free stuff is beginning to pervade the physical as well as the digital world” while
criticizing that the “struggle between the two systems is reduced to a struggle between
business models and good ideas.”[[Mason, Postcapitalism, 131.]]
One must agree with Mason’s
critique. Throughout the sometimes suggestive pages of The Zero Marginal Cost Society,
Rifkin’s apparent naïveté can surprise anyone, whatever their creed. But Mason’s problem lies
in his presumption of technological automatism that drives the rise of the “world of free” and
the “struggle between the two systems.” To the extent that this vision, as in Bastani and in
Srnicek and Williams, presupposes that technologies with lives of their own are in charge of
dissolving the very foundations of capital, it interprets not “government” — in the way Rifkin
does — but the state as an independent actor that defends existing property relations. That is
why Mason’s postcapitalism, as well as that of Srnicek and Williams or of Bastani — beyond the
fact that it sometimes encourages somewhat progressive measures — ends up, without
exception, seeking “viable alternatives” within the system,[[Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury
Communism, 347]] posing the inevitability of “an engagement with the totality of power and
capital”[[Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, 307]] or calling for “learning to do positive
things,” that is, “to build alternatives within the system” and “use government power in a radical
and disruptive way” (Mason).[[Mason, Postcapitalism, 217.]] Thus, together with its essence,
both the material and consensual strength of the capitalist state apparatus, designed to
safeguard the private character of property, is disappears, and for this reason the transition to a
superior system follows from technological development itself — finding an almost unfettered
path. This is portrayed as an almost automatic process that must be aided by the actions of
governments committed to the paradoxical task of promoting — from the capitalist state — the
technological transformation to its logical conclusion, which is resolved in the dissolution of
capital itself.
These are positions that deny the dynamics of capital in the face of crises in
general and seem to think it has been lulled to sleep right now, at the very moment it is being
challenged by a multipronged crisis. In the same sense, these positions fall apart in the face of
the class nature and power of state(s), beyond the character of their various governments. The
transformation of “new technologies” into a true material force that radically disrupts the
economy presupposes a jump in real investment. That is, it presupposes a drastic change in the
current dynamic, in which new investment requires the reestablishment of sufficient conditions
of profitability. Such conditions necessarily require the conquest of space for the expanded
accumulation of capital along with qualitative increases in the exploitation of labor. Both
circumstances invalidate the postcapitalist thesis.
Recognizing the offensive that lies ahead for
capital, and assuming — as history suggests — that capital will fight to defend its laws with
everything it has at hand, implies recognizing a “war” in which there are multiple potential
outcomes, including the possibility of capital’s defeat. This is where all teleologies die and
where the “general purposes” of technologies can acquire a dimension conceived beyond
capital. If we return to the idea that “necessity is the mother of invention,” it becomes evident
that this necessity will not be of the same type if it responds to the power and requirements of
it l th th t th d i t f th g t j it f l Th f t
capital rather than to the power and requirements of the great majority of people. The format

acquired by the transformation of the “new technologies” into “material strength” will be
shaped, ultimately, by what kind of “needs” drive those technologies. Inevitably, if those driving
needs come from the power and interest of the masses, they will, in the course of their
consummation, radically transform the relations of production — that is, of property — and of
its main instrument, the state.
First published in Spanish on November 29 in Ideas de Izquierda
(http://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Mas-alla-del-capital-las-posibilidades-historicas-de-la-
tecnologia).
Translation by Scott Cooper

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Paula Bach
(https://www.leftvoice.org/author/paula-bach/)
Paula is an economist from Buenos Aires and a member of the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS).

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