Paul Mason

Marx had imagined an economy in which the main role of machines was to produce, and the main role of people was to supervise them. He was clear that in such an economy the main productive force would be information. The productive power of machines like the ‘self-acting’ cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive was ‘out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production’.41
Organization and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the labour of making and running the machines.
Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that – once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, vastly outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine – the big question becomes not wages versus profits but who controls the ‘power of knowledge’.

In the Fragment on Machines, these two ideas – that the driving force of production is knowledge, and that knowledge stored in machines is social – led Marx to the following conclusions.
First, in a heavily mechanized capitalism, boosting productivity through better knowledge is a much more attractive source of profit than extending the working day, or speeding up labour: longer days consume more energy, speed-ups hit the limits of human dexterity and stamina. But a knowledge solution is cheap and limitless.
Second, Marx argued, knowledge-driven capitalism cannot support a price mechanism whereby the value of something is dictated by the value of the inputs needed to produce it. It is impossible to properly value inputs when they come in the form of social knowledge. Knowledge-driven production tends towards the unlimited creation of wealth, independent of the labour expended. But the normal capitalist system is based on prices determined by input costs, and assumes all inputs come in limited supply.
For Marx, knowledge-based capitalism creates a contradiction – between the ‘forces of production’ and the ‘social relations’. These form ‘the material conditions to blow [capitalism’s] foundation sky-high’. Furthermore, capitalism of this type is forced to develop the intellectual power of the worker. It will tend to reduce working hours (or halt their extension), leaving time for workers to develop artistic and scientific talents outside work, which become essential to the economic model itself. Finally Marx throws in a new concept, which appears nowhere else – before or after – in his entire writings: ‘the general intellect’. When we measure the development of technology, he writes, we are measuring the extent to which ‘general social knowledge has become a force of production … under the control of the general intellect’.

is there a route to postcapitalism based on the rise of information technology? It is clear from the Fragment that Marx had at least imagined such a route.
He imagined socially produced information becoming embodied in machines. He imagined this producing a new dynamic, which destroys the old mechanisms for creating prices and profits. He imagined capitalism being forced to develop the intellectual capacities of the worker. And he imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a ‘general intellect’ – which was the mind of everybody on earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the info-capitalism in which we live.
Furthermore, he had imagined what the main objective of the working class would be if this world ever existed: freedom from work. The utopian socialist Charles Fourier had predicted that labour would become the same as play. Marx disagreed. Instead, he wrote, liberation would come through leisure time: ‘Free time has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject … in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.’46
This is possibly the most revolutionary idea Marx ever had: that the reduction of labour to a minimum could produce a kind of human being able to deploy the entire, accumulated knowledge of society; a person transformed by vast quantities of socially produced knowledge and for the first time in history more free time than work time. It’s not so far from the worker imagined in the Fragment to the ‘universal educated person’ predicted by Peter Drucker.
Marx, I think, abandoned this thought experiment because it had scant relevance to the society he lived in. But it has massive relevance for ours.