The Clock, the Mill, and the Machine 

Technology is an interesting fact.  It exists, like any social fact, as something quite apart and separate from its origins.  When we encounter it in the marketplace, we're impressed by certain features of it: speed, versatility, even outward design.  When we encounter it in the workplace, its role seems merely functional.  It saves time.  It helps us to work faster, or to put it clearly, to do the same amount of work in less time.  It compresses time.  And so, since the industrial revolution, one of the main features of capital, which is wedded for historical as well as purely functional reasons to technology, is to compress time. 

When Marx wrote to Engels on the difference between machines and tools, he emphasised the ability of machines to remove workers from direct participation in the work being done on materials in the production process.  So that what drives the machine is less important than the portion of direct processing it removes from the worker's control.  He wrote:

"...if we look at the machine in its elementary form there is no question at all that the industrial revolution starts not from the motive power but from the section of the machinery [called] the working machine." (Marx to Engels, 6 July 1863)

He works out this new relationship between workers and machines in a discussion of the industrialisation of spinning, one of the first production processes brought under the control of machines in England's mills.  Much of the engineering employed in the mills was first developed in Switzerland by clock-makers.  The clock also allowed work to be timed and serialised in a way that was previously difficult and inexact.  Marx wrote of the clock that "the whole theory of the production of regular motion was developed through it" (to Engels, 28 Jan. 1863).  In spinning manufacture, the transformation to industrialised production occurs not only through the originating source of power---the focused current of a river turning the blades of the mill---but in the "elimination of that portion of human labour which is not merely 'exertion of power' (as in treading a wheel) but which is concerned with processing, with direct action on the material to be worked up" (July, 1863 letter).

This is how capital is able to compress time and squeeze far more surplus labor out of workers' activities than any previous system.  In this sense, strictly speaking, capital raises workers up by making them attendant on the machine rather than being directly involved in the processing of material.  And while this may not be the case in all parts of the capitalist system, or in all types of work, even today, it's true in the most profitable, most industrialised parts.  There the workers' own physical labor may, and indeed always is, required, even in the case of manufacturing operations based on robotics (for maintenance, fine-tuning etc.)---but this direct activity is applied to the tending of the machine.  While the machine tends to the processing of the materials used in production.  The workers work at the pace and rhythm of the machinery, and it's in this sense that machines come to determine and control much of the capitalist production process.

Again, the difference, the radical rupture, in the historical development of capital, is a difference in a social relationship from the past---in the case of the history of technology, not the relationship between people and machines literally (often the ridiculous, objectified way it's presented to us by the vantage point of capital), but the new way in which machine-controlled work is embedded in production.  This also implies embedding it in the basic social matrix of capitalist/worker, exploiter/exploited.

This is the real place of technology in the capitalist system.  It frees workers from much of the direct processing previously accomplished in what we today call handicraft.  Of course some of this type of work is still required in manufacture, and some is still done voluntarily either as a pasttime or career: "artisan work."  These categories are exceptions, though, and don't describe the most profit-intensive areas of production, where much of the actual work is "carried out" by machines, tended to in every case, in one way or another, by workers.  It is to the increased speed of movement of machines that capital looks for one of its main sources of surplus labor, and this explains why the mechanical basis of production is often treated better than the workers themselves.  Even workers take on this attitude at times, becoming the functionary of the machine they tend to, rather than seeing the machine's operation as a function of their presence.  

And machines don't arrive magically on the factory floor, or in an office.  They, too, are the product of labor.  They represent "dead labor" in the system, and as such they factor into some of the trends in the system as a whole that cause crises, including the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.  Still, in the history of capital's rise, as more and more "surplus" was derived (at least for a while) from machine-controlled work, the illusion arose that workers were somehow less necessary.  At the same time, at the objectified level of the system, in its "official account," we find claims being made that workers had been "freed" finally from the harshness of all menial work previously performed directly by human hands.  The basic conditions of manufacure are taken as universal, and the social relationship of wage-labor exploitation vanishes.  It becomes a system with a head but no body.  And the process of abstractification and obsfucation is taken several steps further when the death of industrial labor itself is announced.  The extreme version of this can be found in contemporary utopian accounts of the "postindustrial economy."

Of course the entire economy is not "postindustrial," and more importantly, even in those sectors which are defined by computer-based work---information gathering, processing and analysing; different forms of engineering; logistics; consultancy---there has been no real elimination of labor.  Its conditions appear to be transformed but there has been no corresponding absencing of exploitation.  Profit is still derived in these types of work from surplus labor.  And the class relationship has not altered one bit.  If anything, subsumed as it is under all the propaganda about workers being "free agents," class becomes more difficult to track, making its sudden eruption in times of crisis seem even more chaotic and disorienting, as if it were emerging out of nothing.  In the 90's when huge numbers of positions were suddenly eliminated from the administrative layers of "information-based" companies, it seemed to many as if some cardinal rule were being violated.  How can my "freedom," my status as a "free agent," mean that I'm powerless to fight back?  Of course this is the brutal rule by which labor is tied to management always---and not just some side effect, some glitch or bad after-taste unique to middle class "downsizing" (the fact that the technical-theoretical term was used to describe and at the same time explain away the mass firings is revealing). 

Predation, TV, and the Culture of Idiocy

This deception---that highly technologised national economies are somehow not still based on the exploitation of workers---is what we mean by the "lustrous aura of capital," and not simply the constant hawking of new technological devices for personal consumer use.  To some extent capital has tried to sell itself to people on the basis of its lustrous aura since the beginning of the industrial period.  The attempt to obscure the real social condition of labor is not solely or even mainly propagandistic.  It is a self-sustaining necessity of capital, of the system's reproduction. 

In times of crisis the system turns to innovation, and especially to technological innovation involving new machines of all sorts, in order to eke out more surplus labor, and thereby restore the value to the system that has been lost.  That's why in periods of crisis we have the sudden appearance of new technologies, of whole new industries, on the scene.  In the 90's it was the hi-tech and dot.com businesses.  After the '01 recession, it was new forms of finance or at least very old forms being dressed up and used in new (and far more toxic) ways.  Technology can be abstract, too.  The complex chains of debt developed in the lead-up to the banking crisis of '08 comprise a new technology of trading.  Its algorithmic cogs were supposed to fit perfectly, and like the loans on which the process was based, it was supposed to eke out more value than the more pedestrian, "traditional" methods.  In the case of the loans this meant abandoning the sound risk assessments of the past: adequate income verification; a 3-to-1, income-to-premium ratio; a reasonable rate of interest etc.  The methods developed to hide extreme risk were even advertised in the financial industry much like new technical gadgets: brilliant, dazzling, revolutionary.  Of course, as in all cases of the emergence of a new technology, labor was required.  As well as a target consumer to prey upon.   

Television was invaluable to the system in the lead-up to the present crisis.  It was used to sell millions of people on the idea of "flipping houses," a buy-low-sell-high investment strategy.  But of course this was always advertised as an activity for the poor---a "get rich quick scheme" that appealed to the basic, opportunistic desires of the petty bourgeoisie, always looking for a way to get to the other side of the exploiter/exploited divide.  This encouraged people to do something idiotic: to get into a highly leveraged financial situation, to take out loans they couldn't afford to pay back, the infamous sub-prime loans so talked about since the crash of the securities market built on them.  As the circuitry between lending, real estate, and finance heated up, whole new cable TV networks dedicated to "house flipping" came on air.  Now that prices have bottomed out in the housing sector, many of these same media outlets have turned to redecorating as their focus---always one part of the "flipping" phenomenon, but with a whole new meaning for the poor suckers who bought into the scheme and who are stuck with the very real consequences of a mortgage they can't afford to pay and a house that nobody wants to buy.  Many of them are properties that few people ever wanted to buy, no matter how much of a "makeover" they underwent, since they're located in low income areas where property prices are always depressed.

The use of television for predation is nothing new.  Remember in the early 80's when Reagan, along with plenty of help from a cynical television-driven media, successfully portrayed himself as a defender of all that was good and true by firing thousands of air-traffic employees for exercising their right to strike.  The fact that their job involved risk to the public is insipid as a reason for making them an exception to basic bargaining protocol.  The same could be said of any truck driver.  But one is reluctant to point this out to a TV news reporter lest one receive the inevitable response: "Well, then, the president should be able to fire striking Teamsters, too...."  The willful idiocy of opportunism only runs in one direction. 

Still the point is the same: what the spectacle of TV represents is not so important as what the spectacle does for the system.  It becomes vital during a crisis because the system has become highly centralised and financialised, and this type of system needs a constant source of value besides diminishing returns on its investment in labor.  With colonial slave labor, and all types of uncapitalised, vagrant and agricultural labor, exhausted or nearly picked clean, and the utopian project of globalisation of trade under threat by multiple anticapitalist movements (indigenous, anti-globalist, ecological, and local labor movements to name only a few groupings), the system has to find other, more "artificial" and somewhat more indirect means to exploit labor.  Its entire organic structure is breaking down.  TV, with its desperate, extreme, infomercial version of everything from real estate, to politics, to reality itself (as in "reality TV"), provides a front-row view on the psychotic social-economic collapse.

As predation has become more obvious, capital-as-spectacle has had to slide elsewhere to give people an experience of feeling "free" of its influence.  These are the moments of joy we indulge in online: pornography, self-entertainment, celebrity culture taken to disturbing, intrusive extremes, up to and including the real-time global tracking of our favorite celebrity commodities.  Freedom here is not free, though, any more than hate is love or war is peace . . .