In recent years, and especially due to the technical progress of American industry, whose economy is less burdened by the rapid renewal of fixed plants that are still productive and therefore costly, there has been increasing talk of automatism in production, which has taken on the fine name of automation. It seemed to be one of the giant novelties of our time, of the second post-war period, the replacement at an overwhelming pace of human labour by the action of mechanical automatons devoid of life and thought that direct themselves, self-regulate and self-guide. Socially, the problem arose, as if it were new and original, of the reduction of the industrial workforce in drastic proportions, and of the predictably high unemployment that would have arisen from it, preventing large masses of men from earning money and spending it, consequently, also to buy the enormous mass of products churned out by the inanimate installations of the factories, almost deserted but perpetually turning to churn out products for the market.

Equal bewilderment has gripped, on one side, the economists of capitalism and those of the opposite band, of false Russian socialism. At an equal distance from the revolutionary science of Marxism, they did not know that this was first of all a problem that had already been posed; and therefore already solved by a highroad, quite different from the washed-out methods of bourgeois ‘intelligence’. In the jargon of this decadent society, a problem is any old nuisance, a new ‘landslide’ added to the daily grind, which one has to shrug off and get rid of with whatever string of clichés, so that after having freed oneself of it without disturbance to one’s own petty affairs, one can boast that it has been ‘resolved’.

The capitalists this time have fared better by putting forward the sacramental ‘reduction of production costs’ that would be the salvation of scientific and mechanical civilisation, and would lend itself, in their crooked formulas, to raising the average standard of living, with the illusion of lulling all class conflict.

It will be easy to silence them and their clumsy, emulative pursuit of the Soviet formula of ‘full employment’, and lead their doctrines on the democratisation of capital to absurdity. An economic-legal democracy has, for centuries, been a historical absurdity; the only form that could in the abstract correspond to it is that of the productive micro-firm, of the sharing out of the instruments of production among individual workers. Worse than the gallows itself.

But those who have remained most embarrassed by the prospect of totalitarian automatic production are the innumerable second-rate Marxists, who abound even among the not-so-dense ranks of those not tied to Stalinism and post-Stalinism. How will we, these poor men said to each other, maintain that all the value that society adds in each cycle of its endowment derives from the labour of wage-earners, when production will no longer require any labour or any effort whatsoever, not only of a muscular nature, but not even of an intellectual one, since the machines are supplemented by devices that take the trouble to calculate and design everything themselves? The law of value-generating labour, the doctrine of surplus value, and our entire critical construction of the capitalist economy and form of production will fall...

Now the fact is this, although the immediatists, who are the ones who pedestrianly conflate the daily subtraction of surplus value to the individual worker, this accounting antagonism enclosed in an envelope, with the clash between two epochs, two forms of production, two worlds – which has a logical link with the pecuniary episode, but dialectically mediated by revolutionary passages on antitheses of a far greater breadth of scope, across immense arcs of times, of spaces, and of modes – have condemned themselves to not understanding it in order to run after philosophies of exploitation and of the autonomy of execution from the manager; the fact is this: that we have been waiting for it for a century.

Onto the scrapheap the laws of value, of equivalent exchange, and of surplus-value: with their fall into nothingness falls the very form of bourgeois production. The former are valid as long as the latter lives, and when science and technology, however millenary the class monopoly, shatter them, it will only be the supreme example of the revolt of the productive forces against the forms that must collapse.

This doctrine of automatism in production amounts to our entire deduction of the necessity of communism founded on the phenomena of capitalism.

We will draw it from Marx’s original text cited above [Grundrisse]: but it is clear by itself and has been clear for some time.

We could draw our entire demonstration from the ‘official’ text of Capital by quoting the chapters on the detail labourer and his implements, manufacture, and machinery and modern industry (a subject treated at the Rome meeting, 5 July 1952); but the text we have now is particularly expressive, and without any cause for restraint in showing the close link between the present internal dynamic of capitalism and its revolutionary overturning, driven not by the fact that it is ‘too exploitative’, but by the necessary, violent generation of a form that negates it head on and overturns all its characteristics.

In order to avoid misunderstandings in relation to the usual insane claim that Marxism is a doctrine ‘in continuous evolution’, and that the texts of different years have indulged in constructions later forgotten (!) or replaced, it will be good to establish that, in the thousand pages in question, the drafting follows the same line as that of Capital and all the same theories are developed there in the same substance and form, with the same exact terminology and the same mathematical expressions; and with the developments of Books II and III of Capital as collected by Engels. From the pages of the chapter ‘On Capital’ (which has the same sections as the Work published later: Process of Production of Capital; Process of Circulation of Capital; Capital as Fructiferous – Transformation of Surplus-Value into Profit; Appendix on the History of Economic Doctrines) it would be easy to quote many in which the same expression dealt with in regard to the three terms forming circulating capital (constant, plus variable, plus surplus-value equals total product) is given in narrative, arithmetic, and algebraic form.

Thus, the passage on automatic production is ‘valid’ not only for Marxist thought in 1857, but also for that of Marx up to his death, and for Marxists up to 1957 and beyond.

We start on page 584 of the Moscow German edition.

‘But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the Machine, or rather, an automatic System of machinery’.

(Let us here make the following arrangement with the reader. We reserve the right to make our own comments, but the underlining is always that of the original text, and we prefer to adopt the capitalisation of nouns in the German style).

The text continues. ‘(System of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate Form [of the System], and alone transforms Machinery into a System), [the System is] set in motion by an Automaton, a moving Power that moves itself; this Automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the Workers themselves are cast merely as [the] conscious Linkages [of the Automaton itself]. In the Machine, and even more in Machinery as an automatic System, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the Means of Labour, is transformed into an Existence adequate to fixed Capital and to Capital as such; and the Form in which it was adopted into the production Process of Capital, the direct Means of labour, is superseded by a Form posited by Capital itself and corresponding to it’.

The author has here established that the means of labour, having become fixed capital, has completely lost the character it had in immediate production (or individual production, to which those whom we call immediatists and gallows-mongers would like to retreat). ‘[The machine’s] distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker’s activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine’s work, the machine’s action, on to the raw material – supervises it and guards against interruptions’.

We cannot let the eloquence of this passage pass without pointing out for a moment the pitiable state of those who quibble: after the fact of modern automatism, one must ‘revise’ all Marxist positions!

‘Not as with the Instrument, which the Worker animates and makes into his Organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the Machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the Worker, is itself the Virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. [instrumental materials], just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The Worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite’.

And here caution. ‘The Science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an Automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the Machine as an alien Power, as the Power of the Machine itself’.

On these words written a century ago, when the ‘ideas of the 18th century’ of which Marx speaks in his Introduction had an immense power of suggestion over the world, and in any case constituted an undeniable historical stage still threatened by the returns of the Restorations, let all those who prostrate themselves today before the worship of Science in general reflect, those who invite the workers to join, and instil in them a reverential fear of it, forgetting that it is, above all, Science and technological superiority that is the monopoly of an exploiting minority; and what is more, as long as the relations of production remain mercantile, monetary and wage-based, the whole System of automatic machinery forms a monster that crushes under the weight of its oppression an enslaved and unhappy humanity, and this is the Monster that dominates the whole picture traced by Marx of the present society, Capital itself, depersonalised, and even ‘declassed’ as in our frequent conclusions, in response to the delirium that in a third of the world the Enemy Class, the Bourgeoisie, has disappeared.

The fundamental opposition of the Marxist system is in evidence here. Every value present in capitalist society is derived from human labour. When we assume we are in a fully capitalist economy, all value is capital, and under this historical expression we denote all the ‘wealth’ of a bourgeois society, the category around which the classical economists of the new regime began to work. All wealth, they said, is such insofar as it is capital, and has value insofar as it is an accumulation of human labour.

At the historical beginning of modern bourgeois society, a ‘scientific’, or if we want to call it ideological, temporary alliance took place between the then new, virgin, revolutionary bourgeois economic science and the budding theoretical economics linked to the new proletarian class that was making its entry into history in the wake of the bourgeoisie. The two ideologies had, at that juncture, a common enemy, namely the social ideology of the ‘anciens régimes’, arisen from the stages of production that preceded capitalist manufacturing and its supreme form, mechanical industry. The pre-industrial figurations of the Physiocrats, as in the famous Tableau of Quesnay (see our series on the agrarian question) place the source of wealth only in nature (physis in Greek) and at most in the encounter between human labour and natural power: agricultural cultivation.

An increase in wealth can, in the Tableau, only be expected from the development of agriculture, and those of landowners and tillers of the soil are indicated as the productive classes. In a single class called the unproductive, Quesnay relegated to a bundle only those who were in effect, socially and politically, the allies of the time in the Great Revolution: industrialists and workers. In every production of inorganic commodities the value, the wealth, passed on without giving increments or rents; one found at the end of the cycle as much monetary wealth as had been given up.

Bourgeois and proletarians, before disputing among themselves over the provenance of the increments of wealth, attacked the Physiocratic vision together and made, with good reason, value, wealth – and, in modern terms, capital – arise only from manufacture or, in the countryside, from agrarian industrial enterprise, with the bourgeois tenant-farmer and the rural wage-earner. They charged the landed rentier with being merely the arbitrary extractor of a part of the surplus labour generated in the bourgeois enterprise.

An identical position is held by the school of Ricardo and that of Marx with regard to the Mercantilists, who, at the dawn of capitalist forms, theorised that the growth of general wealth found its source not in production, rural or manufacturing, but in the exchange of commodities on the domestic and above all international market, where vast profits were generated, as was apparent in the centuries of colonialism and commercial wars. Against these, too, the counter-attack of Ricardo and his followers finds Marx in agreement: exchange, circulation must be upheld as unproductive against the Mercantilists, as much as landed property was against the Physiocrats.

As in the history of the class struggle, the doctrinal war between classical bourgeois economics and Marxist economics dialectically began as an alliance: on the capitalist side, the solidarity of the wage-earner with enterprise capital was thought to be eternal; on the Marxist side, it was known from the outset that the solidarity was nothing but contingent and the antagonism defined from that very moment in its inevitable historical course: Marx defended Ricardo’s theses and his laws: value arising only from labour, increase in value, wealth, and capital arising from surplus value, equivalence in the general exchange of all commodities. But Ricardo, thinking as an 18th century Enlightenment man, maintained that these laws were the finally achieved ‘natural order of human society’; Marx knew and established for all time that these were the laws of a great historical transitional phase, the capitalist mode of production, which, as it had had a beginning, would have an end, and that the laws of the future economy would be quite different. Marx defended the real characteristics of capitalist industrial society in their ‘specific differences’ from reactionary assumptions. Ricardo defended them as the permanent human ideal of economic order; and he could not yet discern the taking-shape of the second alignment, the later antagonistic alignment between bourgeois and proletarians, between capitalists and communists.

It would be vain to call oneself a Marxist if one did not understand this double position, whereby making the law of the exchange of value and surplus value fit the phenomena of the bourgeois world and time, directly means making the victory of the proletarian and communist programme coincide with the fall of these laws proper to a transitory mode of production and economy.

For the economists of the classical Ricardian school, when all of the wealth of society has taken the form of capital, it is admitted that capital can only increase itself, the basic phenomenon of all modern societies, through the contribution of labour only partially consumed, at most arguing that such a useful renunciation of consumption or abstinence can also be practised by members of the entrepreneurial class.

In them there is already the clear distinction between fixed capital and circulating capital, and Marx studied in depth all the ideas of the nineteenth century and earlier on this point. With them one can well say that both fixed capital and circulating capital are employed, insofar as the production of commodities is involved. But if it is a question of increasing the production of commodities, even if only because of the increase in population, one enters into the process of production of capital, which is what is mastered in Marx’s theoretical construction for the first time in a complete manner. So Marx says that fixed capital does not produce additional capital (or value), but this only arises from circulating capital, and from that part of it which is variable capital, cyclically reserved for the purchase of labour power.

All capital and value are, in their origin, human labour. But only the part of circulating capital that we define as variable is actual, living labour.

We know that constant capital circulates, given that it alternately takes the money-form in the cycle of purchasing raw materials, auxiliary materials, renewals of fixed plants for the worn-out part, and then is re-extracted from the sale price of products. But it is only labour capital, i.e. the wage bill, that enters into circulation against a sum of money, and emerges from it increased by surplus value. This part of capital is active, fertile, alive, or living labour, both insofar as it is the work of the living factor of production, man, and insofar as fertilisation and generation are characteristic of that which lives.

Constant capital that circulates, and fixed capital that is also quantitatively constant but does not circulate in successive cycles, but only once at the time of the construction of the plant or machine, does not cease to be a value, which cannot generate other value, but equally comes out of the labour of anterior cycles. Marx therefore habitually calls it dead labour, frozen labour, and in the passage that concerns us objectified (elsewhere materialised) labour or vergegenständlichte Arbeit. In German Gegenstand means Object; that which stands against (gegen) the subject.

We are reading in Marx the novel of objectified labour.

In agreement with Ricardo, and in spite of the economists of his time whom he and Marx thoroughly routed, and of economists of our own time who raise vain defences of causes lost and adjudicated, Fixed Capital, and first and foremost the Machine, is relegated to the sterile value, incapable of begetting, devoid of life, of soul, inanimate, as Marx says elsewhere.

We will attribute every march of the accumulation of value to value, of the play of living labour, a variable part of circulating capital, an inexhaustible source of fecundity and generator of new and wider life.

By denying Ricardo’s contemporary counter-revolutionaries, who flirted with the feudal Middle Ages, and our own contemporary counter-revolutionaries, who flirt with the now decrepit society of Capital, every right to give life to objectified labour, to the mechanical Automaton, we dishonour it for the same reason that Ricardo dishonoured it; but the dialectical greatness of our construction is that once the cycle that Ricardo saw as eternal is closed, in a new revolutionary cataclysm, the cold monster of materialised labour changes its face, its task, and its destiny; it recovers (if we dare say so in the presence of a stupendous formulation whose most dazzling lights Marx himself later thought to dim) a new and human soul, it rises from the weeping and mourning of generations crushed by class systems, it breaks the curse that bound Science and social oppression and lets the bond tighten between the knowledge of the species, conquered in an unspeakable series of struggles, and the secure well-being of social man, of species-man, free from misery, from individualist, privatist, subjectivist infamies. Perhaps Karl Marx even had to pay a tribute to romanticism on our behalf if he made a dead object of living labour, and then redeemed it with the language of a prophet as a gift of happiness and life. But that was not Hegelian coquetry, as he later wrote without regretting it, but rather powerful experimental science, since today with his pages we respond to the shortcomings and ravings of a social form that has reached putrefaction. And they vibrate with truth, and although a century old, they send forth a current light unknown to the elucubrations of this time.

Let it be understood by us and by the reader that fixed capital, machine, automated system of machinery, production plant, instrument of production in capitalist form, objectivised or dead labour are, in the course of the discussion, equivalent terms.

Marx’s text will have to be published in its entirety in due course, which we cannot do now; and we will limit ourselves to extracting a few passages from it, giving them an order that, if it facilitates the dialectic, detracts from the light and power of the exceptional exposition. But we do not see, in our task as strict disseminating disciples, any other way to get around the eternal reef: Marx is too difficult; the texts cannot be understood; the author changes his thesis from page to page; the development is dense with intriguing contradictions (!!). In fact, the play of the dialectic here is so tight and high-potential that the character we have called such for the sake of simplification only, Objectified Labour or Fixed Capital, appears in almost every sentence as both the white protagonist and the black one, the exterminator and the redeemer.

We will bring it to the proscenium, as poor stagehands, first in the sinister guise it has in the capitalist period and under the capitalist regime. Afterwards, we will make it reappear amidst the now unstifleable fanfares of the Communist Revolution.

‘The Appropriation of Living Labour by Objectified Labour (...) lies in the concept of Capital’. ‘Objectified Labour materially confronts Living Labour as a Ruling Power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, (...) in the real Production Process itself’.

‘The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the [Valorisation] Process of Capital’. ‘[Fixed Capital] is a power which, as the Appropriation of Living Labour, is the Form of Capital’.

These propositions, of which we have only changed the order, are easy to understand if read by referring back to the historical transition that is present in the mind of the writer. In our case, the transition from artisan labour to the associated labour of the mechanical industry. In the former, what is the ‘form of appropriation’? (The reader may here compare the writing ‘Property and Capital’ in the journal Prometeo, Series I). The artisan producer is the owner of his instrument of labour: this means that he is also the owner of the workplace and the raw material he transforms (he has enough money in the cycle to buy it). The consequence is that the individual labourer holds the manufactured product, sells it wherever he wants, and makes the price of the commodity-product all his own. This is a true labour process, i.e. a process of production of commodities.

But in this form, very soon the productive forces cannot develop and we move on to large machinery. The producer is not the owner of the machine, nor of the factory, nor of the raw material; he exchanges his labour power, his sole possession, for a wage such as to feed him and render him fit to breed (proletariat). Consequence: who appropriates the product? Perhaps the worker? No, not even for a crumb: it all goes, the easy propaganda answer is obvious, to the capitalist, the master, the bourgeois. Marx too will make use of this many times. But here his construction rises to those heights where every concession to imbecile success by the path of least effort is disdained. The legal formula is despised. Whoever appropriates the capital produced by living labour (surplus-value) is not presented as a human person nor as a human class: it is the Monster, Objectified Labour, Fixed Capital, monopoly and fortress of the Capital Form in itself, a Beast without soul and even without life, but which devours and kills living labour, the labour of the living and the living themselves.

Why do we measure this Capital par excellence by the cyclical ‘product’ (that turnover of accountants)? Because it is the entire product that is appropriated by the man, corpse, or beast, or Thing (the Company!), which holds the proprietary monopoly of Fixed Capital.

Here whoever has weak dialectical kidneys will run the risk of suffocating in immediatism. Will the claim not be the re-transformation of the process of production of Capital into a process of Labour? Immediate Labour is in fact that which controls, dominates (instead of being dominated by the machine, and finally by the blood-curdling AUTOMATON) the Raw Material, the Tool and the Manufacture, the Product.

But to fall back into this, even when monetary fictions were to replace the material disposal over what is today constant Capital and Product, is but to turn the wheel of history backwards, to condemn the ‘free’ worker to spending more hours of sacrifice for the same standard of living.

Now the historical and human problem is to reduce working hours, necessary labour. In the artisan system there is no explicit surplus labour (and that is precisely why society is closed within narrow limits) but necessary labour is extremely high, higher than the entire working day in the mechanical industrial system.

From the artisanal to the industrial form, the transition has been made; no one can dispute this and make the Luddite revolts against machines a programme for the development of Science and Technology. What, in Marxism, is the relationship between theoretical and applied Science, and objectified Labour, between Science and Capital?

Marx has a formidable expression here: the ‘social brain’. Technology first, then Science, is passed on from generation to generation as an endowment of Social Man, of the Species, which in all its individuals has worked and collaborated on it. In our construction, the Prophet, the Priest, the Discoverer, the Inventor, move towards an equal liquidation. Social Man in these pages is also called Social Individual, the meaning of which is not ‘human person’ as a cell of Society; but instead human society treated as a single organism living a single life (in this form the naive and sublime myth of Immortality attributed by childish human thought to the individual enters science, just as today Law and Economics want to sustain themselves on the individual and are heading for similar collapse). This organism, whose Life is History, has its own Brain, an organ built from its millenary function, and which is not the legacy of any Skull or Cranium. The Knowledge of the species, Science, far more than Gold, is not for us private legacies, and in Potential belong intact to social Man.

Therefore our text refers to the fate of human Science under the miserable mercantile regime which still, across the Planet, suffocates it.

‘The accumulation of [Science] and of skill, of the general Productive Forces of the Social Brain, is thus absorbed into Capital, as opposed to Labour, and hence appears as an Attribute of Capital, and more specifically of Fixed Capital, in so far as it enters into the Production Process as a Means of Production proper’.

Here Marx observes that Fixed Capital appears as the most adequate form of Capital in general ‘in so far as capital’s relations with itself are concerned’. But, ‘as regards Capital’s External relations, it is Circulating Capital which appears as the adequate Form of Capital, and not Fixed Capital’. Socially, politically, historically, as a dominant Power, Capital takes the form of Machinery, of fixed Capital. Economically, as a measure in the process of Production of Capital from Capital (id est from Living Labour) it has its principal (adequate) form in Circulating Capital, which equals the overall social Product of a cycle. Having again confirmed this dialectical position in Marx’s words, let us return to the character of Fixed Capital.

‘[I]n so far as the means of labour, as a physical thing, loses its direct form, becomes Fixed Capital, and confronts the worker physically as capital. In Machinery, [Science] appears as alien, external to [the Worker]; and Living Labour [as] subsumed under self-activating Objectified Labour. The Worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [Capital’s] requirements’.

Capitalism is still on the scene, but this is not its entire shame. ‘[T]he entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skilfulness of the worker (artisan), but rather as the technological application of Science. [It is,] hence, the tendency of Capital to give Production a Scientific character; direct labour [is] reduced to a mere moment of this process’. ‘[C]apital (...) presupposes a certain given historical development of the productive forces on one side – Science too [is] among these Productive Forces – and, on the other, [Capital] drives and forces them further onwards’.

We close this part, historically limited to capitalism, with a final description of the link between Science and Capital.

‘In Machinery, the appropriation of living Labour by Capital achieves a direct reality in this respect as well: It is, firstly, the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws, arising directly out of Science, which enables the machine to perform the same labour as that previously performed by the worker. However, the development of machinery along this path occurs only when large industry has already reached a higher stage, and all the Sciences have been pressed into the service of Capital (...) Invention then becomes a Business, and the application of Science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it’ (1857 or 1957?). ‘Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to Capital in the form of the machine, and his own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers’ struggle against machinery. What was the Living Worker’s Activity becomes the Activity of the Machine. Thus the Appropriation of Labour by Capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; Capital absorbs [Living] Labour into itself – “as though its Body were by Love possessed”’.

We will choose no other images of the capitalist relationship between Dead Labour and Living Labour after this one of the monstrous Amplexus.

Marx introduces us for the first time to the revolutionary reversal of this obscene function of the Monster-Automaton with a lapidary title, which crushes forever (O Soviet editors of 1953, did your doctrinal deafness extend to the whistling of firing squad bullets?) the theoretical dementia of the Divine Stalin; and which is this: ‘CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE FOUNDATION OF BOURGEOIS PRODUCTION (VALUE AS MEASURE) AND ITS DEVELOPMENT’.

So, in the post-bourgeois society, it will not be a matter of ‘measuring value justly according to labour time’ as the simpletons believe, but it will be a matter of doing away with value as measure (WERTMASS).

The text of the paragraph repeats this no less crudely. ‘The exchange of Living Labour for Objectified Labour – i.e. the positing of Social Labour in the Form of the Contradiction of Capital and Wage Labour – is the ultimate development of the Value-Relation and of Production resting on Value’. Not only in the development we present is the measure of exchange value drawn from labour time only valid for a wage-based and antagonistic economy, but the coming twilight of the measure of value from labour is potentially prepared for by the very appearance of mechanical industry, especially when this rises to an automatic system of machinery. And would we now fear automatism, as though it were a lost doctrinal battle? We would indeed be ignorant of the first objectives of our class war!

In the early days of capitalism it could be argued that ‘real wealth’ is measured by the mass of direct labour, of average labour time. ‘But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on Labour time and on the amount of Labour employed than on the Power of the [Mechanical] Agencies set in motion during labour time [i.e. the labour Process], whose “Powerful effectiveness” is itself in turn 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’.

Such a discourse, embedded in our texts for exactly a century, puts us in a position to say that, although the antagonistic (class, wage, mercantile) character of the production process has not yet been overcome, the possibilities of such an overcoming have nonetheless risen to the maximum, when automation is implemented on an immense scale in industry; and by virtue of the same deductions when the powerful mechanical agencies are joined by the latest, truly disproportionate in a gigantic way to the muscular strength of man, nuclear energy.

The time to kill the law of value and the measure of value, and far more so in America than in the Russia of the scambisti [a pun in Italian: scambista means both a railway pointsman and one who exchanges, tr. ed.] Stalin and Khrushchev, who threw the express train of the Revolution on the dead track, has indeed come.

This has also been known to us for over a century. And today we hear a higher version of it, in which we see succumbing at one and the same time: the law of labour time as exchange value, class antagonism, social division of labour, mercantile production, wage-necessary labour, i.e. wage-forced labour. The change of scenery occurs with a speed worthy of the Epilogue.

‘No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing (the instrument of labour) as middle link between the object [worked material] and himself; rather, he inserts the Process of Nature, transformed into an Industrial Process, as a means between Himself and Inorganic Nature, Mastering it. He steps to the side of the Production Process instead of being its chief actor’.

The text presents a triple step, which is the Negation of the very well-known ending of Book One of Capital. By bypassing the exorbitant capitalist and wage-based parenthesis, the worker has become ‘free’, i.e. ‘master’ of the labour and production process. He once again ‘handles’ the tool and imprints his skill and intelligence on the ‘artefact’. But the hand and the worker are no longer those of the single individual, but of the species, which with its hand-brain brings into action on nature a ‘Mechanical’ process created by the mastery of natural laws. We harbour the illusion that the glosses we ‘insert’ do not seem gratuitous variations, but prepare for the arduous reading of what follows.

‘In this transformation, it is neither the Direct Human Labour he himself performs, nor the Time During which he Works, but rather the Appropriation of his own general Productive Power, his Understanding of Nature and his Mastery over it by virtue of his Presence as a Social Body – it is, in a word, the development of the Social Individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of Production and of Wealth’.

Marx here speaks in a general sense of Wealth as a faculty of both bourgeois and socialist society, while also demonstrating the opposing aspects before and after the transformation. But he harshly defines capitalist wealth. ‘The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself’.

A purely terminological proposal was made at our meeting to leave the word ricchezza [wealth] derived from ricco [rich] to its current form of taking away the value and labour of others. Property and wealth make sense to the individual insofar as he can preclude others from entering his property. Having elevated the individual, the deformed homo economicus of today, to a social Body, there are no measures of time and value, and therefore no subtractions, no rich and no wealth, and that of Society, of the immortal Social Body, here for the first time sculpted with features that make the Eternal Fathers of Michelangelo turn pale, we shall call it not Wealth, but Wisdom, Efficiency, and Power borne not by men, but by Reality and Nature. The passage continues, with what we will allow ourselves to call the Last Judgement on Mercantile Society. In the Doctrinal War, even if not yet in that of arms, we have already hurled it back into its sinister Past.

‘As soon as Labour in the Direct Form has ceased to be the Great Well-Spring of Wealth, Labour Time ceases and must cease to be its Measure, and hence Exchange Value (Stalin! Stalin!) must cease to be the measure of Use Value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the General Powers of the Human [Brain]’. The thunderbolts of the Last Judgement strike down upon their targets!

‘With that, Production based on Exchange Value breaks down, and the Direct, material Production Process is stripped of the Form of penury and Antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of Necessary Labour time so as to posit Surplus Labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary Labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them’.

The text here outlines the contradiction to which Capital is condemned. On the one hand, It, having posited labour time as the measure of wealth and its sole source (pure Ricardo) must increase total labour time, and when necessary (paid) labour time falls, it exalts superfluous time, this being for it a condition of life and death (process of progressive production of more Capital). On the other hand, it awakens all the forces of science and nature as well as those of social organisation and circulation, and lays, despite itself, the foundations for making the creation of wealth independent of the labour time allocated to it.

With the class domination of Capital broken, our Character, Dead and Objectified Labour, the Fixed Capital of before, from being the enslaving instrument of Living Labour has risen to the opposite function, and we write its triumph.

‘Nature builds no Machines, no Locomotives, Railways, Electric Telegraphs, self-acting Mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over Nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the Power of [Science], Objectified. The development of Fixed Capital indicates to what degree general social Knowledge has become a Direct Force of Production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. Fixed Capital (no longer indicates, we might add, the brutal subjugation of living Labour), but indicates [t]o what degree the Powers of Social Production have been produced, not only in the Form of Knowledge, but also as Immediate Organs of Social Practice, of the Real Life Process’.

Once again we know that Marx describes the Future Society, and in such a way that no doubt remains as to its specific differences from the one in which we live today, as to the peremptory characteristics of the latter, which, in the Revolutionary Transformation, will have to be sunk into Nothingness.

We believe we have established this dialectical pair of propositions. Ricardian doctrines based on the measure of labour time are well suited to scientifically describe any capitalist economy until, whatever the magnitude of the productive forces and Capital may become, the link between production, distribution, and consumption is the machine of mercantile exchange. Marx therefore rejects any system of a different description of the foundations of capitalism, which seeks value and wealth, i.e. the valorisation of Capital, in a source other than human Labour. When Marx, with eagle flight, overcomes the law of labour-value, he does not in the slightest express a different theory of capitalism, nor does he shift any cog in his mighty harmonious scientific construction, but he marks the historical exit from the bourgeois mode of production, the last of the thinkable mercantile and monetary modes, exorbitant measurers of labour-time.

The limitation of this first report prevents us from drawing from the final part an outline of Book IV of Capital that is now printed as the History of Economic Doctrines [i.e. Theories of Surplus Value], the refutation of all the non-classical economic schools that, after Ricardo and his followers, caught in the dialectical grip of the contradiction discovered and demonstrated by Marx, struggle to escape from it by opening breaches in the theorem that SO LONG AS WE ARE IN THE LIMITS OF THE MEASURE OF COMMODITY EXCHANGE, it is not possible to draw from any source other than labour a causal factor in the formation of wealth, id est the accumulation of Capital. Yes, as soon as the gigantic organ of machinery is formed, Science is able to give the human species masses of use-values that cost no labour, but the capitalist mercantile Form, until it is broken, ensures that this gift does not reach the species, but is infallibly transformed – by keeping the working day long – into a factor of further extortion of surplus labour.

Ricardo’s law, made his own by Marx, is, in our understanding, transient, but it cannot succumb in the theoretical war; only in the civil and social one, and after being brought under the Heel of the Revolutionary Dictatorship.

Therefore, to introduce the final position of the Piombino report, namely that the post-Marxist schools, which attempt a new scientific construction, exhibit a different ‘model’ of the capitalist machine, and are refuted with deductions that Marx already developed in his time, we limit ourselves to a few hints that are in the wonderful bundle of pages we have been working on.

‘Fixed capital, in its character as means of production, whose most adequate form [is] machinery, produces value, i.e. increases the value of the product, in only two respects: 1) in so far as it has value; i.e. is itself the product of labour, a certain quantity of labour in objectified form; 2) in so far as it increases the relation of surplus labour to necessary labour, by enabling labour, through an increase of its productive power, to create a greater mass of the products required for the maintenance of living labour capacity in a shorter time’. This practically means that a new machine makes it possible for workers to generate twice as much product in the same time. But then the modern system makes it so that one does not reduce the day by half while leaving the wage equal, but leaves it so that, having reduced the necessary time measured by the living wage, the rest becomes entirely surplus value and new capital. This remains true even if of the four hours gifted by the Machine, only three were to go to the commodity product – which the wage-earner cannot have except by buying it – half to a shorter working day for the worker, and another half to a wage increase of one-sixteenth, which would actually be one-eighth’.

So much seems clear to us. The text adds: ‘It is therefore a highly absurd bourgeois assertion that the worker “shares” with the capitalist, because the latter, with fixed capital (which is, as far as that goes, itself a product of labour, and of alien labour merely appropriated by capital) makes labour easier for him (rather, he robs it of all independence and attractive character, by means of the machine)’. One such economist was Lauderdale, another forerunner of the modern Keynesians and ‘Welfare’. ‘Lauderdale believes himself to have made the great discovery that machinery does not increase the productive power of labour, because it rather replaces the latter, or does what labour cannot do with its own power. It belongs to the concept of Capital that the increased productive Force of Labour is posited rather as the increase of a force outside itself, and as labour’s own debilitation’. And further on: ‘From a viewpoint such as Lauderdale’s etc., who would like to have Capital as such, separately from Labour, create Value and hence also Surplus Value (or Profit), fixed capital – namely that whose physical presence or Use Value is Machinery – is the form which gives their superficial fallacies still the greatest semblance of validity’.

Fixed capital as machinery is what today, in the East as in the West, they call the Capital Goods complex, with an equal tendency to exalt it in order to increase the mass of the productive forces, the new name for the Monster that today suffocates humanity. This is a true indication of the domination of the capitalist mode of production. ‘[I]t is in the production of Fixed Capital that Capital posits itself as (...) a higher Power than it does in the Production of Circulating Capital’.

Keynes is perhaps the most important among the economists of Capital who, in the interwar period, sought to perfect a model of the present economy from which its possibility of proceeding without disruptive contradictions can be deduced. We will look neither for constant capital nor variable capital nor surplus value among his basic quantities. The driving forces of social production for him are other quantities, some experimentally comprehensible ones such as population and the rate of employment of its active part. Alongside these quantities, he introduces as starting elements others that are completely imponderable and ‘psychological’, in which he sees the engine of history and the economy: they are the ‘propensity to consume’, the ‘propensity to furnish’ or the like (durable consumer goods) and the ‘propensity to hoard’. This is not the place here to expound or criticise the system. But what can these data, which one claims to calculate, in order to pose a ‘causa causarum’ similar to universal gravitation, lead to scientifically, when not even a Newtonian ‘as if’ is interposed? Keynes and the like (compare report to the Asti meeting) say: man consumes because of and to the extent he has desired. We Marxists say that man desires according to what he has been able to consume, and so the modern system of power and false bourgeois science rears him with alimentary and psychological drugs.

The Dictatorship will be necessary in the midst of the palingenesis of objectified Labour, of the reversal of the Praxis of fixed Capital, not so much in order to dominate production, which it will be enough to let fall to lower levels, freeing the servants of labour and corporate galleys for billions of hours, but above all to overturn consumptive praxis, to eradicate the pathological forms of consuming, heirs of forms of class oppression. The individual man, the citizen, the individual, just as he would lose, even under the Revolutionary Terror, the possibility of possessing wealth and value, with the bestial propensity being killed off in him, so too will he lose, forming a cell of the eternal – and we are on the verge of writing ‘sacred’ – social Body, every right to harm himself, to ruin his own animal organism, to poison himself. In doing so, he would harm not only his own body, but society. The revolutionary can only be someone who has been detoxified, and this is one of the reasons why in Revolutions more than the mass, which will be detoxified afterwards from the brand of servitude, operates the minority of the party, nourished in its living blood by the far-sighted and combatant Integral Doctrine.

At the meeting, the theory of money that Keynes draws from the theory of man’s propensity to dispose of it, in order to base on it a right of the holder of cash to withdraw part of the social product, was mocked with an empirical observation. His conclusion is that (English financial policy was cited as an example) the rate of interest or discount tends historically to decrease, removing its usurious character from the strange algebraic magnitude of ‘propensity’. Reading this false prophet’s piece, it was compared with a news item from the day of the meeting we are reporting on: the Bank of England, for the first time in history, hiked the discount by two per cent, taking it to a record seven per cent!

These revivers of Malthus, Lauderdale, and others are well answered by Engels’ magnificent passage in the introduction to the Second Book of Capital against Rodbertus, another champion of Immediatism. These people attempt to give new life to dead theories, as in the example of phlogiston chemistry, overthrown by Lavoisier’s discovery (on the nature of combustion as a combination with oxygen and not as the loss of the mysterious phlogiston). New theories may arise after that of atomic chemistry, and the indivisible atom of the revolutionary Lavoisier may, as in the twentieth century, break down, but the battle against phlogiston will no more be reversed than that of Marx against Capitalism.

At the Milan meeting in September 1952, we made deep use of the chapters in which Marx dismantles the trinity theory of incomes and their sources: part of the Income comes from Labour, and is paid out in Wages, part from Nature and is Rent, part from Money and is Interest. The Profit of Capital itself is obliterated in this formula, to which in essence the ultra-modern professors of the new Science, Phlogiston Economics, are reduced.

In those pages of Marx there flames, in opposition to the bourgeois concept of Freedom of the Person, the communist concept of disposable Time for the Species, its material and mental development, and its harmony of joy.

Humanity will not emerge, says Marx, from Necessity, but this will not take the form of one part of itself against the other, but only that of the surrounding nature increasingly controlled and bent by a Science without any more phlogistons and trinities (Book III, Chapter XLVIII: The Trinity Formula).

‘With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production (natural, disciplined by the automatic mechanism referred to in the Grundrisse) which satisfy these wants also increase (with a minimum of necessary labour, and at the limit with only voluntary labour-enjoyment). Freedom in this field (Communism) can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature’.

A monument and a jewel risen from the Social Brain, Karl Marx’s theory of exchange value is complete over the decades of the drafting of his work, it runs without retractions, and without the seditious improvements and enrichments of modern-day ravers locked in the depths of impotence in gazing upon the light that flashed forth in a single stroke.

Exchange value governs the capitalist era, and for its duration value is measured by labour time.

In socialism, there are no longer measures of labour, nor of value. There are no longer exchanges between man and man. Only one exchange remains: between human Society and Nature.