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The presupposition of the master-servant relation is the appropriation of an alien will. Whatever has no will, e.g.,
the animal, may well provide a service, but does not thereby make its owner into a master. This much can beseen here, however, that the master-servant relation likewise belong in this formula of the appropriation of the
instruments of production; and it forms a necessary ferment for the development and decline and fall of all
original relations of property and production, just as it also expresses their limited na-ture. Still it isreproduced—in mediated form—in capital, and thus likewise forms a ferment of its dissolution and is an emblemof its limitation.
—Karl Marx, Grundrisse1
There will be machines that make work easier, but first you must work hard to have one. —Marcel Biefer and Beat Zgraggen, Prophecies2

Thirty years ago, my generation was told by economists, sociologists, and futurolo-gists to expect a society inwhich machines had taken over most repetitive and stressful tasks and the working day would be so reduced bymechanization that our existential problem would not be how to suffer through the working day but rather how
to fill our leisure time. The coming “affluent society” would, we were assured, make the ancient problems ofhunger, disease, and insecurity dim historical memories. The long-term trends showing a reduction in theworking day, the rise in real wages and the relative reduction of the waged working population (with, forexample, the curbs on child labor and an earlier retirement age) in the early 1960s seemed to confirm such “great
expectations.”Not all was future perfect, however. Pro Not all was future perfect, however. Prophets of the Rightand Left projected different dystopias on the basis of these socioeconomic trends. Those on the Right warned ofa postindustrial, mass society filled with anomic, “superfluous people” living on guaranteed incomes, lacking
individual initiative, being electronically manipulated by a totalitarian welfare state. Leftist prophets saw in thismechanization a dramatic reduction in the proletariat’s ability to struggle against capital, since its labor would beless needed while structural unemployment would increasingly exacerbate racebased divisions between a small
sector of highly paid skilled workers and a huge “underclass” of unemployables.3
These futurological assumptions and political dystopias turned out to be radically wrong in their common
assumptions. The most glaring mistake can be seen in what happened to the length of the working year and thesize of the wage labor market. For, just as the increase in capitalist accumulation in the 1840s and 1850s (after
the ten-hour-day legislation went into effect in Britain) put into crisis Nassau Senior’s claim that the capitalists
would lose most of their profits if the ten-hour-day legislation was passed, so too the stubborn refusal of
capitalist states since the 1960s to substantially reduce the working day and the labor market par-ticipation rate
seems to put in question the assumption that capitalism is no more in need of the proletariat’s capacity to create
value because machines now are the prime value producers.
Since the energy crisis of 1973–74, the work-year in the United States has increased by about 10 percent, while
the number of waged workers has also dramatically increased with the introduction of millions of new
immigrants and women workers into the wage labor market. More people are working for longer hours (and forlower real wages) than ever before in U.S. history.4 According to U.S. Department of Commerce 1994
estimates, the total amount of waged work per week in the U.S. has increased by 57 percent between 1970 and
1993, while the number of nonagricultural waged workers has increased from 69,461,000 in 1970 to
107,011,000 in 1993 and their average weekly work increased from 38.3 to 39.3 hours. This trend can beobserved throughout the advanced capitalist world (defined as the OECD countries) where, though the average
unemployment rate (for waged workers) increased in this period, the total percentage of waged workers in the
population increased from 42.8 percent to 46.8 percent.5 These facts contradicted the sophisticated prophesies
concerning “the obsolescence of the proletariat,” especially when we take into account the increasing importanceof “informal economic activity” ranging from unpaid housework, “off the books” work, and criminal activity inOECD and Third World countries.6 In addition, the desperate attempts by neoliberal postcolonial and postCommunist governments (with the complicity of international agencies like the IMF and World Bank) to throw
billions of new workers into competition against each other on the international labor market through structuraladjustment programs and forced emigration is a further contradiction of the projected trend to less work.
The existence of higher average unemployment rates in the former Eastern bloc countries and in many parts ofAfrica and the Americas (as well as in Western Europe) does not falsify this account. Increasing unemployment
rates do not signal a reduced need by capitalists for work and workers, but rather the creation of unemployment
is a standard capitalist strategy for increasing the mass of available laborpower while reducing its value.
Irrespective of unemployment trends, the increase in both the duration and mass of work in the United States andinternationally in the last generation has occurred in the face of an unprecedented increase in technologicaltransformation (from robotization of industrial work, to computerization of commercial work, to introduction of
biotechnical methods in agricultural work). In other words, mechanization has led to an increase, not a decrease,of work.

Why did the most sophisticated analysts of the last generation go wrong and why is there a still continual streamof texts to this day like Rifkin’s The End of Work, which see in technological innovations the promise of a newera of workerless production? One way to understand this failure is to see that these analysts and texts assumed
that technology had a qualitatively new role to play in contemporary capitalism and that machines can create
value, hence surplus value and profits. One can locate such a view not only among neoclassical economists who
claim that capital (in the form of machines) used in the production of a commodity is partially responsible for thecommodity’s value, but implicitly or explicitly among many others—ranging from Hannah Arendt and Jürgen
Habermas to Antonio Negri and Jean Baudrillard—who took a Marxist analysis of capitalism seriously, but thenclaimed, often using passages from Marx’s as support, that there was a qualitative change in the nature ofcapitalist accumulation in the twentieth century due to technological change.7 If machines did create value, one
could certainly see the justice of the scenarios implying a qualitative change in capitalism (as postmodernists
claim), and of those theorists who have bid a “farewell to the proletariat” and given primacy to a “social
movement” and “identity politics” analysis of resistance to capitalism.8
Contrary to such claims, what follows is a reanalysis and defense of Marx’s original claim that machines cannot
produce value. It falls into two parts. The first examines Marx’s original claim in the context of the midnineteenth-century discussion of machines, energy, and work in political economy, physics, and engineering.
The second part deals with Marx’s claim from the perspective of the late twentieth century. It is important to do
so not simply because almost a century and a half separates us from Capital, but also because major theoreticaldevelopments in the study of technology have taken place during this period. Marx and the classical Marxist
analysts recognized only two theories of machines: the theory of simple machines (developed by Hero ofAlexandria and perfected by Galileo and the eighteenth-century mechanists); and the theory of heat engines(developed by Carnot and perfected by Clausius and Thompson in the mid-nineteenth century). These set theframework for their own theory of machines. But a new theory of machines was developed in the 1930s(associated with Turing, von Neumann, Wiener, and Shannon) that could not have been known to Marx and theclassical Marxists. The analysis of value-production in the context of communicating Turing machines
theoretically capable of feedback and self-reproduction needs to be sketched out in order to understand how
Marx’s original claim fares in our time.9
Marx's Theory and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Thermodynamics
The energy in A is increased and that in B is diminished; that is, the hot system has got hotter and the cold colder
and yet no work has been done, only the intelligence of a very observant and neat-fingered being has been
employed.
—A letter from Maxwell to Tait in 1867
Machines have been the center of an elaborate scientific and philosophical discourse throughout the capitalist
period. A most prominent feature of this discourse has been their use as a trope for organizing thought about
Nature. Thus “the mechanization of the world picture” so lamented by nineteenth-century romanticism andHeidegger-inspired ecologists has its roots in early bourgeois thought and its attempt to determine how muchwork could be expected from natural processes. The romantic lamentation over the “demystification of theworld,” however, was premature. The last four centuries have seen a “remystification” of nature whereby,
instead of taking on the charming or terrifying personifications of Homeric warlords and ladies, nature has
become capitalized in the form of a gigantic machine.
The use of this trope was no accident, since the development of machinery and a heightening of the need for atheory of machines is an essential aspect of the development of class antagonism. Once the working class—through its strikes, revolts, and sabotage—makes the path of accumulation via the extension of the working day
or the cutting of wages below subsistence risky, the main path of accumulation that lies open is that of increasing
relative surplus value. By the introduction of machinery that increases the productivity and intensity of labor, thenecessary part of the workday can be reduced (with appropriate qualifications) and surplus value can beincreased even if the length of the workday is fixed or the level of subsistence wages defended. True, in mostcases, the capitalist class in general and many individual capitalists are brought kicking and screaming to theshowroom of each passing “industrial revolution.” And they resist with justice, for the new machines do costmoney and “create a lot of problems” especially in the initial phases; but invariably the working-class entropy
these recalcitrant capitalists face will force them to buy the new machines or to find a completely new sector of
the working class to exploit . . . or, of course, to die qua capital.
Marx was rightly critical of the “theory of machines” as he found it in the middle of the nineteenth century. It
had barely changed from Hero’s day in form (returning to the same old lever, inclined plane, screw, and so on)
though its mathematical content had gone through an enormous transformation in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. In particular, Marx was critical of its confused categories and its lack of historicity, and so he took totask the machine science of his day: “The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, amaterialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideologicalconceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own specialty.”10 He tries tomake a beginning on the “history of the productive organs of man” in Part IV of the first volume of Capital.
Consider a definition of machine that is characteristically Marx’s own:
All fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different parts, the motor mechanism, the transmitting
mechanism, and finally the tool or working machine. The motor mechanism is that which puts the whole inmotion.... The transmitting mechanism... regulates the motion, changes its form where necessary as for instance,from linear to circular, and divides and distributes it among the working machines.... The tool or working
machine is that part of the machinery with which the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century started.11
Marx inverts the polar hierarchy that plots the standard narrative of the industrial revolution—in the differenceof motive power and tool, analyses of motive power are given prominence. But, Marx argues, it is only with theseparation of work and tool in the original labor process accomplished by manufacturing that steam engines
became necessary. What held up the application of steam power was not so much the efficiency of steam engines
in the eighteenth century, but rather the lack of preconditions for their use.12
For if the labor process has “three elementary factors”—the personal activity of man [sic], that is, work itself; thesubject of that work; its instruments, then, ironically enough, the development of capitalism (whose historicalcondition is the exploitation of labor) spells a step-by-step disintegration of the labor process. First, primitive
accumulation detaches the laborer from the subject of the labor, and thenmanufacture, through its obsessive attention to the details of the “naturally developed differentiation of the
trades” separates the work of the laborer from the instruments of that work to a point where Modern Industry
appears to virtually do away with the activity of the laborer all together.
In describing the labor process, Marx gives it the form of an Aristotelian process, complete with starting andfinishing points, means and ends, entelechies and dynamae, that is, the labor process is an activity in Aristoteliantime (Aufführung!!!) . But in its perpetual efforts to rid itself of dependence on the “self-willed and intractableworkman” (Ure), capitalist development has certainly destroyed the apparent meta-physical structure of the labor
process, though by no means has it destroyed workers and their labor—quite the contrary.13 For human workers
enter into the production process after the introduction of Modern Industry in one of two major ways: (a) as“mere living appendages” of the system of machines, or (b) as “wretches” SOLDATEN whose wag-es are solow “machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist.”14
For The Appendage, the workday is linearized, since the basic form of work is the feeding and tending ofmachines whose cycles are independent of the laborer’s work tempo. The process character of labor (as laid out
by Marx originally) is eliminated: “In Manufacture, the organization of the social labor-process is purely
subjective; it is a combination of detail workers; in its machinery system, Modern Industry has a productive
organism that is purely objective, in which the laborer becomes a mere appendage to an already existing material
condition of production.”15
In Modern Industry the laborer undergoes something of a Copernican revolution, finding him/herself
transformed from the center of the productive system to its planetary margins . . . and then pumped dry, under
the threat of unemployment, the workday is either prolonged or intensified. Similarly, the introduction ofmachinery creates The Wretch who, in effect, finds him/herself on the other side of the cost horizon, in the
netherworld of production. If the Wretches force their wages above the horizon determined by a possible
technological application they annihilate themselves qua Wretches, but if they remain below this horizon theyknow that they will “squander” themselves and their labor-power.
Thermodynamics and Value
The laws that determine the creation and conditions of both Appendages and Wretches constitute Marx’s theoryof the capitalist use of machines. But while he was working out this theory of machines, another theory ofmachines—a thermodynamics of heat engines to be precise—was being developed by Joule, Mayer, Clausius,
Maxwell, Tait, and Thomson in England and Germany. Indeed, the tension between Marx’s theory andthermodynamics and the differing notions of equivalence and limit they espouse, pose one of the most serious
questions in the divide between capital and nature: what differentiates human labor-power from other natural
powers and human labor from other forms of work? Marx’s theory postulates a deep difference between
machines and humans—that machines produce no value, while human labor can. By contrast, thermodynamics
argues that machines like humans can produce “work.” In Marx’s theory, the asymmetry between machines andhumans is pivotal, while in thermodynamics this difference is not recognized, even though both are theories ofwork.
Marx was clearly cognizant of this new thermodynamical theory of machines and was concerned about its
relationship to his own theory, which presumes the asymmetry of machines and labor. He refers to the work ofGrove and Liebig—two of many aspirants to the laurels of discoverer of the conservation of energy—directly inthe first volume of Capital, in regard to labor and labor-power. These references show that Marx clearly saw
labor-power to be integrated (or correlated) with the wide range of forces that were being studied by theenergeticists of the mid-nineteenth century. These researches ranged horizontally, from heat to light to electricity
to magnetism to chemical affinity; and vertically, from the inorganic realm (as in the crystallization of atoms intosolids) to the vegetable realm (where the minerals of the soil, the carbon and oxygen of the atmosphere and thelight and heat of the sun are joined to make plant cells), to the realm of herbivorous animals (which release theenergy of plants internally to make their animal motion possible), to the realm of carnivorous animals (which
release the energy of plants at a metalevel). Labor-power is situated rather precariously at the pinnacle of thisvertical hierarchy, correlating or converting living substances into human motion. Thus it is an object of physics,
physiology, and political economy, but not in the way, however, that Foucault saw Labor in the discourse of
economics as being homologous to Language in Linguistics and Life in Biology.16 Rather, labor-power is thephysical precondition of social production and the point of intersection of the law of the conservation of energy
and the law of the conservation of value.
However, Marx was eager to differentiate labor as it appeared in political economy and labor (or work) from its
appearance in thermodynamics. He did this in a number of oblique ways. For example, at the end of Chapter 15of the first volume of Capital, Marx criticizes one of Liebig’s excursions into political economy—Liebig’s praiseof John Stuart Mill’s expression of the “law of diminishing returns of labor” in agricultural production—by
pointing out that Liebig used “an incorrect interpretation of the word ‘labor,’ a word he used in quite a different
sense from that adopted by political economy,” implying that even a most sophisticated chemist might blunder intraversing the divide between nature and society, or chemistry and political economy. In the beginning of thefirst volume of Capital, he more directly differentiates (conjunctively) between the physiological and the social
aspects of labor: “all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in thisquality of being equal, or abstract labour that it forms the value of commodities.”17 “This quality” is a social
product that is averaged over all the differential physiological loci at one particular temporal instant to create that
productive Leviathan, “the total social labour-power of society.” Consequently, labor and labor-power in Marx’s
analysis is related to the work and work-power of the thermodynamically sensitive physiologists in the same way
as the total work done by a steam engine is related to the work done by the individual atoms in the steam cloud.
There is clearly a relation between the two levels, but the higher one is dependent upon the macroscopicarrangement of the engine’s (or a society’s productive) parts, while the lower one is theoretically determinable
independent of this arrangement.
But this fundamental differentiation of political economy from thermodynamics, between labor and work, does
not mean that Marx’s theory of machines was not correlated with the then current theory of machines and heatengines of the engineers (Carnot, Joule), physicians (Mayer, Helmholtz, Carpenter), lawyers (Grove), andchemists (Faraday, Liebig) that was so functional to the development of capitalist production and reproduction
during this period. For example, central to both Marx and capitalism’s technical intelligentsia was the questionof the existence of a perpetual motion machine, that is, could there be a machine M such that it has as its only
input and output the same “stuff ” Q and in every cycle of its operation Q (input) is less than Q (output)? If sucha machine M existed, then M would be able to produce any desired quantity of Q, Q(d), for there must exist
some n such that n(Q(output)–Q(input)) would be greater than Q(d), given M’s proper operation over n cycles.
There can be many kinds of perpetual motion machines depending on the purported quantity Q, and, of course,
the more valuable Q is, the more M would be the object of fantasy and desire. The history of the search for such
Ms has been the source of many arcane and humorous volumes, and indeed the year 1775, when the Paris
Academy of Sciences refused to consider any design that purported to be of a perpetual motion machine, is often
considered the terminal year of magical technology.
But in the period between 1775 and the 1840s, when the first formulations of the conservation of energy were
published, there was a new temptation to try to find in the nonmechanistic forces of electricity, magnetism, heat,chemical attraction, and physiological vitality some source for a perpetual motion machine. Thermodynamics
was based on the denial of this temptation, for it began with postulating the impossibility of a perpetual motion
machine (of the first and second kinds). Thus, Liebig begins his essay “The Connection and Equivalence ofForces” with this claim: “It is well known that our machines create no power, but only return what they havereceived.”18 Indeed, he argues that the conservation of power is simply the obverse of the view that power
cannot be annihilated. Liebig goes on, of course, to dismiss the possibility of a perpetual motion machine as did
all the other founders of thermodynamics. Many, indeed, inserted an “economic” twist. For example, Helmholtz
in his popular essay on the conservation of energy, “Interaction of Natural Forces,” argues that the fascination of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with automata and the “real quintessence of organic life” lead many to
try to discuss the new philosopher’s stone—perpetual motion for profit. He turned to “fable-rich America” for a
recent example of an American inventor who argued that the gases produced by electrolytic decomposition could
be combusted to turn a steam engine that would drive a magneto-electric machine that would decompose waterthat would in turn provide the fuel for the steam engine. Such schemes were doomed, of course, but Helmholtz
ironically described the hopes they generated, not only in fabulous America:
Another hope also seemed to take up incidentally the second place [after the attempt to artificially create men],which, in our wiser age, would certainly have claimed the first rank in the thoughts of men. The perpetualmotion was to produce work inexhaustibly without corresponding consumption, that is to say, out of nothing.
Work, however, is money. Here, therefore, the practical problem which the cunning heads of all centuries havefollowed in the most diverse ways, namely, to fabricate money out of nothing, invited solution. The similarity

with the philosopher’s stone sought by the ancient chemists was complete. That also was thought to contain thequintessence of organic life, and to be capable of producing gold.19
The conservation of energy (or “force,” up until the 1860s and 1870s) as well as Carnot’s principle (as phrased
by Helmholtz: “only when heat passes from a warmer to a colder body, and even then only partially, can it beconverted into mechanical work”) put a definitive end to these economic dreams.
Marx entered into this discussion not only by inserting labor-power into the network of forces being correlatedby the energeticist program. He also argued quite paradoxically against the economic analysis of perpetualmotion machines that provided so much of the ideological stage setting of the early energeticist movement. For
the thermodynamicists saw in their laws of the conservation and dissipation of energy a new kind of Puritanism
to scourge any neo-alchemical, pseudoscientific “American” offering a “free lunch” contraption. But Marx in his
theory of machines did energetic Puritanism one better by claiming that far from perpetual motion machines“fabricating money out of nothing” they would directly produce zero value. To understand this Marxist paradox
one must examine Helmholtz’s claims like “Perpetual motion [machines] produce work” and “work is money”
more carefully from Marx’s perspective.
Machines enter into the value-production process, according to Marx’s theory of machines, as constant instead ofvariable capital. Their value is preserved and transferred during the production process to the resultant
commodity by the labor expended in the process. This labor has a twofold character, however, for it is (a) useful,concrete labor as well a (b) abstract, value-creating labor. This twofold nature of labor is crucial to understanding
what happens in the production process, for the concrete labor “preserves” the value of the machinery which ittransfers to the product, while the abstract labor creates new value. Hence in his discussion of the production ofyarn, Marx argues:

On the one hand, then, it is by virtue of its general character, as being expenditure of human labour-power in the
abstract, that spinning adds new value to the values of the cotton and the spindle; and on the other hand, it is byvirtue of its special character, as being a concrete, useful process, that the same labour of spinning both transfers
the values of the means of production to the product, and preserves them in the product.20
This division of result arises from the root differential of the commodity itself—the distinction between usevalue and exchange-value—and the twofold nature of capital in the production process, for the capitalist
purchases raw materials, auxiliary materials and machinery and labor-power to initiate the process. Thesepurchases ap-pear totally symmetric to the capitalist but they have very different consequences: the capital
represented by the first remains constant through the destruction of the origi-nal utilities into the product, while
the capital represented by the labor-power creates new value and thus is variable.
Thus we see that in Marx’s theory of value production a machine cannot add value to the product, however
efficient and cost-free it might be. Marx does to the perpetual motion enthusiasts of the nineteenth century what
the early quantity theorists of money like Locke did to those with lingering alchemical dreams in theseventeenth. The quantity theorists revealed not the physical impossibility of turning, say, iron, into gold, butrather they exposed alchemy’s self-defeating character. Increasing the supply of gold would, by that very fact,
decrease the relative price of gold while increasing the general price level. Far from realizing their visions of
infinite wealth, the alchemists would destroy the very ideal they premised their vision on.
Similarly, Marx argues that a perpetual motion machine would create no value directly at all as a machine, norwould it have part of its value transferred to the product since it would be costless by definition. It would be thegoose that laid the golden egg, but the egg would embody less value than the regular henhouse variety. Marx
wrote of perpetual motion machines in his 1858 Notebooks and claimed that they were ideal machines: “Ifmachinery lasted for ever, if it did not consist of transitory material which must be reproduced (quite apart fromthe invention of more perfect machines which would rob it of the character of being a machine), if it were aperpetual motion machine, then it would most completely correspond to its concept.”21 Such ideal ma-chines
would join with all the other “powers of society” that cost capital nothing, like the division and cooperation oflabor, scientific power and population growth, but arein themselves incapable of creating or positing value. Marx recognized that it was easy to confuse the ability tocreate use-values with the ability to create value:
It is easy to form the notion that machinery as such posits value, because it acts as a productive power of labour.
But if machinery required no labour, then it would be able to increase the use value; but the exchange value
which it would create would never be greater than its own costs of production, its own value, the value
objectified in it. It creates value not because it replaces labour; rather, only in so far as it is a means to increase
surplus labour, and only the latter itself is both the measure and the substance of the surplus value posited withthe aid of the machine; hence of labour in general.22

The perpetual motion machineas the embodiment of the ideal Marxist machine would not make money, as
Helmholtz claimed, by doing work. Rather, it would make money through reducing the value of the commodities
it was involved in producing by (a) reducing the transfer of value from it to the product relative to less efficientand more costly mechanical rivals and (b) reducing the socially necessary labor-time required in the productionof the said commodities. A perpetual motion machine could only make money for capitalists by reducing thevalue of the commodities it produced. The paradox is thus both resolved and further intensified in the pages of
the Grundrisse when Marx notes that the capitalist desire for a perpetual motion machine has within it, in its
most extreme form, the very drive that will destroy itself:
On the one side, then, [capital] calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination andof social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time
employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour 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.
Forces of production and social relations—two different sides of the development of the social individual—
appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact,
however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.23
Just as the dream of the alchemists has within it the destruction of a gold-based economy - südamerika exporte,
so too the moneymaking schemes of the perpetuum mobilists implicitly speak of the end of a moneymaking
economy. For they call up all “the powers of sci-ence and nature” (indeed, call beyond these powers) merely tomake . . . values.
Marx proves his own version of the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine by invoking a law ofconservation in the realm of value: No machine can create new value nor transfer more value to its product thanit loses. This law parallels the laws of conservation of force and energy found in the classical theory of machines
in the theory of heat engines. Machines are not seen as producers of force or energy in either tradition; they
merely transform, more or less efficiently, input forces or energies. Indeed, this is one of many laws of value
conservation to be found in Marx’s critique of political economy. For example, there is the law of the exchangeof equivalents and its converse: “Circulation, or exchange of commodities, creates no value” in the first volume
of Capital.24 Then there are the laws of the conservation of total value and total surplus value that he postulates
in the discussion of the transformation of values into prices in the third volume of Capital.25
The Zerowork Paradox
But in the fashioning of these conservation theorems, Marx had to deal with a number of phenomena thatinvolved an amplification/dissipation of value in the production process. The most blatant one was theextraordinary existence of profits in successful industries that employ relatively little direct labor (and thus evenless surplus labor). Since the total value produced in a developed capitalism comes largely from the work of
Wretches and Appendages, then it would appear that the fewer the direct workers involved in a particular sphereof production, the less the surplus value created there. But this is clearly not the case. As Marx recognizes: “Howtherefore can living labour be the exclusive source of profit, since a deduction in the quantity of labour needed
for production not only seems not to affect the profit, but rather to be the immediate source of increasing profit,
in certain circumstance, at least for the individual capitalist?”26 Indeed, Marx even mentions the possibility(though an “exaggerated” one) of a capitalist employing no laborers and still generating an average profit rate on
his machinery and other elements of constant capital alone.27 Here, it would seem, is proof positive thatmachines do produce value!
Marx’s solution to this “zerowork” paradox lies in his claim that commodities are not exchanged (in most cases)at their value and that the profits of capitalists in different spheres of production are not identical to the surplus
value created there. On the contrary, “the process of capitalist production as a whole,” which synthesizes
individual spheres of production and local conditions of circulation with global constraints, cannot operate on thebasis of such identities. Each of the spheres of production has its own “organic composition” (a chemical term
originally), which crystallize or congeal value in its commodity products. In exchange and circulation, however,
the ratios of value are only accidentally one-to-one. On the contrary, commodities produced in spheres of highorganic-composition production generally exchange above their value, while commodities produced in spheresof low organic composition generally exchange below their value. This breakdown of “equal exchange” isnecessary to preserve the existence of an average rate of profit and make possible the existence of high-organiccomposition spheres of production.
This process takes place in a world of fluctuations, “removed from direct observation,” and is something of a
“mystery” which takes place “behind the backs” of individual capitalists and workers. Capitalists have aglimmering of it when they recognize that “their profits are not derived solely from the labor employed in theirown individual sphere” and that they are involved in the collective exploitation of the total working class.
Indeed, it explains the very existence of the capitalist class as a class - Morcillo versus Bergheuer. “Here, then,we have the mathematically exact demonstration, how it is that the capitalists form a veritable freemason society
arrayed against the whole working class, however much they may treat each other as false brothers in thecompetition among themselves.”28 Thus in the “transformation process” we have a truly organicist vision ofcapitalist production and reproduction, with the vegetative roots of the system sucking up the labor nutrients andtransferring them vertically to the herbivores, which in turn are devoured by the carnivores, who finally transfer
the original labor to the nervous pinnacles.
The transformation of values into prices solves the “zerowork” paradox by simply pointing out that the“zerowork” capitalist, who invests only in constant capital (machinery, buildings and raw materials) and nothingin variable capital (labor-power), receives an average rate of profit due to the transformation of value fromspheres of production that operate with much variable capital. Thus, this capitalist’s machines do not produce or
create new value at all; rather, they at most preserve and conserve the value of the constant capital consumed in
the production process. These totally automatic machines simulate the role of a worker’s concrete useful labor,
but they cannot create value as the worker can by actualizing his/her labor-power into abstract labor. Indeed, thevery existence of spheres of production with such high (tending toward infinite) organic compositions
necessitate the existence of a much greater mass of labor-power exploited in spheres of production withextremely low organic composition. Otherwise the average rate of profit would fall dramatically. But all thisbehind-the-scenes circulation of value from lower to higher spheres is not arbitrary. It is determined by thechemical-like composition of capital in its exchange reactions and the various conservation laws like “the sum of
the profits for all the different spheres of production must accordingly be equal to the sum of surplus values, andthe sum of the prices of production for the total social product must be equal to the sum of its values.”29
The strategy of Marx's theory of Machines
The context of Marx’s theory of machines is not only to be found in the development of the science of energetics
or even of Darwinian evolution or indeed of any particular discipline. Still less is its center to be found in his
philosophical and methodological debates with the Hegelian tradition. Marx’s theory of machines was deployed
in a political struggle; it was not the result of some suprahistorical, a prioristic ratiocination. Theoretically, Marx
could have taken different paths in the understand-ing of machines and still remained anticapitalist. For example,
he could have argued that machines create value but that this value was the product of a general social andscientific labor that ought not be appropriated by the capitalist class. Such an approach was indeed taken up by
Veblen and others in the early twentieth century, although it of course has its roots in Saint Simon and Comte.
Marx’s choice of theoretical weapons against the value-creativity of machines was rooted in the complex
political situation he and his faction of the working-class movement of Western Europe faced during the U.S.
Civil War and the formation of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA). On the one side,
capitalist ideologists were increasingly putting the working-class initiative on the defensive through their claimthat machines could break the resistance of the movement and that the future belonged to those who could
conceive of and own the “crystal palaces” of Modern Industry. On the other, there was an “anti-economistic”
faction of the IWMA (which included first Lassalleans and later Bakuninites) who combined this capitalist
ideology and the wages fund theory to conclude that the capitalist class was increasingly becoming independentof the working class and that therefore the wages fund was diminishing. The “anti-economists” drew political
implications from these conclusions that were definitely at odds with the Marxist line, arguing that trade union
activity was ultimately useless.
On top of these ideological and political struggles were historical realities that Marx was responding to: therevolutionary end of the Civil War in the United States and the wave of strikes that followed the end of that war
in Europe. Within that moment, inevitably, there were echoes of Luddism and the “antagonism of workers andmachinery.” The leaders of an organization that named itself “the International” faced a mass call for a strategy
of action. Marx was thus certainly feeling the heat in the mid-1860s. His writings and speeches leading up to andincluding the publication of the first volume of Capital were his effort at a response. And one of the mostimportant questions he had to deal with was the complex “question of machinery.”30The first element of thequestion was the intensive propaganda campaign that industrial capitalists in Britain launched against the TenHour Day Law in the 1830s and 1840s and later against the legalization of unions in the 1850s and 1860s. In
both campaigns, their secret tool was the ability to make those who were most exploited—and hence those mostessential to the existence of capitalism—appear to be the most superfluous of beings. In both campaigns, the“question of machinery” was central.
One of the most important intellectual agents of capital in the first period was Andrew Ure—though, ironically,
he was a man whom Marx did more to memorialize than anyone else. Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures was apaean to the capitalist use of machines to thwart, subvert and eventually crush working-class resistance to theirmasters’ rule. Indeed, Ure seems to positively rejoice in the capitalist’s recruitment of science to tame and, ifneed be, eliminate workers. His book is full of tales showing how cooperation between capitalists and engineers
can inevitably create devices that will make redundant factory operatives who try to become “Egyptiantaskmasters” over their bosses. Ure epigrammatically eulogizes, “when capital enlists science in her service, therefractory hand of labour will always be taught docility.”31 He is especially proud of the story of the inventiveengineer, Mr. Roberts, who took on the project of constructing “a spinning automaton” at the behest of strikeplagued spinning mill owners of Lancashire and Lanarkshire. In the course of a few months, he succeeded increating “the Iron Man, as the operatives fitly call it, [which] sprung out of the hands of our modern Prometheus

at the bidding of Minerva—a creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes, and to confirm toGreat Britain the empire of art. The news of this Herculean prodigy spread dismay through the Union, and evenlong before it left its cradle, so to speak, it strangled the Hydra of misrule.”32 Ure thus consigned class struggle
on the shop floor to the rank of an unscientific superstition. In fact, so confident was Ure of the insuperable
power produced by the union of science and capital that he saw the major obstacle to capitalist development tobe the factory masters themselves. For if the masters were dissolute and irreligious, their hands would follow
their example, and only this form of self-destruction could be the path of perdition for capital. “It is, therefore,
excessively the interest of every mill-owner, to organize his moral machinery on equally sound principles withhis mechanical, for otherwise he will never command the steady hands, watchful eyes, and prompt co-operation,
essential to excellence of product.”33 Industrial Reformation, he concludes, is the key to success now that theworking class has been tamed by the Iron Man.
This Urean image was a dominant feature of nineteenth-century capitalist ideology. For example, the grandindustrial exhibitions of 1851 and 1862 were not simply places for intercapitalist information exchange about thelatest technological breakthroughs. They were housed in the Crystal Palace in London at great expense in orderto show the machines to the working-class public as well. These exhibits had the quality of armed parades whose
intent is to forestall attack by awing the enemy with the public display of the power of one’s weapons. Its
success was such that the machine and its power had become the literary expression of capital in general. This, at
any rate, was the message the Crystal Palace transmitted from London throughout Europe even to the streets ofPetersburg. By 1864, in the heat of Marx’s work in preparing the Inaugural Address for the IMWA, Dostoevsky
was writing in Notes from the Underground: “we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will notlonger be responsible for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him....Then . . . new economic
relations will be established, all ready made and computed with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible
question will vanish in a twinkling, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the crystal
palace will be built.34 The Crystal Palace meant to the petty bureaucrat speaking in the Notes from theUnderground a final loss of his humanity, the crushing of “human” resistance to capital by scientific means.
The theme of machines becoming the arbiters of social existence in general had captured the European
imaginary by the 1860s. And not only in Europe. In 1863, Samuel Butler wrote and published “Darwin among
the Machines” in New Zealand. He argued, ironically playing upon and then validating the machine=capital
metaphor, that machines were best conceived as the next evolutionary step beyond the human species. The
problem this evolutionary tendency posed was: What would be the proper human stance, resistance orcooperation? The working out of the resistance-option could be seen later in Erewhon (1872), which describes asociety that destroyed all its machines in a horrendous civil war after the publication of a prophetic text, The
Book of Machines. That book’s argument was that machines were quickly becoming the masters of the humanrace and that unless they were destroyed (at the cost of infinite suffering) the human race would eventually beannihilated or totally dominated.
Not surprisingly, Erewhon was written in large part during the Franco-Prussian War and the massacre of theParis communards. Indeed, at the end of that utopian novel, Butler has the Italian captain who saves the herofrom drowning simply assume that he had come from the siege of Paris.35 Butler’s semi-satiric intent indicatesthe ambivalence of the discourse on machines that was current in the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. On
one side, the metaphorical identification of science with capital originated as a salubrious “moderating”
influence on the demands of workers but, on the other, it gradually lost a clear class referent and even began tobe identified with an alien force that was threatening to the marginal bourgeoisie itself. Such are the vicissitudes
of class weapons!
It is in this context of capitalist imaginary that Marx’s theory of machines operated to great effect. Marx argues
that the forces that lead to the metaphor are not simply tactical moves in the class struggle. Working-classstruggle leads to the era of relative surplus value production and a tremendous unleashing of the productive
powers of labor that, necessarily, in the capitalist system appear as powers of capital itself. His texts are repletewith this point:
the forms of socially developed labor—co-operation, manufacture (as a form of the division of labor), the factory(as a form of social labor organized on machinery as its material basis)—all these appear as forms of thedevelopment of capital, and therefore the productive powers of labor built upon the forms of social labor—
consequently also science and the forces of nature—appear as productive powers of capital . . . with thedevelopment of machinery the conditions of labor seem to dominate labor also technologically while at the sametime they replace labor, oppress it, and make it superfluous in its independent forms.36

In the face of the ideological attack arising from the depths of the system, Marx needed a direct reply. It was, ofcourse, to point out that surplus value was the thin reed that the whole capitalist system was based upon. For all
the thunder of its steam hammers, for all the intimidating silence of its chemical plants, capital could notdispense with labor. Labor is not the only source of wealth, but it is the only source of value. Thus capital wasmortally tied to the working class, whatever the forces that it had unleashed that were driving to a form of labor-

less production. This was the political card that Marx played in the political game against the ideologicalsuffocation of the machine=capital metaphor. It was an ironic card, but it has proved to be a useful one not onlyin the struggles of the 1860s.
The other side of the functionality of Marx’s theory of machines was in his internal battles with members of the
IWMA, which revolved around the possibility of working-class action to increase wages. The IMWA originatedin the strike waves throughout Europe during the latter part of the U.S. Civil War, and it was effectively
terminated with the bloody defeat of the Paris Commune. This period of eight years saw the beginning of a risein real wages in Western Europe and the United States as well as the formation of major trade union
organizations. Marx saw in the wage struggle and trade unions a positive direction for the working-class
movement, and he rejected both the state-collaborationist and insurrectionist wings of the International. Marxargued on behalf of the trade unionists of the IWMA that the working class can autonomously raise wages whilein the process precipitate a profits crisis for capital and empower itself for the overthrow of capitalism. He thus
positioned himself between the IWMA’s Lassallean and Bakuninite tendencies. Lassalle argued that theindustrial proletariat cannot change the “iron law of wages” and so required state-collaboration to deviate fromthe law, while Bakunin argued that the power to overthrow the capitalist system can only come from themargins, that is, from the rural peasants or the lumpenproletariat at the margin of cities who were not rendered
impotent by the powers of industrial capital.
At the root of both positions was a doctrine that quite rightly gave political economy the epithet “dismal.” This
doctrine was a synthesis of the “wage fund” theory and an analysis of the labor/wage displacing aspects ofmachinery that has its roots in Ricardo’s Principles and was refined by J.S. Mill. The “wage fund” theory has
had many variations, but in essence it claims that in each period of production the quantity of wage goods
destined for working-class consumption is fixed. If that quantity is W and the average wage is w and the numberof wage workers is n then w=W/n. Clearly, given the fixity of W, the only way for w to rise is through a fall of n;when individual workers or subgroups of workers struggle for higher wages, they simply redistribute W not w,that is, the wage struggle is a zero-sum game played against other workers.
The other “dismal” part of the doctrine arises from an analysis of the construction and introduction of machinery
into a capitalist economy. Given a distribution of workers in the industrial and agricultural sector that produces awage fund W, imagine now that a capitalist decides to construct a new machine. This would either directly or
indirectly draw off labor from the agricultural sector and would then reduce the wage fund in the next period, W.
This would then lead to a reduction of the average wage, w. At the end of the process of construction are we surethat W will equal or be greater than W? This does not necessarily follow, for it would depend upon the uses ofthe machine, its eventual impact on agricultural productiv-ity, and so on.37
Synthesizing these two aspects of the dismal doctrine we gaze on the specter of a fixed (or even falling) wage
fund being shared by an ever-increasing number of industrial wage workers. This would lead to periodic
Malthusian crises that would equilibrate average wages at the point of physical subsistence. Thus mechanization
threatened to intensify the effects of a system that was destined to Malthusianism anyway. The bourgeois
economists thus advised the workers to forget their riots and strikes and stop up their sexual lusts. The
Lassalleans called on the State to intervene in the operation of the laws of civil society and offer large sectors ofworkers alternatives to employment in capitalist industry. Finally, the Bakuninites could only see salvation in an
apocalyptic end to the wages system precipitated outside it by the lumpen in city and country.
Marx, of course, rejected these ways out because he saw in the great strike wave stretching from the cotton
plantations of Georgia to the wheat fields of Poland through the great factories and mines of Western Europe
another possibility. But it required organizational cohesion and a theoretical understanding among those in thecenter of the wave. Thus he needed to dispel the specter of the “dismal doctrine.” The first aspect of the doctrine
was easy enough: there was no fixed wage fund since national production continuously changes and the ratio
between the wage and profit parts of that production also shifts. His speech before the General Council of the
IWMA in June 1865, later titled “Value, Price and Profit,” dealt the wage fund theory a decisive blow.38 But
what of the labor/wage-displacing character of machinery? Couldn’t the capitalists direct their investments sothat the construction of machinery would increase their profits while reducing the wage rate? Certainly, if
machines were creators of value, then this would be the golden (for capital) but dismal (for workers) path ofaccumulation. But if machines do not create value, another consequence looms. Every time capitalists introduce
machinery in response to working-class efforts to increase wages and/or reduce the working day, they threaten
the average rate of profit. That is, the wage struggle intensifies mechanization, which in turn causes the relative
diminution of the variable (and value creating) part of capital. Thus, the immediate impact of strikes and otherforms of shop floor action might not invariably be to increase wages but to strengthen the tendency of capital toreduce the average rate of profit while simultaneously reducing the necessary part of the average working day.
And the main way the capitalist class can find out of this rap is to further expand the net of capitalist labormarket.39 It is this consequence that Marx saw as central to the argument of the IWMA. For it makes it possible
to follow an Ariadne’s thread from apparently reformist trade union struggles to the international revolutions
implicit in the strategy of the First International. A key element to it was the inability of capital to solve its crisis
internally through the self-creation of value via machines.

Marx and the Turing Machine
I would prefer not to.
—Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
Marx’s theory of machines was deeply implicated in the theory of heat engines that developed in the midnineteenth century under the rubric of thermodynamics. The strategic motivation for Marx’s restriction of value
creativity to human labor was given “scientific” support through an obvious analogy with the restrictions that
thermodynamics places on perpetual motion machines of the first and second kind, that is, on machines that
violate the first (conservation of energy) law and the second (entropy) law of thermodynamics. But a new theoryof machines was developed in the 1930s (and its ideological impact began to be increasingly felt in the years
after the revolts of the 1960s) that Marx did not deal with. This section turns to this twentieth-century theory, thetheory of Turing machines—often called “universal computers” or “logic machines”—and poses the question ofvalue creativity in their case.
A good place to begin this discussion is the annus mirabilus for the class struggle in the United States, 1936. On
the one side, that year saw the River Rouge live-ins and the peak of the CIO’s mass worker organization drive,and on the other it saw the publication of Turing’s (and Post’s [1936]) work on universal computers. The former
phenomenon spelled the limits of Taylorization in practice, while the latter was a theoretical starting point for a
new science of machines and, consequently, of the labor process. Turing originally presented his the notion of
the Turing machine in a paper titled “On Computable Numbers, an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”This is not the place to enter into the details of Turing’s classic paper, but it is worth pointing out that its
fetishistic charm is the utter simplicity and plausibility of its starting point. The basic elements of the Turingmachine are the following:
The machine is supplied with a “tape” (the analog of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called“squares”) each capable of bearing a “symbol” [“blank” or “1”]. At any moment there is just one square . . .
which is “in the machine.” We may call this the “scanned square.” The symbol on the scanned square may becalled the “scanned symbol.” The “scanned symbol” is the only one of which the machine is, so to speak,“directly aware.”40
There are a finite set of “conditions” or states the machine may be in when it scans a square and the specificationof the state the machine is in and the symbol that the machine is scanning is called the machine’s configuration.
The configuration determines which among the following four operations the machine can do:
In some of the configurations in which the scanned square is blank . . . the machine writes down a new symbol[“1”] on the scanned square: in other configurations it erases the scanned symbol. The machine may also change
the square which is being scanned, but only by shifting it one place to right or left. In addition to any of these
operations the [state] may be changed.41

A Turing machine is thus machine with (1) a suitably inscribed tape, (2) a finite set of internal states, (3) acapacity to execute the four operations, and (4) a set of instructions that completely determines the next step of
the machine for any possible configuration, with the proviso that one possible next step is halting the operationof the machine. In fact, every kind of Turing machine can be described completely by its set of instructions,which after all is simply a set of symbols that can be written on a tape as well. This description is what Turing
called “the standard description” of the Turing machine that is controlled by the given instructions.
The first mathematical tour de force of “On Computable Numbers” is the demonstration that a Turing machine iscapable of computing any function a human or any other computer can compute. (Or, à la Jacquard, a Turingmachine, starting off with a blank tape, can produce any numerical pattern that a human or any other patternmaker can produce.)
Yet the second major result of his work was even more remarkable. For he showed that “it is possible to invent asingle machine which can be used to compute any computable [function].” The key to this result is therecognition that the standard description of a given Turing machine’s table of instructions can be represented as anumber printed on the tape of a special machine, the universal Turing machine (UTM). On the basis of such anumber plus other information inscribed on its tape, the UTM determines what the given Turing machine cancompute and proceeds to compute the function the Turing machine was designed to compute. In other words, theUTM is the universal simulator.
The UTM’s capacity for universal simulation mimics the classical self-reflexivity of thought, for the UTM cantake the number representing the standard description of its own instructions as an input on its own tape. Indeed,using this reflexivity technique, one can try to construct all sorts of specialized machines to ex-amine themselves
and other machines and test whether they can do certain specified tasks. For example, we might wish toconstruct a machine that, given the standard descriptions of any two Turing machines, can determine whether

they compute the same function. Or, perhaps, we might wish to construct a machine that would allow us todetermine whether it halts, that is, it reaches a state for which there do not exist any instructions for further
action. For example, we might ask if there is a machine that, given the standard description of any arbitrarymachine M, can determine whether M will halt or not?
The third major achievement of Turing’s “On Computable Numbers” is his proof that there are certain importantquestions about Turing machines (and hence about computable functions and computers, human or otherwise)that cannot be answered by Turing machines. The first such example of a demonstrably mechanicallyundecidable question is exactly the previous query, sometimes called “the halting problem.” Turing proved thatno Turing machine could determine in general whether a given Turing machine will halt or not. Therefore,
mutatis mutandis, a human computer cannot start out computing a function given some set of precise instructions
and always know beforehand that the job will be done in some finite time. Indeed, it is in this aspect of his workthat Turing charts the limits of mechanization of computation, and hence the limits of computation itself. The
undecidability of the halting problem is for the new science of computation what the Second Law ofthermodynamics was for heat engines: a limit on the constructability of machines.
There had been many previous attempts to characterize the computation process before Turing’s, of course, but
Turing devised an intuitively appealing and mathematically precise way to capture the notion of “following arule” in general. It is important to see that human beings can be “Turing machines” that follow rules as well.
Indeed, in Emil Post’s version of the theory a worker carrying out a specified set of (repeatable and objectifiable)
actions is the equivalent of a Turing machine. Consequently, Turing machine theory deals with productive
processes irrespective of the physical construction of the subject of the process.
Moreover, Turing showed convincingly that the Turing machine can compute any function or can manipulate
any string of function symbols that any rival system or scheme of computation known at the time could. This
fact gave great support to an observation made by Alonzo Church made in the mid-1930s, later termed Church’s
Thesis. This thesis necessarily has many formulations. One sober one would be:
The notion of a function computable by a Turing machine is a realization of the notion of a finite decision
procedure, that is, a set of rules and instructions that unambiguously determine a step-by-step operation, and,moreover, any past or future formulations of the latter notion will be equivalent to Turing’s.
Church’s Thesis is not strictly a mathematical or logical theorem, rather it is a claim about the capacities of any
computer, whether human or not, similar to the formulation of the First Law of thermodynamics that prohibits
the existence of perpetual motion machines of the first kind. If a system produces results that are the product ofcomputation, then its behavior should be simulatable by a Turing machine. Moreover, if anyone claims to comeup with a new decision procedure, the Thesis claims that it ought to be equivalent to Turing’s.
Church’s Thesis still holds to this day even though an impressive number of new formulations of the notion havebeen developed since 1936—for example, Kolmogorov’s and Markov’s notion of algorithm, McCulloch andPitts’s notion of the neural net, Post’s notion of a formal system, a wide variety of new computer programming“languages”—and the intuitive power of Turing’s for-mulation of such decision procedures was decisive inpersuading most mathema-ticians that Church’s Thesis marks off the limits and content of computation.
More important still, however, has been the ability of Turing’s work to show that mathematics was no longer thedividing line between mental activity and manual labor. For Turing machines can replicate the behavior of any
human worker who is following (consciously or not) any fixed, finite decision procedure whether it involves
manipulating numbers, discrete physical objects or well-defined, publicly identifiable environmental conditions.
A data entry technician at Los Alamos, a hole-puncher in an auto assembly line, a quality-control tester, atypesetter or anyone else working in conditions typical of the industrial “Modern Times” capitalism of the 1930s
and 1940s are Turing machines whose behavior can be simulated by the universal Turing machine. In a word,
Turing’s machine theory reveals the mathematics of work.
Although the technological implications of Turing’s work were almost immediately recognized, its political
economy still remains problematic. If, as some versions of technological determinism have it, the steam engine
set the conditions for a classical period of economic reflection, does the Turing machine create the conditions fora postclassical form of economic reflection? Or, does the Turing machine create the conditions for a new type of
conflict between worker and machine qua capital? And finally, though most crucial for our work, even if we
grant Marx his claim that simple machines and heat engines do not create value, do Turing machines create
value?
The short answer to these questions is that the value-creating aspect of human labor seems to be essentially
unaffected by the Turing machine approach. Indeed, it seems to give more concrete support for Marx’s claimthat the use-value of labor, that is, that labor has different levels of skill and kinds of results, is not crucial for
analyzing the value-creation aspect of human labor. Rather, simple average labor as the expenditure of humanlabor-power is the crucial object for study. Just as thermodynamics gives us the measure to compare all sorts ofhuman energy expenditure so, too, a Turing machine analysis allows us to see the quantitative basis of skill. It
makes precise the “various proportions in which different kinds of labor are reduced to simple labor as their unitof measurement are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers; theseproportions therefore appear to the producers to have been handed down by tradition.”42 Thus, a computational
analysis of tailoring and weaving make clear that “though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a
productive expenditure of human brains, nerves and muscles, and in this sense are human labour.” The mystiqueof skill (especially mental skill) is deflated by a Turing machine analysis, and a fundamental continuity between
labor—mental and manual—is verified.
The Self-Negativity of Labor
I am forced to the conclusion that this was a deliberate act. In a man of his type, one never knows what his
mental processes are going to do next.
—A British coroner commenting on Alan Turing’s suicide (1954)
The theory of the Turing machine and Church’s Thesis have a fundamental contribution to make to Marxist
value theory by extremizing the possibilities of mechanization. For if the notion of computation is properly
generalized into any activity that is rule-governed, then one of its implications is that all labor (whether mental or
physical) that is repeatable and standardized (and hence open to value analysis at all) can be mechanized. Thus,
if value is created by labor per se and all its positive features can be accomplished by machine (via Church’s
Thesis), then machines can create value. But this is a reductio ad absurdum for Marxist theory: consequently one
must look to other features of the transformation of labor-power into labor that cannot be subsumed under
Church’s Thesis.
This transformation nexus between labor-power and labor is, of course, central to value theory. It is here, after
all, that the creation of surplus value is to be found, that is, the difference between the value of labor-power andthe value created by labor. On the labor-power side of this nexus is the weight of physiology and history, whileon the labor side is an activity that is totally simulatable by machine, but it is in its gap that value creativity is tobe found. For if machines cannot create value, then why can labor? The answer cannot lie in some positive
feature of labor per se, since it is arguable that any particular well-defined piece of labor can be modeled or
simulated by a complex machine (in theory at least). That is, let us grant that a universal simple machine
powered by a universal heat engine guided by a universal Turing machine can imitate or instantiate any rulegoverned act of labor. If there was, therefore, a positive aspect of labor that created value, either individually orcollectively, then one can conclude that machines also, at least theoretically, can produce value.
Consequently, if labor is to create value while (simple, heat or Turing) machines do not, then labor’s valuecreating capacities must lie in its negative capability, that is, its capacity to refuse to be labor. This self-reflexive
negativity is an element of the actuality of labor that very few models of Marx’s theory can capture. Thus in
linear algebraic Marxism, this negative capacity of labor is not revealed. On the contrary, the formal equational
symmetries seem to bedevil the interpretation making “iron,” “corn,” “machines,” or any other basic commodity
as capable as labor to produce value (and to be exploited!).43 Certainly, these linear algebraic systems do notconvincingly interpret Marx’s theory because they seem to take Sraffa’s method as basic: that capitalism is apositive, self-reflexive system of commodities produced by commodities per se. But Marx insists that labor has
no value and is not a commodity, though it is the creative source of value, that is, capitalism is a system ofcommodities produced by a noncommodity.
Thus, labor is something like a singularity in the apparently total and homogeneous field of value or a kinetic
energy trajectory in a potential field. It is not commensurable in kind with the objects of the discipline—the“immense [mountain cavern] of commodities” that begins Volume I of Capital—though its volatility creates thevalue of these very objects. Labor is outside of political economy in a way opposite to the exoteric character ofuse-values, for the discovery of the externality of labor to the field of value makes it possible for there to be a
“critique of political economy” at all, whereas use-values simply direct us to consumer catalogues and thesemiotics of fashion.
In a nutshell, we can thus formulate the Marxian reason why machines can-not create value: because they arevalues already.
A good, if enigmatic place to look for this gap between the being and the becoming of value is in the suicide of
Alan Turing himself. Turing’s suicide deprived the British government and industry a highly skilled
mathematician, cryptanalyst, and computer theorist. On June 7, 1954, he ate an apple dipped in cyanide, leaving
behind neither note nor explanation.44 The circumstances behind the suicide are not clear, but it did follow his
arrest under the “Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885” and his
being forced by the court to undergo “chemotherapy” to “cure” his homosexual “tendencies.” Was his suicide aprotest against his treatment at the hands of the authorities (whom he had served with such effectiveness in theSecond World War and in the initial period of the computer “revolution”)?
This we do not know. We do know, however, that he was a state employee in the midst of an antihomosexual
purge. Its very lack of explanation gave his suicide a sort of “Bartleby-effect” (after the mysterious Scrivener inMelville’s 1851 story who would “prefer not”): an act that evinces the ability of labor-power to refuse to berealized as labor whether within or without a contractual bond and for reasons that are not necessarily dictated by

the immediate conditions of the labor. Turing’s suicide (when an employee of the state) or Bartleby’s refusal to
move (when an employee of a private firm) demonstrates that the crucial ability giving human work its value is
not its nonmechanizability, but rather its self-negating capacity. As long as it can be refused, as long as thetransformation of labor-power into labor is self-reflexively nondeterministic, then it can create value in its
actualization. This self-reflexive negativity is no simple matter, as Hegel pointed out in his is master-slave
dialectic long before and as Fanon demonstrated shortly after Turing’s suicide. For this negativity brings intoplay a history not so much of life and death, but of killing or being killed.
This analysis of value-creation allows us to see that class struggle is basic to the capitalist mode of production in
the region of “mental” labor just as it is to be found in the realm of physical production. It is basic not because it
is a sign of the special quality of mental labor, but because it is simply labor. Though complex, this capacity forlabor-power to refuse its actualization into labor is not some mysterious aspect of humanity, it is apresupposition of the existence of contractual society in the first place.

1 Marx, Grundrisse, 501.
2 Marcel Biefer and Beat Zgraggen,Prophecies,ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Zürich and Venice: Sammlung Hauser & Wirth and Aperto
93/Biennale of Venice, 1993)
3 See, for example, Mario Savio’s “An End to History” in The New Left: A Documentary History, ed. Massimo Teodori (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 159–61.
4 Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
5 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, The OECD Jobs Study: Evidence and Explanations (Paris: OECD, 1994).
6 J.J. Thomas, Informal Economic Activity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Giovanna Franca
Dalla Costa, Paying the Price: Wom-en and International Economic Strategy. London: Zed Books. 1995
7 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973); Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); Julius Sensat Jr.,
Habermas and Marxism: An Appraisal (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979); Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press,
1975); Jean Baudrillard, Simulations(New York: Semiotext(e)/Autonomedia, 1983); and Negri, Marx Beyond Marx.
8 Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Proletariat (Boston: South End Press, 1983); Andre Gorz, Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work
(Boston: South End Press, 1985); and Caffentzis, “The Work-Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse,” 11–57 in this volume.
9 See “On Africa and Self-Reproducing Automata,” 127 in this volume
10 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 494.11 Ibid., 494.12 Ibid., 496–97.
11 Ibid, 494
12 Ibid, 496 -97
13 Ibid., 490.
14 Ibid., 517.
15 Ibid., 508.
16 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970).
17 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 137.18 Edward L. Youmans, The Correlation and Conservation of Forces: A Series of Expositions (New York:Appleton & Co., 1872), 387
18 Edward L. Youmans, The Correlation and Conservation of Forces: A Series of Expositions (New York; ASppelton % Co., 1872), 387
19 Ibid., 231
20 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 308.
21 Marx, Grundrisse, 766
22 Ibid., 767–68.
23 Ibid., 706.
24 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 266.
25 Marx, Capital: Volume III, 266; Marco Lippi, Value and Naturalism in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1979), 50–51.
26 Marx, Capital: Volume III, 270.
27 Ibid., 299.
28 Ibid., 270.
29 Ibid., 273.
30 See G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: Marxism and Anarchism 1850–1890 (London: Macmillan, 1969) and Julius Braunthal, The Historyof the International, Volume 1: 1864–1914 (New York: Praeger, 1967).
31 Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1967), 368.
32 Ibid., 367.
33 Ibid., 417.
34 Feodor Dostoevsky, “Notes from the Underground,” in Existentialism, ed. Robert C. Solomon (New York: Modern Library, 1974), 37.
35 Samuel Butler, Erewhon (New York: Lancer Books, 1968), 337.
36 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), 390–91.
37 See Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, 1962) and Samuel Hollander, The Economics ofJohn Stuart Mill, Vol. 1: Theory of Method(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).
38 Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1935)
39 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 772–81.
40 Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers,” in The Undecidable,ed. Martin Davis(Hewlett, NY: Raven Press, 1965), 117.
41 Ibid.
42 Marx, Capital: Volume I, 135.
43 Spencer J. Pack, Reconstructing Marxian Economics: Marx Based upon a Sraffian Commodity Theory of Value (New York: Praeger,1986).
44 Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 487–96.

0

$

%& '

We are excited to write you this letter regarding the ways your essay “Why Machines Cannot
Create Value” relates to our experiences of the history of silver mining and its images in Potosí. 0.
But before we can begin we must first stay in Germany, in Saxony, where silver mining began at theend of the 12th century. By the mid-16th century it suffered a decline caused by cheap silver imports
from South America. It recovered with help from a highly sophisticated montane technology, before
another wave of cheap metals from USA and Mexico in the 19th century caused its final collapse.
This montane technology cannot be reduced to the processes of amalgamation or smelting. It was ahuge social organism, a "Leviathan" of labour power. 1 The images you see in this brochure originate
from a large tableau of this Leviathan.2 It is a Leviathan of administration, subordination andtechnology, and at the same time of the celebration of the new absolutism after the Thirty Year War.
The tableau features a parade of miners organized in 1719, as the grand finale of the festivities in
Dresden celebrating the wedding of August the Strong’s son and Maria Josepha von Habsburg - amarriage that promised a claim to the Habsburg throne, which in fact was very weak. Thus, thecelebration was not so much a wedding but rather an opportunity to demonstrate the mercantile
and industrial power of Saxony – much like the grand industrial exhibitions at the Crystal Palace inLondon, which you mention in your text.
The festivities were called The Feast of the Planets and lasted an entire month. Each week wasdedicated to different planets and their corresponding pagan gods as well as to their relation to
virtues of government and economy and included a full bestiary of mythological figures from theRenaissance. It was organized with such care and attention to perfection and splendour as to set a
standard for the entire East of Europe, as though it had learned its lessons from Versailles 3: The
Leviathan is gorgeous.
We have to mention a detail of the feast before we get to the miners' procession. In a picture of thefeast you can see a table in the shape of an A
-like August. You can see many hills lined up on it. These are the stations of the miners' procession,
which are reproduced out of sugar as decoration on the feast table. They stand on an intricate
pattern of sugar platters, as centrepieces. What at the time seemed as affluent waste became aninvestment. The moulds for these sugar glazes became the repertoire of the casting moulds for the
new porcelain manufactory in Meissen. Such is the happiness of history, with the distance of time,
one can determine what was considered fortune and what was overlooked with presupposes
blindness to the matter itself. Sugar, asthe first colonial commodity to reach Europe, was producedwith a great deal of effort on land, shipping logistics and an abundance of wastage of people. So
what do the mines of sugar on the banquet table in the last part of the festival, The Feast Of Saturn,tell us? Perhaps that they were saying goodbye to/ parting from a new industry here in Saxony inwhich resources and logistics are taking on a different global role. 4
The last week and the climax of the feast was The Festival Of Saturn. For it, a parade of 1,500 miners
not only marched in front of the nobles, but also demonstrated the process of mining, melting andcoining while marching. This entire undertaking was organized with pioneering logistics, and wasmeant to represent all the mines monopolized by the king. In it you could see four machines at work
carried by the paraders: a mine in a portable mountain with its delivery mechanism, a blowing
hearth, a smelting machine and a minting machine.5 The parade was not only meant to demonstrate
the richness of resources of labour and soil, but also to show the production process in itself,
displaying it as a demonstration of overwhelming cameralistic power. Mining and metallurgy weredivided in the procession into two uniformed corps, with 12 divisions of approximately 300 men,each of them led by a detailed line of figures, from director until foreman. A corps of Janissaries
headed off the parade - demonstrating the final victory over the Turks. The parade offered a displayof all the professions included in the mining and melting process, giving one an idea of the highly
differentiated division of the labour and the hierarchies of an entire industry.
We also found a description of the miner’s costumes. These were costumes they would have neverworn to work. They were designed in painstaking detail - to manifest/demonstrate their function
inside this Leviathan. Towards the end of the costumes' description, it is revealed that the expenses
for these costumes were later taken from the miners' own wages. “Among other things, the miners
were granted advances for the purchase of the new mountain habit, which were again deductedfrom their wages. To make a comparison possible,” the author concludes, “the Kur Prince had anallowance of 112,680 talers a year for entertainment. The Chief Court Marshal von Löwenthal
received an annual salary of 6,000 talers, and a litter carrier got 28 talers a month." 6 In some images
you can see the miners carrying decorative weapons, such as those used in the early days of mining
to defend a claim. But in these images they now appear to bear the attributes of those seeking tomould the miners into their own claims. B
This brings us to the product of this parade: the coin. C
One of the sides of the coin shows a cupid with a dowsing rod trying to discover a vein of ore. The
other side shows a cupid as a minter. The coin thus represents a beginning and an end, an alpha andomega of the mining production at The Festival Of Saturn in Saxony. The focus on religion andmythology however hides the dependency of the mining production on the actual world economy-”
All labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this qualityof being equal ... that it forms the value of commodities.” you quote Marx’s response to Liebig’s
physiological view of labour. “This quality is a social product that is averaged over all the differential
physiological loci at one particular temporal instant to create that productive Leviathan.”7 After silvermining was rendered unprofitable by South American imports, Saxony was in need of moreinvestments for its emerging manufacturing economy. This is, in fact, the very thing these festivities
were promoting.. 8
We should turn now to some fragments of our research into the history of the 16th and 17th century
images journey from Europe to the Andes.. We often thought about the back-flow of these images,
taking into consideration both the silver as a part of this global Leviathan with all its social relations,but also the messages these images were conveying. These images seemed to instruct/portray a shift
in the entire social imagination.. Even the idea of love was now altered by this new step in thedevelopment of capitalism. This cupid imprinted on the coin reminds us of a painting we saw in the
church of Jesús de Machaca. D
It shows a blindfolded figure in an animal harness much like the ones used for beasts driving
machines. A cupid with a whip rides the figure to keep it at work. We found the original motive of thepainting in a book of emblems printed in 1628 by the Plantin Press in Antwerp.
E
The Plantin Press had a monopoly awarded by the Spanish King to provide the colonies images to be
painted. These emblems were originally dedicated to an erotic dialog between Amor and Psyche.. In
the wake of the Counter-Reformation, Amor was transformed to Jesus and Psyche to the soul. “Weassume”, we wrote in the description of the painting, “that in Jesus de Machaca the machine, inwhich the soul and its supervisor are harnessed, was quite well known. It represents a mechanism of
power transmission deployed in both mines and silver processing.” 9 Indeed the machinery in thispainting is identical with the machines described and drawn in the compendium about mining andmetallurgy by Gregorius Agricola, Fa doctor residing in Joachimsthal, the epicenter of the new mining industry. The compendium was
published after his death in 1556, when the mining industry in Saxony was restoring itself throughthe mining of other metals as well as through investments in technology and procedural knowledge

of the montane industry too. The Montane Academy Freiberg was founded around the same time.
Agricola’s compendium soon became a world wide recognized source for basic knowledge on mining
technologies. One Chinese translation from 1640 could be found in the library of Nanjing. 10 The
compendium was translated into Spanish in 1569, and in the Casa Moneda Museum in Potosí you canfind the book "De Arte de los Metales" by Alonzo Barba from 1640 which refers to Agricola oncountless occasions. An evident link to these documents link might be the machines you can still see
there. G“The relation of divine Eros to the Soul is a new motif in Christian edifying literature, a further
possibility to describe and assert the subject that is divided into the one obeying and the one giving
orders, both subordinates of the divine power apparatus,” 11 we wrote about the painting in Jesus
Jesús de Machaca. The materials of history, however, tell a monotonous, more brutal story. In more
recent research on Potosí, we discovered that slaves were the ones predominantly driving the wheelsof these machines, and tending to them until the machines consumed them and caused their deaththrough exhaustion. 12 The abyss between these slaves, or the indigenous forced labourers recruited
through the mita system, and the sophisticated and opalescent division of craft, labour andadministration in the 1719 miner's parade might be difficult to gauge at first – much like the risk weface in trusting the beauty of the tableau without knowing that the clothes described in it were paid
for in advance by the miner's wages

H
We have to quote Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” despite it being rather overused in the marxist
debates because it returns again and again as an early painted image foreseeing so much of the
global capitalist machinery. And when we read your description of the international wave of strikes
that followed the end of the U.S. Civil War from “the cotton plantations of Georgia to the wheat
fields of Poland” up to the Paris Commune. 13 With the advance of the international worker’s
movement and its discussions, we recognize another serious image: the promise of reversing themighty organism in realizing who is driving its wheels. I
The Leviathan is glorious and it is glorious to fight with it. We see before us a historical battle scene—painted with a triumphant gesture only possible when the painter still believes that history itself isa machine—a fulfilment of laws—in itself. We read (not only) this part of the Communist Manifesto(quoted here under I) touched and sadden as it echoes all the hopes of the inevitably coming
revolution we shared in the last decades: General Intellect, Social Media, and this dream... J
Our current impression is that the predators in their own competition - in their breathless mutual
existential angst - are devouring so much that they are on their way not only devour themselves, but
the entire world.
At the end of your text—after the chapter about Alan Turing—you write about the negativity oflabour. “Labor’s value-creating capacities must lie in its negative capability, that is, its capacity torefuse to be labor. [...] (L)abor is something like a singularity in the apparently total andhomogeneous field of value [...] Labor is outside of political economy in a way opposite to the
exoteric character of use-values” 14 Putting something in terms of value demands a beyond that canbe consumed and digested into values - like lifetime (labor hours), air, water, trees, hills, thoughts,
feelings, data or genes. In view of the hunger of the latest predators, it is difficult for us to make a
distinction between lifetime / labour, and air, water, hills or genes. We stand in front of a question,
which seems as fashionable as the question "Can machines create value?" was in 19th century ,namely: Can machines create life? The difference between resources (just being there, provided bynature) and labour (making resources into value) is an axiom of classical economy. But as we observelabor as well as consumer behaviours being informalized, dispersed and exploited as data, pulling us
all into the next level of dependencies on capital, we must ask, what if we / labour are dropping to
the mere level as resources? Then resistance — the realisation and reversal of the machine and thesolidarity among united resources—suddenly becomes imaginable across a very wide field of—yes—
the joy to resist.
Three more parades: We visited the town Schneeberg to watch the annual miner’s parade thatcelebrate the "Bergstreittag” in honour of the successful miners wage struggle in 1496. We saw
union flags from the 15th century, the pride and joy of the people wearing those flags in theirtraditional costumes despite the fact that the mining industry disappeared from that region a longtime ago. And everywhere we looked, we saw the posters of new the right wing party. We remember
press images of Trump signing a new plan for the steel industry in the USA, surrounded by "workers"
and we thought about the irreversibility of industrial labour as a battlefield in the struggle against the
Leviathan. We thought about the horrible pain/hardship labour could cause when this irreversibility
is denied. But what about the pride and the joy of the paraders - so lost in time, and so abandoned
by a historically derivable future?
In the introduction to our first chapter of the archive we wrote about another parade celebrated inhonor of the new Viceroy Morcillo in Potosí in 1718—one year before the celebrations in Dresden.
Here you can see as well, a parade of honor guards and well dressed mining officers, but the
costumes here were hastily improvised because the Viceroy came too early and the funds of thetown were precarious during this time of crisis. Entrepreneurs and adventurers of the town enacted
the guards in the parade, just assumming these roles. This calls to mind the fact that the miners had
to pay off their clothes in Dresden. Both adapted costumes of a particular order as a means to justify
exploitation. The aim of the festival was to reclaim the right to recruit forced labor for the town
through the system of the mita and thus to save the majority of the viceroyalty’s working resources.
During the festivities at night, a hill was carried to the nobles. This was not done by a machine. K
It was labour as a bare human resource. But there was a machine built into a tier of a triumphal arc.

L
No production was performed here in a town drenched in crisis, we said to ourselves, what was
performed was pure waste as if ... M
But, we discussed, overproduction is not the term for the satisfaction of the hunger of the European
Leviathans in this town. The core event that came about in the town is rather the unconditional
availability of resources.
Yet, we replied, seeing as the metal was in fact extracted and minted here, it did perform
overproduction in Spain with its influence on the increase of the food prices, or the decrease of silver
prices in Saxony, and in all the other places forged by the machinery of capital, where peoples lives
are generally depend upon money for survival.
The last parade we mention here is a Triumphal chariot with a well-ordered hierarchy of saints andapostles mixed with figures of secular Renaissance mythology as well as Andean mythology. We
found that painting in Jesús de Machaca hanging next to the one with the angel. A similar painting
was located in the church of the neighbouring village of Guachi. N"Chariots are widespread motifs in Andean and European painting. They actually stem from thefestivals of the Renaissance and draw upon Antique myths. [...] The chariot of Jesus Machaca forms
an entire hierarchy of prophets, church fathers, allegories, famous saints [...] contaminated by bothindigenous and humanistic themes."15 We mentioned at the beginning that the wedding festivities in
Dresden were performed with mythological figures of the Renaissance as a huge cosmos to praise
the King. In these painting, we find the same bestiary on parade, although it is now contaminated byAndean figures. For us these mythological figures of the Andes must remain silent, it cannot be up to
us to interpret them. But in both paintings, we see the wheels of the chariot driven by four allegoric
figures representing Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. In the discussions of the Potosí project the
responding artists raised with no uncertain terms questions as to who is driving these wheels. "Who

actually sets the wagon in motion? The four evangelists in front of the wagon, the siren twining
around it, or the four persons under the wagon moving its wheels with their hands? We say: It isthese four representatives of The Wretched of the Earth. Without them, the world would grind to a
halt.” 16
But we have to take a more detailed look now. The serpent swallows the train of the four evangelists
pretending to pull the chariot. The four figures might be representing something, but arepermanently threatened by an alien power that meanders under the whole chariot. This could be a
precise description of the permanent fear of the colonizer, who dominates a world that he exploits
but doesn’t understand.
The hands of the four figures are on the wheels. The figures are painted as kings, and their bodies aremelted together as one world. With this we have to come back again to labour, not as a lost identity,
not as pure spending of lifetime, but as a force on one side and - you were so right - as a powerfulrealisation of resistance on the other. O
And we can see now the tiara above the head of the Viceroy like a blade "dropping a good distancethrough the air, that stopped and hung at the height of his head". P

Yours
Alice and Andreas

Endnotes
1 “the total social labour-power of society.”as you quoted Marx in your text.
Georges Caffentzis, Why Machines cannot create Value, p., 139 - 163, Chapter Thermodynamics and Value, p. 145, in: In
Letters of Blood and Fire, PM Press, 2013 https://libcom.org/files/in-letters-of-blood-and-fire.pdf
2 It is a 38-meter long drawing, made by an anonymous artist in1736, archived at the library of the Bergakademie Freiberg.
There are two reproductions of parts of it that were published. One by a Miner Union in West Germany (Eisenhütte
Westfalia) in 1957, and another in the GDR in 1982. We are showing the first one and quoting the introduction of thelatter: Die historische Bergparade anläßlich des Saturnfestes im Jahre 1719, Eberhard Wächtler, Eberhard Neubert, VEB
Verlag für Grundstoffindustrie, Leipzig, 1982
3 A huge volume of copper engravings was planned to be published under the title RECUEL DES DESINS ET GRAVURES
repésentent LES SOLEMNITES DU MARRIAGES […]. It should have propagated the power of Saxony in the whole of Europe.
Due to budget cuts is remained unfinished. But the Saturn Festivity is documented by the copper engravings of Carl Heinrich
Jacob Fehling; detailed protocols of the organisation of the whole event were taken in advance and sent afterwards as
know-hows to the courts of Petersburg, London, Vienna. and the print editions in the fair cities of Leipzig and Frankfurt,
look at: Monika Schlechte, Saturnalia Saxonia 1719, In Dresdner Hefte, 21, 1990,
http://www.dr-schlechte.com/schlechte83sondersaturnaliasaxoniae.pdf
4 Maureen Cassidy - Geiger: Vom Zucker zum Silber zum Porzellan
Court Dining in Dresden under Augustus III]KERAMOS 198, October 2007, pp. 31-48
https://www.academia.edu/1766511/Von_Zucker_und_Silber_zum_Porzellan

Columbus possessed a detailed knowledge of the eastern Atlantic’s Madeira Island sugar industry—he had married thedaughter of a wealthy Madeira sugar grower—and he clearly recognized Jamaica’s rich potential for growing the crop.
Moreover, at least 60,000 indigenous Taino farmers and fishers lived on the island, a potential pool of forced labourers. But
Columbus died [...] Instead it was his son Diego who dispatched some 80 Spanish colonists to the north coast of Jamaica in
1509. There the colonists subjugated the Taino, planted sugar cane and corn, and founded Sevilla la Nueva ... According tosurviving records, the inhabitants of Seville la Nueva did not begin milling sugar until the arrival of their second governor,
Francesco de Garay, in 1515. Garay, a former slave trader in the Bahamas, had made his fortune in Caribbean gold fields. He
devoted part of this wealth to constructing a mill in Sevilla la Nueva capable of churning out 150 tons of sugar a year for
European markets. [...] Documents strongly suggest that Garay brought 11 enslaved Africans to Seville la Nueva, but
excavators found no trace of their existence in the industrial quarter. Instead, Garay relied heavily on coerced Tainolaborers. [...] The excavations also reveal much about the grand ambitions of the early Spanish entrepreneurs. In Sevilla la
Nueva’s industrial quarter, the archaeologists unearthed a massive sculptor’s workshop littered with nearly 1,000 carved

limestone blocks of archangels, griffons and demons—the largest collection of Renaissance sculpture ever discovered in theAmericas. These were destined for the altar of a magnificent stone abbey the settlers planned to build. [...] Moreover, thesugar industry they founded in Jamaica took a tragic toll on human life. European germs and exploitation virtuallyextinguished Jamaica’s Taino in just one century. Without this large coerced workforce, Jamaica’s sugar economy faltered
until the British seized the island in 1655 and set up a full-scale plantation system, importing tens of thousands of enslaved
Africans. By the end of the 18th century, African-American slaves outnumbered Europeans in Jamaica by a ratio of ten toone.
Heather Pringle, Sugar Masters in a New World, January 12, 2010https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/sugar-masters-in-a-new-world-5212993/

A

Carl Heinrich Jacob Fehling, Banquet, Saturn Festival

5 "Ein großer Erzberg, in welcher die Ausstellung der Bergbaus, stollenweise und vor Ort, auch auf Strossen, benebenst
Verlaufung der Erze unter dem Haspel und deren Ausförderung wirklich zu sehen ist. [..] der Treibeherd , als eine
Hüttenmaschine, auf der wirklich getrieben und ein Blick von etlichen Mark Silber gemacht worden ist. Dieser Herd maß im[..]etwa 1.60m[..]und stand auf einem (3,36) langem Wagen [..] die Münzmaschine." Die historische Bergparade, ibid.
6 "Es wurden nämlich unter anderem den Bergleuten Vorschüsse für die Anschaffung des neuen Berghabits gewährt, diewieder vom Lohn abgezogen wurden. Um einen Vergleich zu ermöglichen, an den Kurprinzen sind jährlich zur Unterhaltung
112 680 Taler gezahlt worden. Der Oberhofmarschall von Löwenthal erhielt ein Jahresgehalt von 6000 Talern, ein
Sänftenträger bekam monatlich 28 Taler", Die historische Bergparade, ibid.

B

Manifesto of the Communist Party, English edition, 1888
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, May 2019

C

Ejection token for the Saturnfest 1719,
Münzkabinett Dresden, inventory no. 3697

7 Caffentzis, ibd., p.145
8 One of Saxony´s chief imports to Southamerica was canvas.
The Export to England - which was usually followed by re-exports to North America, Spain and Latin America - made Upper
Lusatia an important location for the European linen industry, an "integral part of the Atlantic economic system. The
landowners (not only aristocrats) began to settle weavers on their estates on a large scale in view of the linen boom on theforeign markets. The transition from manor to manorial rule in most manor villages in southern Upper Lusatia thus became
apparent not least as a result of the boom for canvas on the world market. However, this did not involve the abolition of
feudal achievements in general, but only their transformation from labour and payment in kind to a money pension.
Jörg Ludwig, Der Handel Sachsens nach Spanien und Lateinamerika 1760 – 1830 , Warenexport, Unternehmerinteressen
und staatliche Politik 2014

D

Amor Divinus, ascribed to Juan Ramos,

Church of Jesus de Machaca, Departament de La Paz, ca. 1700
It was stolen after our visit, which tells a lot about the destructive value of our view and visit - as "European curators". Lookat "Why the Pictures from Jesus de Machaca are not coming", in: The Potosí Principle, ed. by Alice Creischer, Max Jorge
Hinderer, Andreas Siekmann, Walther König, Cologne 2010, p. 87

E

Pia desideria emblematis, Hermanus Hugo, 1628,

K.U. Leuven, Centrale Bibliothek

9 Description Amor Divinus, The Potosí Principle, ibid., p. 85

F
Gregorius Agricola: "De re metallica libri XII" - Vom Bergkwerck, 1557,
ed. Hans Prescher, Leipzig 1965, Facsimile, Book 6. The compendium describes the whole mining and melting industry theentire mining and metallurgy from the exploration of the deposits, over the mining and transport of the ore up to theprocessing of the ore.
10 https://www.archaeologie-online.de/blog/350-jahre-alte-chinesische-uebersetzung-von-agricolas-de-re-metallicagefunden-2949/

G

Machines at the museum Casa Moneda in Potosí

11 Description Amor Divinus, Principio Potosí, ibid.
12 From around 1600, the death rate skyrocketed among the local Indian communities. To compensate for the diminishingindigenous labour force, the colonists made a request in 1608 to the Crown in Madrid to begin allowing the importation of
1,500 to 2,000 African slaves per year [..] An estimated total of 30,000 African slaves were taken to Potosí during thecolonial era. Like the native labourers, they too died in large numbers. African slaves were also forced to work in the Casa
Moneda (mint) as acémilas humanas (human mules). Since mules would die after a couple of months pushing the mills, thecolonists replaced the four mules with twenty African slaves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potos%C3%AD
look at Angola Maconde, Juan. "Raíces de un pueblo: cultura afroboliviana." La Paz: Producciones CIMA,
1999.

H

Fragment on Machines,

http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf
13 Caffentzis, ibid., p. 156

I

Manifesto, ibid.

J

as we see it

14 Caffentzis, ibid., p. 162

K

Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí

Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsua y Vela, Volume III, Chapter 41;
English Translation of the chapter in: Tales of Potosí, ed. R.C. Padden, Brown University, Providence 1975

L

Historia, ibid.

M

Manifesto, ibid.

N

Triunfo del Nombre de Jesus

1703, Juan Ramos, Churches of Jesus de Machca and Guachi, Principio Potosí, ibid., p., 86
Church of Guachi, image research 200915 Principio Potosi, ibid, p., 86
16 Konstanze Schmitt, Stephan Dillemuth, Territorio Domestico, Madrid 2010, Principio Potosí, ibid., p., 86
Look at Chapter 1 /No 1a

O

Fragment on Machines

http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf, 706

P

Entrada del Virrey Morcillo en Potosí

Melchor Perez Holguin: 1718, Museo de America, Madrid,
look at Chapter 1/ No 1
Translated with deepl, / edited by David Riff, proofreading by Ella Shechter

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