Automation qualitatively alters dead versus living labor and surplus value

Evidence

The technological change which tends to do away with the machine as individual instrument of production, as “absolute unit,” seems to cancel the Marxian notion of the “organic composition of capital” and with it the theory of the creation of surplus value. According to Marx, the machine never creates value but merely transfers its own value to the product, while surplus value remains the result of the exploitation of living labor. The machine is embodiment of human labor power, and through it, past labor (dead labor) preserves itself and determines living labor. Now automation seems to alter qualitatively the relation between dead and living labor; it tends toward the point where productivity is determined “by the machines, and not by the individual output.” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 179

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Automated production grounds a value theory beyond measurable labor time — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 198; Automated production shifts wealth creation from labor time to scientific knowledge — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 198; Technology is a figure for dead labor’s alienated counterfinality — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 125 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Automated production grounds a value theory beyond measurable labor time #expands (0.92) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 198
• Automation makes individual output measurement and surplus-value theory obsolete. #expands (0.90) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 179
• Automation ends individual output measurement and the wage system built on it #expands (0.88) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 180
• Automated production shifts wealth creation from labor time to scientific knowledge #expands (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 198
• Technology is a figure for dead labor’s alienated counterfinality #exemplifies (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 125