An aspect of Marx’s thinking which remains underemphasised is how he recognised capitalism’s tendency to progressively replace labour – animal and human, physical and cognitive – with machines. In a system replete with contradictions, it was this one in particular which rendered it a force of potential liberation. This is most clearly laid out in the ‘Fragment on Machines’, a short but important excerpt within the much larger Grundrisse. The reason you’ve likely never heard of either before, unlike the better-known Communist Manifesto or Capital, is that the Grundrisse was unpublished in
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