Brief Five — Circulation, Fixed Capital, and the Fragment on Machines Circulation and turnover, fixed capital, the automatic system of machinery and the general intellect, real wealth as disposable time, and the transformation into profit.

The last stretch of the Chapter on Capital carries the analysis through circulation and turnover into the theory of fixed capital — and it is in the pages on fixed capital and machinery, in Notebook VII, that Marx wrote the single most influential passage of the entire Grundrisse: the "Fragment on Machines." This brief gathers that culminating material. The circulation and turnover analysis here is the rough-draft ancestor of Volume II. But the fragment on machines reaches beyond anything in the published Capital. Contemplating the fully developed automatic factory, where the worker no longer wields the tool but stands beside a self-moving system of machinery as its watchman and regulator, Marx projects the tendency to its limit and draws a startling conclusion: that capital, by developing the social productive forces and the "general intellect" to this degree, undermines its own foundation, the measure of wealth by labour-time. Once the automatic system of machines embodies accumulated social knowledge and does the producing, direct labour shrinks to a vanishing quantity, and the real source of wealth becomes the general productive powers of the social individual — the collective knowledge, science, and cooperation objectified in the machinery — while the real measure of wealth becomes not labour-time but disposable time, free time for human development. Capital thus becomes "the moving contradiction," straining to reduce labour-time to a minimum while clinging to labour-time as the sole measure and source of value. These pages are the fountainhead of autonomist Marxism, of post-work and "cognitive capitalism" theory, and of every argument that automation points beyond the value form; they are also a charter capture-target. The brief carries them whole.

Before the fragment, Marx develops the material that Volume II would formalize. Capital is value in constant motion through its forms, and its circulation — the time it spends in the market, changing from commodity into money and back — is a limit on its valorization, "circulation time = time of devaluation," time in which capital produces no value. He works out the distinction between fixed capital (the means of labour that stays in production and yields its value gradually, over many turnovers) and circulating capital (whose value returns whole each cycle), and the turnover time compounded of production time and circulation time — the whole apparatus of the later volume, here in first draft. The crucial move is that Marx treats fixed capital not as a merely technical category but as the form in which capital's tendency to develop the productive forces becomes objectified: fixed capital is where accumulated social labour, science, and skill are deposited in the instruments of production. The analysis of fixed capital therefore opens directly onto the analysis of machinery, because the machine is fixed capital in its "most adequate" form — the form in which the means of labour has been wholly transformed by capital and confronts living labour as an alien, dominating power.

The fragment opens with that transformation stated in full.

But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 692.

In the fully developed machine system, the relation of worker to instrument is inverted. The worker no longer uses the tool; the automatic system of machinery uses the worker, who is reduced to a conscious linkage — a watchman and regulator — beside a process that runs by its own power. This is the passage Volume I's factory chapter would echo, but here Marx presses it further.

The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 693.

The inversion culminates in the loss of the process’s unity to the machine.

The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 693.

What the machine system embodies, the notebooks say outright, is society’s accumulated knowledge, absorbed into capital and confronting labour as capital’s attribute.

The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper. Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, in so far as capital’s relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of capital as such.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 694.

For the worker, that objectified knowledge is an alien power.

In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital’s] requirements.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 695.

Because the machine embodies the accumulated knowledge and skill of society, the real productive power at work is no longer the individual worker's labour but the collective, social knowledge objectified in the machinery — what Marx names, in the phrase that has echoed through a century of theory, the general intellect.

The naming of the general intellect builds from the image of machines as organs of the human brain.

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

This is the conceptual heart of the fragment. Social knowledge — science, technology, the accumulated cooperation and skill of society — becomes a direct productive force, materialized in fixed capital, and the process of social life comes under the control of this "general intellect." Under capitalism this social knowledge confronts the worker as capital's property, an alien power dominating him; but the fact that it is social knowledge, produced collectively and objectified in a common apparatus, points beyond the private form in which capital holds it. It is this double character — social power appropriated privately — that makes the passage so combustible for later readers.

The fragment’s own verdict on this double character is explosive.

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.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

From the general intellect Marx draws the consequence that has made the fragment legendary. If wealth is really produced by the automatic system of machinery embodying social knowledge, and direct human labour shrinks toward the margin, then the whole foundation of the value form — the measurement of wealth by labour-time — is cut away beneath capital's feet. Capital develops productive powers so great that the labour-time of the individual worker becomes an ever more absurd measure of the wealth actually produced.

The argument comes in one continuous run, and it deserves to be carried whole. First, the premise of the value form — and its undermining by large industry itself.

The exchange of living labour for objectified labour – i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour – is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is – and remains – the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), pages 704–705.

Then the new figure of the producer, and the verdict on the old foundation of wealth.

Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 705.

The conclusion follows at once.

As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 705.

And the draft presses past the collapse to what it sets free.

With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), pages 705–706.

The real measure of wealth then becomes not labour-time but disposable time — free time for the many, time for the full development of human capacities, which the development of the productive forces has made materially possible.

The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 708.

But capital cannot allow this consequence, because its whole existence is the appropriation of surplus labour-time; it must therefore go on measuring and extracting value by labour-time even as it destroys the basis of that measure. This is the "moving contradiction" — the formulation in which the fragment names capital's self-undermining tendency.

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

Marx seconds the anonymous pamphleteer of 1821, whose formulation the fragment adopts as its own measure of wealth.

Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 706.

The horizon the passage opens is unmistakable: capital creates, in the automatic system of machinery and the general intellect, the material conditions of a society freed from toil, in which disposable time — free time for the development of individuals — would be the true wealth; and it simultaneously fetters those conditions within the value form, which can only measure wealth by the labour-time it is destroying. The contradiction points beyond capital to a form of society in which the "development of the social individual" and the free disposal of time would replace the extraction of surplus labour as the organizing principle of production. This is the passage that later readers — from the operaisti and Negri to the theorists of post-work and cognitive capitalism — have taken as Marx's most direct anticipation of a post-capitalist, post-scarcity horizon, and it is the deepest root of the charter's own concern with disposable time and the realm beyond necessity.

The see-saw is stated explicitly: capital creates disposable time and reconverts it into surplus labour, on pain of crisis — until the workers appropriate their own surplus.

It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital. The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 708.

In the closing pages of Notebook VII the positive horizon returns, in the vocabulary of free time and the production of the human being himself.

The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), pages 711–712.

Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital (Fragment on Machines), page 712.

The closing notebooks turn toward the transformation of surplus value into profit and the tendential fall in the rate of profit — the material that Volume III Part Three would formalize. Here the law appears in first draft, and Marx states its standing in terms even stronger than those of the published work.

The derivation is compact.

Presupposing the same surplus value, the same surplus labour in proportion to necessary labour, then, the rate of profit depends on the relation between the part of capital exchanged for living labour and the part existing in the form of raw material and means of production. Hence, the smaller the portion exchanged for living labour becomes, the smaller becomes the rate of profit. Thus, in the same proportion as capital takes up a larger place as capital in the production process relative to immediate labour, i.e. the more the relative surplus value grows – the value-creating power of capital – the more does the rate of profit fall.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 747.

Marx immediately ranks the law.

This is in every respect the most important law of modern political economy, and the most essential for understanding the most difficult relations. It is the most important law from the historical standpoint.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 748.

The Grundrisse's derivation is the same in principle as Volume III's: as capital develops the productive forces, the proportion of living labour to objectified labour falls, and since only living labour produces surplus-value, the rate of profit tends to decline even as the mass of profit and the productive power of labour grow. But Marx reads the law here in an explicitly historical register — as the sign that capital is developing the forces of production up against the barrier of its own value form, that the very success of accumulation erodes the ground of profit, and that this contradiction announces the historical limit of the capitalist mode. The falling-rate material and the machine fragment thus point in the same direction: capital undermines itself by developing the social productivity of labour beyond what the appropriation of surplus labour-time can contain.

The notebooks draw the historical conclusion in the strongest language they contain.

Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production becomes a barrier for capital; hence the capital relation a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour. When it has reached this point, capital, i.e. wage labour, enters into the same relation towards the development of social wealth and of the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom, slavery, and is necessarily stripped off as a fetter.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, page 749.

Crises are the form of the reckoning.

The growing incompatibility between the productive development of society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms. The violent destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation, is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production.

Marx, Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital, pages 749–750.

Appended to the notebooks is the early fragment "Bastiat and Carey," a polemic against two economists of bourgeois harmony — Bastiat, the French apostle of laissez-faire and the natural concord of labour and capital, and Carey, the American protectionist who saw disharmony only where the state intervened. Marx treats both as ideologists who abolish the antagonisms of capitalist society by definition, projecting a harmony of interests that the analysis of the whole work has shown to be a mystification. The fragment is minor beside the machine pages, but it belongs to the same critique: the systematic exposure of the standpoint that takes the fetishized surface of capitalist society — its apparent freedom, equality, and harmony of interests — for its truth, the standpoint that Capital Volume III's trinity formula would dissect as the completed form of the fetish. With this the Grundrisse notebooks, the workshop of the entire critique, come to their close.