General Intellect, Conscious Organs: Marx’ Aristotelian Theory of Alienation in the Machine Fragment

Antonio Negri’s post-workerist interpretation of Karl Marx’ Machine Fragment is optimistic about the role of digital technology in working-class emancipation. For Negri, the industrial formation of a general intellect has instigated a process of real subsumption of labour under capital, but he adds that this same process makes capital more dependent on labour and hence more vulnerable to attempts to reappropriate the general intellect. I argue that a careful reading of Marx’ references to alienation in the Machine Fragment reveals a crucial obstacle to Negri’s optimistic account. Marx uses his interpretation of slave subjectivity in Aristotle to describe the predicament of industrial workers. Just like Aristotelian slaves were dispossessed of their capacity for conscious rational decisionmaking, Marx argues the general intellect dispossesses workers from the ability to consciously deliberate about their own work, rendering them so cognitively dependent on machines that emancipation is hard to imagine.