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.