Was reading Negri's book on the Grundrisse (Marx Beyond Marx).
I work in a factory and do robot wrangling. The big topic in industry right now is: Industry 4.0 the "digitization" of industry.
That term never really sat with me, and beyond a bunch of marketing wankery I didn't really see a there, there. But it hit me - Industry 4.0 is the latest abstracted form of labor.
I have to preface this with an quick explanation of money in the commodity - wage labor relationship, but essentially money tries to make anything it touches like money. An obscuring of value and control, and a seemingly fluid / formless power that seems to work as if magic.
Industry 4.0 represents a factory-ecosystem of the purest exchange value. A factory without living labor, that exists as raw productive power for the sake of production.
It is mediated by smart contracts. The contracts are the purest form of exchange value to date, they formalize and turn into commodities the control of labor. They are a crystalization of the control of money, and in that sense they are the epitomy of the crisis and instability inherent to the money form.
Thoughts?
That makes sense, but is it really so different from a human having hands on the levers of power? We decisively entered the paperclip maximizer phase of capitalism as soon as oil companies started lying about carbon emissions and climate change.
I think it matters in terms of the antagonistic relationship between labor and capital. At the point where living labor is no longer actively involved in production, the moment use value no longer exists to extact, is peak decline in the rate of profit, is a ratcheting of the moment of crisis that has been inherent in the value form.