The ‘Fragment on Machines’ as science fiction; or, reading the Grundrisse politically

Abstract

This paper interrogates the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in Marx’s Grundrisse, first widely translated and disseminated in the 1960s at the dawn of post-Fordism. It examines its reception, and its deployment by the Italian Marxian tradition of Operaismo, and the criticisms this has sometimes garnered from other Marxists. I argue that while the ‘Fragment’ has generally been critically evaluated in terms of its contribution to the ‘scientific’ (or wissenschaftlich) critique of political economy—revealing truth through a method seen as objective, rational and methodical—it is in fact better understood in terms of its function as science fiction. In other words, its function as a piece of social commentary and criticism, exploring the social relations caught up with techno-scientific developments that are evidently already imaginable—revealing something about the then present, its dystopian dangers and utopian possibilities—even where these remained (just) beyond the realm of the scientifically possible. I argue that evaluating the ‘Fragment’ as science fiction draws attention to its effects, namely its capacity to pose (on the basis of this scientifically plausible interrogation of emergent futures) important political questions. Foremost among these was the meaning—for our understanding of the possible locations of workers’ resistance—of capital’s increasing reliance on relationships, forms of knowledge and affects that cannot be contained by the times and places of work.