Reading Hans-Dieter Bahr's "The Class Structure of Machinery: Notes on the Value Form"
Some commentary on Marxism and the critique of technology
The following contains some loosely organized commentary on Hans-Dieter Bahr’s “The Class Structure of Machinery: Notes on the Value Form.” As noted in an introduction written by Phil Slater, Bahr’s work extends the Marxist critique of technology toward the question of its relationship to the value-form (1980: 97). In particular, Bahr attempts to clarify the historical process within which technology came to acquire the form of “abstract social purposiveness” (Bahr 1980: 104). Why, he asks, does technology appear today as if it was undetermined by the social relationships which in actuality determine it?
Bahr contends this form of appearance of technology is unique to capitalism—in previous epochs, the construction of instruments of production had revealed their “social existence,” attached as they were to “class-specific occupations,” such as peasantry and handicraft (ibid.: 139). So, Bahr is searching for the historical conditions of possibility for the “indifferent” appearance of technology. He roots this possibility in the real subsumption of labor, during which, he says, labor is not only dispossessed of the means of labor but the development of the latter becomes objective, independent, and ‘scientifically rational;’ and in this way their social character is effaced. Machinery is the materialization of this process, which, as Slater suggests, is defined by Bahr as nothing but the “purpose-built basis of the specifically capitalist mode of production, i.e. of value-in-process” (1980: 97).
Of course, this puts Bahr in close conversation with Herbert Marcuse, whose critique of “technological rationality” grounded class domination not in the mere application but the “very construction of the technical apparatus” (1968: 224). On this point, Bahr explains that the appearance of machinery as “class neutral” is testament precisely to the “fetish character of the ‘inner value-form’ of the means of production” (1980: 138). The genesis of technological development is forgotten in its result, such that the means of labor appears, from the standpoint of the laboring subject, as having always been merely means—that is, the means of labor are naturalized as “instruments of use” which “anyone can appropriate and use” (ibid.: 101).
However, Bahr also attempts to move beyond Marcuse by clarifying to a much further extent how, through this “inner value-form” (an idiosyncratic term to which I will return near the end), technological rationality achieves political domination through “non-political” means. To this end, Bahr writes that, in the “final analysis, political-military force is not an adequate basis for maintaining social cohesion in a system of production” (ibid.: 139). Instead, class domination depends upon the mediation of the “subjectless form” of “machinery and technology” (ibid.: 140)—that is, an “objective framework” for the production of value (Marx 1976: 489).
I.
If Marxism has remained “idealist” when “confronted by the truth of nature,” as Alfred Sohn-Rethel suggested (1978: 3), then Bahr adds that it has been even more so, “and with more serious consequences, as regards the conceptual treatment of technology” (1980: 126). “Idealist” because, just as the social history of scientific discovery is regarded as inessential to the “truth of nature” which that history is supposed to reveal, the development of technology is spirited away by Marxists as if the social relations of its production were accidental to its use. It is as if, despite the exploitation of labor being an explicit, necessary condition of ‘technological progress,’ machines could be taken as they are by the workers who have been subsumed by them and simply steered in the direction of new ideals. The ‘productive forces’ are viewed by Marxists in the same way as they are viewed by industrial capitalists: “purely instrumentally,” Bahr writes, as abstract means which can be applied to the production of social need in some future, post-capitalist society as readily as they are currently applied to the production of surplus value.
Even the most cursory investigation into the cutting-edge capitalist technologies of today ought to throw into question this supposed promise of their hidden emancipatory potential. In a very concrete, practical way, we ought to be asking: is the production of social need technologically compatible with mining excavators, smart phones, and ChatGPT? This is not, to be clear, the same as asking the generic question of whether we need minerals or communication or tools but a question of whether or not the technical specifications of currently existing technologies will require transformation under socialism—it is hence a question of what form socialist technology must take.
To put it another way: What, exactly, does socialism appropriate when it appropriates as productive forces the profoundly atomizing, wasteful, and destructive machines which today not only produce but fully saturate contemporary capitalist life? If communism entails the radical transformation of the laboring subject, why would it not also entail the radical transformation of the technological means with which that subject reproduces itself? And if communism does entail this latter transformation, what, then, does Marx really mean when he argues that the capitalist mode of production establishes the material conditions for its own transcendence?
One possible answer is this: technological development under capitalism always retains a dual and contradictory character. To the extent that technological development not only augments the productivity of labor but intensifies its socialization—that is, in ever-increasing magnitude, increases the degree of cooperation between labors (intellectual and manual, productive and reproductive)—it is progressive. By contrast, technological development is regressive to the extent that it undermines the conditions for the reproduction of labor, namely, by reifying them as something alien to laboring activity.
Technology can exhibit this regressive characteristic in at least two ways. First, it can facilitate the further penetration of the value-form into social relationships which had been, ironically, devalued in a prior period of capitalism (e.g. housework, elderly care, entertainment). Second, technology can undermine reproduction by facilitating the same with respect to pre-existing relations between human and non-human nature, thus widening the metabolic rift between social and natural worlds for the express purpose of producing more value.
This dual character of technological development under capitalism inheres in all of its machinery; however, there are different degrees of each character according to the different specifications of different machines. Some more recent technologies, such as the Internet, have presented remarkable opportunities for the expanded cooperation and integration of social labor—even if, of course, the Internet has just the same exhibited remarkable opportunities for the emergence of new forms of alienation of labor. Hence, the decisive question for socialist politics is whether the Internet can facilitate the communication of information while holding in check its tendency to atomize and estrange labor from social processes of individuation. Other technologies, such as private automobiles, are expressly designed for, and in my view inextricable from, an anti-social world shaped by independent producers and private consumption. It does not seem to me there is justification to treat the latter as an appropriate form of technology for socialist transition. At the very least, the question of the ‘socialist use’ of private automobility ought to be actually asked, explicitly and concretely in these terms—rather than leave the genus and species of technology confused, as is much more often the case.
Hence, a Marxist critique of technology would first of all be one which is capable of not only articulating this contradictory character of technological development under capitalism but of concretely clarifying which particular technologies are more or less oriented toward the socialization of labor and which are much more likely, in their specifications, if not their functionality, to do little else but impede the realization of a life shared in common. Slippage between technology as such and its particular forms is precisely what must be avoided and, hence, the veil of technology as “abstract social purposiveness” lifted.
Now, this being said, we must also avoid any technological determinism here. Alongside Bahr, we must affirm that there is no “direct cause-effect relation” between machinery as “instrument of use” and machinery as the “form of constant capital” deployed in the production of value (ibid.: 126). This transformation is effected by “different subjects” who have their own distinct capacities for labor and who we cannot assume automatically fulfill the role expected of them by capital. Likewise, machines in themselves maintain a “margin of indeterminacy,” in Gilbert Simondon’s words, which opens them to the surrounding technical milieu (2017: 147). They therefore retain a variability of use which is unpredictable from the standpoint of their production.
Nevertheless, to say that there is always a subject of labor and a “margin of indeterminacy,” and hence that the process which transforms machinery qua “instruments of use” into constant capital is not automatic, does not mean technology presupposes no objective determinations. Productive forces never exist as a pure concentration of protean, mechanical power: to exercise any force at all, they must have themselves been produced and hence must have themselves acquired a social form. It is precisely with the clarification of the different social forms of technology—in its historical determinations—that a Marxist critique of technology must concern itself.
II.
Hence, a Marxist critique of technology posits that the appearance of indifference of technology to class struggle is a mystification of the invariably social determinations of its production. Given the means of labor are themselves products of labor, machinery is not and has never been a “class neutral” substrate of social activity. The means of labor are the product of social activity, after all, hence they have their own specific history of development; as products of labor, they develop according to specific relations of production. Thus, the fundamental ‘question concerning technology’ is not, as Heidegger had suggested, a phenomenological investigation of modern technology in its way of “revealing” as “challenging-forth” but rather a materialist investigation of the historical genesis through labor of its social form under capitalism—that of the machine.
It is, again, precisely for this reason that Bahr asks: what labors, in the course of a certain phase of human development, had to be separated such that machinery, as a particular social form, could serve to reunite them?
As he goes on to argue, for machinery to emerge at all, labor had to have already been divided into two “poles,” the “drive” (objectifying expenditure of labor-power qua motive force) and the “tool” (objectified skill qua purposive essence). “Simple mechanisms,” such as instruments of handicraft, had in fact already possessed or at least anticipated this dialectical structure; machinery merely made their separation more apparent, namely, by unifying them (ibid.: 103). Indeed, even the “transmitting mechanism” mediating tool and drive pre-existed machinery proper as the living “form of intercourse” between plebeian and peasant-handicraft forms of labor (ibid.: 104). Machinery, qua abstract social purposiveness, is the objective “ossification” of this form of mediation between tool and drive.
Throughout his essay, Bahr relies heavily on contrasting the present technological context with that of a previous historical epoch, wherein the “nature-given form” of the means of labor was apparently bound up with the social existence of the classes of laborers, qua “occupational estates,” which made use of them (1980: 139). In other words, the means of labor (ploughs, looms, etc.) in this previous epoch corresponded directly with the different activities of concrete labor. Under capitalism, by contrast, “nature-given” forms dissolve and become the “ground for social form” (ibid.: 123). From the standpoint of the class of producers: “the means used to work upon nature-given material are [now] simply the conditions for [the workers’] abstract activity” (ibid.: 139).
While bourgeois science also recognizes the means of labor to be objectified social relations, Bahr writes, it does so only as an “archaeology.” In pre-capitalist societies, that is, conclusions about the “living form of particular social relations” are deduced from the appearance of certain types of tools. This “stone-drill” or that “spear” is a product of labor expressing the limit of this or that degree of the social organization of that labor (ibid.: 102). However, bourgeois science does not recognize the historical material basis of its own means of labor (i.e. machinery). Rather, it regards its own means of labor as the materialization of a purely scientific rationality—for which its concrete historical development is, as stated above, accidental to its teleology qua “abstract purposiveness.”
Once again, this is how the social character of the means of labor becomes effaced in capitalist machinery, such that any form of domination which makes use of the latter appears to be a consequence of post-hoc ‘political’ aims:
The paradox is that although machinery and technology were created as the purposive basis of bourgeois class rule, they appear as their opposite in the social mediation of individual capitals through the market: that is, they appear as a neutral, indifferent basis for the societation of the production process through the division of labour. They appear specifically 'class neutral’, particularly in comparison to objects from the sphere of consumption, where cars, home furnishings, fancy packaging and buildings still directly exhibit both forms of their social nature, namely, utility and domination. (ibid.: 139)
As an aside, the line Bahr draws here between the sphere of consumption and the sphere of production seems to me untenable today. As a number of Italian Marxists had identified at around the time of Bahr’s writing (1973), capitalist production depends upon a widely distributed social factory, such that any degree of analytical scrutiny over the technologies of consumption versus those of production would see blurred today the distinction between leisurely consumption and productive labor, namely, in what Antonio Negri calls the ‘real subsumption of society under capital’.
Nevertheless, Bahr’s insight concerning the “neutral” appearance of machinery remains pertinent to the extent that productive forces continue to be assumed to be mere “instruments” of “abstract social purposiveness.” Indeed, this belief is quite pervasive today, with the division of labor under capitalism appearing to many liberals and socialists alike as a self-evident, scientific, and ‘natural’ consequence of the slow march of the socialization of production through technological development.
To that end, Bahr goes on to say:
By contrast, the highest stage of the developmental forms of the means of production, as ‘rationality of the inner value-form’, produces the opposite appearance: the melancholic sameness of proletarian working conditions vaunts itself as the ‘transcendence of class society’, for the simple reason that capital, as ‘inner social value-form of the means of production’, presents itself abstractly as the latter’s societal nature and universal validity: in fact, as society-in-itself, taking on material shape as the universally valid coercion characterizing labour conditions. (Bahr 1980: 140)
Herein lies the contradiction at the heart of the socialist’s ‘critical’ appraisal of capitalist machinery. On the one hand, the outer form of the means of production appears as the passive, er satz natural, if uneven, terrain upon which class struggle will work itself out. On the other hand, the inner secret of the productive forces is that their development is inherently contradictory to the capitalist relations of production which simultaneously enable and fetter them. In revealing their “societal nature and universal validity,” in other words, the productive forces are supposed to progressively reveal their impropriety to class society.
But again we must ask: which forms of productive forces are we talking about here? More than a few technologies today seem to exhibit little other functionality than to divide and exploit workers. One could include here not only the Fordist design of machinery on the assembly line but, just the same, the numerous platform applications designed to simplify, stratify, and exploit different activities involved in social reproduction under capitalism—shopping, driving, housework, and so on. Hence, from the vantage point of labor, many capitalist technologies appear quite proper to and inextricable from class society. What does the social character of authentically socialist ‘productive forces’ look like? To answer this question, any Marxist critique of technology would need to not only provide a rigorously materialist account of the class structure of machinery but also tarry with this “melancholic sameness,” as Bahr describes it, which has proven a decisive tendency of technological development both under capitalism and ‘actually existing socialism.’
III.
Last, I want to comment briefly on Bahr’s distinction of the “inner” and “external” forms of capitalist machinery. The “external” form of machinery constitutes its instrumental shape and the “inner” form, Bahr writes, constitutes its class-determined structure (ibid.: 104-105). As I see it, this separation is Bahr’s way of unraveling the mystery he poses in the first sentence of the essay—that the “historical development of the means of labor,” through which “nature-given forms” transform through labor into “socially purposive forms,” is “simultaneously the ‘naturalization’ of the social forms of instruments of use” (ibid.: 101). This double-movement inherent to the development of the means of labor, moving in both socializing and naturalizing directions at once, congeals in the inner and outer forms of the machine. While the “inner value-form” of the machine is precisely what allows for it to transform into constant capital and facilitate the production of value, its “external” and “naturalized” instrumental shape is what allows the machine to maintain the appearance of neutrality and, hence, facilitate class domination through the “non-political” means of labor.
Importantly, Bahr’s distinction between inner and outer forms of value separates his account of the relation between scientific labor and the value-form from that of Sohn-Rethel: fixated on the emergence of “thought-forms” in exchange, Sohn-Rethel obscures the determination of capitalist exchange by machines which in themselves objectify and interiorize prior thought-forms—he, in brief, does not consider the historical development of the means of labor inherent to the possibility of the “scientification” of production. For Bahr, it is precisely the commodification of the means of labor which brings scientific thought and exchange into a thoroughly dialectical relationship, the result being that certain “forms of the social intellect are just as much products as determining moments of the universalization of value” (ibid.: 132). This is an important claim, as one provocative consequence is that the capitalist mode of production is not just ‘form-determined’ through exchange but internally determined through the materialization of value as the “inner form” of the machine.
A comment may help clarify this point: the structure of machinery under commodity production obtains simultaneously a form of use value and a form of value (ibid.: 126). On the other hand, however, the expansion of the form of value takes a specific, unique track in the case of facilitating the development of the means of labor. Again, as an “inner form,” value inheres in the machine as “abstract social purposiveness,” or the “immanent value-form of the means of production” (ibid.: 104). It is precisely for this reason, as the involution of the value-form within the machine, that value comes to play a role within production: value “plays a part” as the “inner form” of machinery by “co-determining” the “further development of adequate use-value forms for the products” (ibid.: 132).
As Bahr stresses, Marx had already gestured toward this “inner” form of value insofar as he designated the “sensuous measure” of the commodity as the form of mediation of its use value and its exchange value. “Measures,” Bahr writes, “are quantitative relations […] as social qualities of objects” (ibid: 127). The vast majority of measures can be considered particular equivalent forms of value which “were unable, for a variety of reasons, to evolve further into the general form of value” (ibid.). The historical development of “sensuous measures” therefore leads not only to the emergence of the price-form but, simultaneously, the historical development of all manner of industrial standards of weight, number, length, area, space, and so on. While the former is the ‘external’ development of value in exchange, the latter is the ‘internal’ development of value within production—namely, within the technical specifications of the machinery itself.
Given the inner form of value, the determination of the “amounts of commodities” is thus no longer exclusive to the realm of exchange but produced “along with the commodity from the outset” (ibid.: 130). Put differently, the inner form of value is precisely what makes the object produced no longer produced for social need but, as a commodity, produced as an object “purposive” for exchange—that is, insofar as it acquires “sensuous measure” through the application of standardized machinery. This is how the units of measurement attach themselves to “technically specific nature-given forms of commodities as inner value forms” (ibid.: 131).
Thus, as Bahr notes, here echoing Marcuse, technological rationality “sinks down” into the “actual production of commodities” (ibid.). This is because, in the realm of production, the value-form shapes the technical specifications of machines: “The ‘uniform motion’ of machinery itself accommodated the creation of an ‘inner value-form’ of the commodity objects (as mutually equal), just as machine motion itself expresses the ‘inner value-form’ of the means of production as process. The equi-valency of the various commodities’ amounts becomes their actual equality” (ibid.: 132). In turn, the aforementioned “melancholic sameness” of proletarian working conditions can finally be seen as a necessary consequence of technical specifications, such as the uniformity of machine motion, which in themselves express the ‘internal capture’, as it were, of the means of production under capitalism by the “inner value-form.”
Once the internal class structure of machinery has been sufficiently clarified, and hence the “inner value-form” of the machine unveiled, it seems to me a Marxist critique of technology could no longer confuse the “outer form” of machinery as that of a “class neutral” instrumentality. Instead, this “outer form” of mere instrumental use would be recognized as indelibly connected to the “inner form” of value it masks. At that point, a Marxist critique of technology would have to risk speculation of a revolutionary social form for technology, one which transcends the dialectic of the “inner” and “outer” forms of machinery under capitalism.
References
Bahr, Hans-Dieter. 1980. “The Class Structure of Machinery: Notes on the Value Form.” Translated by Pete Burgess. In Outlines of a Critique of Technology. Edited by Phil Slater. London: Ink Links, pp. 101-141.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. London: Penguin.
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.
Simondon, Gilbert. 2017. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal.
Slater, Phil. 1980. “Introduction to Bahr.” In Outlines of a Critique of Technology. Edited by Phil Slater. London: Ink Links, pp. 97-100.
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1978. Intellectual and Manual Labour. New Jersey: Humanities Press.