Abstract
Through a comparison of the logic of socio-economic and technical development in Marx with the logic of technical invention in Simondon, I argue the thesis that worker’s democracy is the forgotten political form that offers a viable alternative to both capitalism and Soviet-style Communism, the dominant political régimes of the Cold War period that have not yet been surpassed. Marx’s detailed account of the capitalist technical logic from handwork through manufacture to industry is a logic of continuous concretization in Simondon’s sense. Its immanent teleology is the exclusion of living labor through automation such that freedom is understood as free time apart from labor and technical activity. A post-capitalist society would require a conception of freedom in labor, such as that held by the early Marx, that demands a leap from this logic of concretization to a new technical object. Such a new technical object would require workers to engage in technical activity that continues the activity of invention in Simondon’s sense. Through these interpretive and argumentative links, Simondon’s possibility of transindividual technical activity and knowledge can be seen as, in socio-political terms, aiming at workplace democracy. In philosophical terms, it aims to displace the priority of thought and imagination over activity and to locate both within an ongoing impersonal task which contains the possibility of individual and social self-realization.
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Notes
Simondon gives only one example of such axiological value: the way in which the different technical individuals of a laboratory function best as an ensemble when they have the same level of relative individualization. However, the cybernetic principle of self-enclosure and self-regulation has a broader axiological function in Simondon’s work through his deployment of the concept of the technical individual. We will show this below through his portrayal of the non-alienated state.
There are actually four places where Marcuse refers to Simondon but the first reference is not pertinent to the current argument. It pertains to the nature of the contemporary technical milieu where Marcuse documents the physical pain attached to labour to claim such that, despite changes due to mechanization, the worker’s body is still subjected by mechanical rhythms. In this, his account contains neither disagreement from Simondon nor pertinent nuance (Marcuse 1964, p. 24; quoted from Simondon 2017, p. 119ftn.).
This previous discussion of Husserl is incorporated into chapter 6 of One-Dimensional Man soon after his quotation from Simondon, though without his earlier verdict on Husserl’s reliance on philosophy (Angus 2017).
“Every art or applied science and every systematic investigation, and similarly every action and choice seem to aim at some good; the good, therefore, has been well defined as that at which all things aim. But it is clear that there is a difference in the ends at which they aim: in some cases the activity is the end, in others the end is some product beyond the activity. In cases where the end lies beyond the action the product is naturally superior to the activity” (Aristotle 1962, p. 3, 1094a; see also Aristotle 1974, p. 298, 1328a).
Immediately after stating this Aristotelian conception, Marx has recourse to the form/matter distinction when he refers to a “change of form in the materials of nature.” The German phrasing is “Formveränderung des Natürlichen bewirkt” or “effects a change in the form of nature” (Marx 1957, p. 186).
In The German Ideology Marx and Engels described the material conditions of human life through the production of the means to satisfy human needs such that “the first historical act is the production on the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life” (Marx and Engels 1970, 48). This early account was considerably developed in Capital, Vol. 1 where the description of transhistorical, or ontological, features of labor significantly adds technology to his early account.
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Angus, I. Logic of Subsumption, Logic of Invention, and Workplace Democracy: Marx, Marcuse, and Simondon. Philos. Technol. 32, 613–625 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0324-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0324-4