Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

THE 'ECONOMICS'^281

lowed by that of automation (Marx's foresight here is extraordinary); and
this in turn led to an ever-growing contradiction between the decreasing
role played by labour in the production of social wealth and the necessity
for capital to appropriate surplus labour. Capital was thus both hugely
creative and hugely wasteful:

On the one hand it calls into life all the forces of science and nature,

as well as those of social co-operation and commerce, in order to create

wealth which is relatively independent of the labour time utilised. On

the other hand, it attempts to measure the vast social forces thus created

in terms of labour time, and imprisons them within the narrow limits

that are required in order to retain the value already created as value.

Productive forces and social relationships - the two different sides of

the development of social individuality - appear only as a means for

capital, and are for it only a means to enable it to produce from its

own cramped foundation. But in fact they are the material conditions

that will shatter this foundation.^27

Passages like this show clearly enough that what seem to be purely

economic doctrines (such as the labour theory of value) are not economic

doctrines in the sense that, say, Keynes or Schumpeter would understand

them. Inevitably, then, to regard Marx as just one among several econo-

mists is somewhat to falsify and misunderstand his intentions. For, as

Marx himself proclaimed as early as 1844 , economics and ethics were

inextricably linked. The Grundrisse shows that this is as true of his later

writings as it is of the earlier work.

With the immense growth in the productive forces created by capital-

ism, there was, according to Marx, a danger that the forces guiding human

development would be taken over entirely by machines to the exclusion

of human beings: 'Science thus appears, in the machine, as something

alien and exterior to the worker; and living labour is subsumed under

objectified labour which acts independendy. The worker appears to be

superfluous insofar as his action is not determined by the needs of capi-

tal.'^28 In the age of automation, science itself could become the biggest

factor making for alienation:

The worker's activity, limited to a mere abstraction, is determined and

regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, not the other

way round. The knowledge that obliges the inanimate parts of the

machine, through their construction, to work appropriately as an

automaton, does not exist in the consciousness of the worker, but acts

through the machine upon him as an alien force, as the power of the

machine itself.^29

Yet this enormous expansion of the productive forces did not neces-