KARL MARX

THE 'ECONOMICS' 2 81
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 economists
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 capitalism,
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 capital.'
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-