Capital, Technology, and Human Obsolescence: The De-Investment in the Well-Being of the Human Worker

As ‘indeterminate’ beings who fundamentally rely on the artificial skills and technology mediated abilities we acquire after birth, we are born obsolete. To be human means to live with a compulsion to leave behind the Epimethean condition of being ‘naked, unshod, without bedding or weapons’ that mark our arrival in the world. Once born, we are inevitably propelled into the Promethean realms of artificial skill and technological supplementation.

— Christopher John Miller, commenting on Gunther Ander’s “On Promethean Shame”

“Many can't go there; and many would rather die.” “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

I’ve recently set myself to the task of reading Marx’s Capital, something I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never done. I’m in no position to comment on this text as a whole in any depth (having not even finished reading it!), but so far it’s been a fascinating ride. Whatever you think of Marxism, Capital is among the tools needed to think to the bottom of modernity. That being said, there is one episode in Capital that I cannot help myself from reflecting on aloud, as it so resonates with my experience of living in the industrial (post-industrial?) midwest for almost my entire life.

When Marx considers the “sale and purchase of labour power” (and this notion will play a key role in the overall argument of the first volume of Capital), the owner of the means of production (the capitalist in Marx’s terminology), who is out to purchase labor power in order to transform raw materials into marketable commodities, must realize that:

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“Labour-power exists only as a capacity of the living individual. Its production consequently presupposes his existence. Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary to for the maintenance of its owner. (Marx, Capital, Volume Im, Ch. 7, p. 274)

In other words, since dead men don’t do much work, the cost of purchasing labour power is partly determined by the cost of keeping the worker alive. If the wage is not enough for the worker literally to live on, whatever might compel her to sell her labor, the owner of the means of production will not be able to sustain the enterprise once the worker starves to death. In Marx’s terms, labor-power must be able to reproduce itself, i.e., literally stay alive, from one day to the next. Thus, the long-term interests of the capitalist entail that the worker is given a living wage. If your barista at Starbucks goes home and starves to death, you don’t have anyone to move lattes tomorrow morning. Notice, however, that merely being alive is not enough. The the capitalist needs the worker to show up with some vigor to do the work. Thus, the owner of the means of production will have a vested interest in the broader well-being of the worker over and above her merely managing to keep breathing from one day to the next:

“If the owner of labour-power works today, tomorrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same condition as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a working individual. His natural needs, such as food, clothing, fuel and housing vary according to climatic and other physical peculiarities of his country . . . [and] the number and extent of his so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history, and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained a country; in particular they depend on the conditions in which, and consequently on the habits and expectations with which, the class of free workers has been formed . . . . [So] the determination of the value of labour-power contains historical and moral element. Nevertheless, in a given country at a given period, the average amount of the means of subsistence necessary for the worker is a known datum.” (Marx, Capital, Volume Im, Ch. 7, p. 275)

The owner of the means of production must make provision for the health and overall well-being of the worker whose labour-power he wants to purchase, i.e., the worker’s health is included in the price. This will include necessities such as food, clothing, sleep, and presumably healthcare, but we would also expect that some provision for recreation, entertainment, and cultural engagement will have to be made too. There is more to reproducing oneself as a capable worker than just sufficient calories and sleep. Marx notes that even the buyer on the labor-power market must concede that man does not live on bread alone. The extent of the provision for the broadly understood well-being of the worker will vary according to cultural, geographic, and historical circumstances, such that different times and locales will require varying labor costs depending on the conditions the workers face both on and off the job. In any event, the workers will have to be kept both alive and in basically good working condition according to standards for health and wellness on the ground where they are found.

Be that as it may, even the best kept workers are not immortal. Sooner or later all members of the labor force are going to go the way of their ancestors. Thus, the owner of the means of production must make provision for the frictions of aging and mortality, unless her labor force will be rendered null by the inevitable and grim attrition of human finitude:

“The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous transformation of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself ‘in the way every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation’. The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum of means of subsistence necessary for the worker’s replacements, i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its presence on the market.” Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 7, p. 275)

Since the labor market is subject to constant entropy due to the inevitable aging and eventual demise of the available workers, the capitalist has to include the costs of labor-reproduction in the price he expects to pay for labor-power not just for the day-to-reproduction of the individual worker (sustenance), but also generational reproduction (the sexual reproduction). That is, it is in the interest of the capitalist that the worker is able to have a family. From where else is the next crop of workers going to come? Moreover, the mere act of sexual reproduction is insufficient to meet the capitalist’s interests (and under certain conditions it is contrary to those interests). The capitalist needs the worker to spawn the next generation of people capable of reliably working. Thus, the cost of labor includes the expense of rearing children in relatively stable and supportive conditions. That, of course, includes education. Children do not fall from the womb with skills salable on the labor market; they need to be trained in order to be valuable to the owner of the means of production:

“In order to modify the general nature of the human organism in such a way that it acquires skill and dexterity in a given branch of industry, and becomes labour-power of a developed and specific kind, a special education or training is needed, and this in turn costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or lesser amount. The costs of education vary according to the degree of complexity of the labour-power required. These expenses (exceedingly small in the case of ordinary labour-power) form a part of the total value spend in producing it.” (Marx, Capital, Volume I, Ch. 7, p. 275-276)

All of this is to say that the capitalist, given his own long-term interests, must invest in the life, health, diversion, family, and education of the worker. Dead, sick, fatigued, never-born, and untrained workers add too little value (or none at all) to raw materials, and therefore the price of purchasing the labor of the worker must include the expense of maintaining her well-being, including the well-being of her children. Of course, it is in the interest of the capitalist to make these provisions at the least possible expense, so the general well-being of the worker will be kept to the absolute minimum necessary for the individual and generational reproduction of labor-power worthy of capital investment. The capitalist invests in the worker to the degree that that latter is able to work reliably, not to the point his flourishing.

The notion of well-being here is likely rather broad. For example, when it comes to health, we would likely need to include mental health, at least as it is defined by the needs of the modern workplace. People suffering through debilitating depressions don’t return very well on an investment of capital in their labor potential. Thus, once the connection between mental illness and loss of productivity is understood, we would expect that the capitalist would see provision for mental health care as part of the cost of doing business. Moreover, productive well-being likely includes what for many are almost embarrassingly ethical elements. Children reared in unstable homes, with limited contact with their parents, do not make for the strongest prospects for expressing labor-power, so the capitalist has an interest in the maintenance of the kind of family life that affords parents and children the leisure necessary to assure the rearing of productive offspring. Likewise, potentially life-crushing and soul-sapping drugs do not make for consistent output on the assembly line or in the cubical. Thus, once again, we would expect that the capitalist would recognize that investing in the prevention and treatment of drug abuse related illnesses are a necessary part of the labor investment. In short, the sick, the incompetent, the emotionally distressed, the addicted, and the dead have no value to the capitalist looking to buy on the labor market, so he will need to account for all of these issues in the price he expects to pay for labor-power.

Now, consider the realities of the American worker today. I won’t rehearse the already well-rehearsed statistics. We all know well that our population, especially the working class of laborers, is increasingly obese, wracked with subsequent chronic diseases, stricken by debilitating mental illnesses, suffering through a seemingly irreversible deterioration of family life, enduring an increasingly irrelevant, incompetent, and even exploitive educational system (i.e., the student loan industrial complex), and plagued by an epidemic of suicidal drug abuse the likes of which may not have been seen before in human history. We are all most likely familiar with statistics showing a decline in life-expectancy mostly due to diseases of despair (drug overdoses, suicides, etc.) mainly among our working class. The fact that there is a mental health epidemic afoot, just as debilitating as the myriad of plagues running rampant in in our society, is readily apparent to anyone with eyes to see.

Moreover, it seems that nobody really is all that concerned to do much about any of these epidemics. The fact that I do not need to go very far toward justifying my claims empirically says as much. Everyone seems to know what is going on, and, for those of us in “fly-over country,” only a willful act of bad faith can ignore it: the working population has been relegated to perpetual and grave infirmity. Nevertheless, our political “discourse” (and it might be an abuse of that term to use it here) is obsessed with cultural warfare, our deadly foibles in meddling overseas, the personal follies of the flamboyant hucksters in our political class, and myriad other phantasmagoric distractions. It seems that the capitalist has ceased to invest in the working class, and the latter has been left to whither. Our workers have been abandoned to an unhealthy (to the extreme) existence (i.e., a degradation of physical and mental health, decreased longevity, the dissolution of family life, addiction, educational failure, etc.) while our elites, who one would expect to be most apt to protect the investment in labor-power, do not seem to be at all inclined to come to the rescue. Our keepers and betters were quite willing to grind society to a halt in order to address a certain epidemic recently, but no national scale effort to fight diseases of despair is in the offing. The way public (or maybe just elite, influential, and powerful) concern has been selective regarding which of our epidemics are worthy of attention speaks volumes. The very conditions for the reproduction of labor that Marx rightly saw as necessary for capital investment are simply not being met. Our working class is not being sustained to reproduce itself, and instead it is being left to rot.

Does this mean that Marx got it wrong? Is capital really not tied to the well-being (albeit minimal) of its labor force? I am sure Marx accounts for this somewhere (and if I were actually a responsible scholar, I would keep my mouth shut until I had properly done my homework!). Nevertheless, the quotations I used above are from a point in Capital in which he assumes a sort of idealized or abstract scenario for the sake of argument. Maybe what is happening is that the capitalist has come to see labour-power as a disposable commodity. The moment in Marx’s argument from which I have been drawing presumes that the labor-market is limited to what is directly or geographically available to the buyer. Thus, the buyer needs to see to it that labor-power is reproduced in that vicinity. What, however, if the capitalist can move the operation elsewhere to consume other supplies of labor-power or ship such supplies in? In that case, it might be cheaper to consume these other supplies at a cheaper cost, rather than investing in the reproduction of labor-power at home. As long as there are other deposits of humanity that can be mined, there won’t be a need to invest in labor-reproduction much above the bare necessities of physical existence in the near-term. If we wear these people out, we can always buy others from elsewhere (either by shipping them in or moving our operation to the labor supply), so no need to waste a lot of money on maintaining local well-being or even existence. There is no need to invest in the health, education, and emotional content of a working class that can be cheaply disposed of in favor of a cheaper resource. Thus, as long as the capitalist has access to other supplies of labor-power, she is freed from making any long-term investment in the well-being of the local workers. At a certain point, the price of TVs might fall so far as to render the notion of TV repair silly. “Just use it up and buy another one, they’re plenty and cheap.” Maybe something like that is what has happened to our working class. There are other options who (at the moment) have a lower price point for well-being, so we can just discard the people we have on hand and go with the cheaper option.

This is certainly a familiar line of argument, and I believe it has a great deal of traction. It is hard to resist the conclusion that something like the mobility and subsequent disposability of labor-power has done much to undo the working class in the USA since the 1990s. If there are cheaper options, there is no need to invest in the health, well-being, and future of a class of people. I’m not making an anti-immigration or nativist argument. The people who are brought here or to whom we move our operations will inevitably be disposed of too, so long as supplies elsewhere can be found. They will be left behind as soon their price goes or up other cheaper sources of humanity are on hand, so we should see them a being exploited by the same grim process. It is also true that this arrangement has made cheaper goods readily available, which certainly has its upside. That, however, raises the point that the American working class is increasingly valuable as consumers, not producers. That is, our former industrial workers are among the primary consumers of the cheaper goods produced by their less expensive replacements in the labor-power market. One does not need to be nearly as healthy to consume as she does to produce. Indeed, a good bit of ill-health probably ups ones consumptive value. Obese people rendered permanently dependent on insulin and the objects of their addictive eating habits are great business for both the pharmaceutical and junk-food industries.

Nevertheless, I think this Marxist analysis is too short-sighted, or at the very least incomplete. Certainly, the supply of humanity to provide ever-cheaper labor-power is vast, but it is not infinite. At some point, the capitalist will run out of other labor markets to exploit, and she will need to invest in the well-being of some local population again. In that case, wouldn’t good long-term thinking suggest a better investment in local-labor power in the first place? It isn’t cheap to move operations off-shore, nor is it inexpensive (or at least hassle free) to import labor-power from abroad. Maybe, or maybe not. I’ll leave that one to the economists to haggle over. In any event, none of this would be short-sighted, if human labor-power was on its way to being obsolete entirely, i.e., it is not just this or that population of human labors who can be disposed with, but human labor as such. Consider the following remark from Jaques Ellul’s classic, The Technological Society:

“Industrial technique will soon succeed in completely replacing the effort of the worker, and it would do so even sooner if capitalism were not an obstacle. The worker, no longer needed to guide or move the machine to action, will be required merely to watch it and repair it when it breaks down. He will not participate in the work any more than a boxer’s manager participates in a prize fight. This is no dream.” (p. 135)

The point here is that as technological development “progresses,” the worker is increasingly irrelevant to the actual productive process. Work is becoming less like running a drill press and more like merely watching the espresso machine do the job. Ellul’s point is not that automation is going to leave everybody unemployed, but that it is changing the very character of work. It is rendering the worker mostly obsolete, except as a sort of post hoc observer. The worker isn’t necessary for the actual work, but only to clean up when something (rarely) goes wrong. Maybe we will need just as many people to supervise our new legions of machines as we once did to operate fewer of them, but our role in the process is fundamentally changing. Even in a future of full employment, as Ellul put is, “Man’s role is limited to inspection” (The Technological Society, p. 136). The point is that as technology progress, the worker becomes less and less of a responsible agent in a productive process, and more of a passive observer who merely needs to show up. The worker’s role is to do as little as possible to interrupt the flow of the mechanical process, intervening (of course according to pre-determined quasi-mechanical procedures) only in the infrequent instances that the process needs to be put back on track.

For Ellul, the productive obsolescence of the human worker is an inevitable outcome of the logic of technological development:

This progressive elimination of man from the circuit must inexorably continue. Is the elimination of man so unavoidably necessary? Certainly! Freeing man from toil is in itself an ideal. Beyond this, every intervention of man, however educated or used to machinery he may be, is a source of error and unpredictability. The combination of man and technique is a happy one only if man has no responsibility. (The Technological Society, p. 136)

For Ellul, none of this has anything to do with capitalism per se, but what he sees as the necessary path of technological development. Technology not only liberates humans from the Curse of Adam (“By the sweat of your brow!”), but also perfects the productive process. The machine is less apt to err or to entangle things by trying to be creative (“Don’t get cute!”), and thereby foul the product. Thus, as we develop technologically, we are apt to become bugs and not features of the process: “Man must have nothing to perform in the course of technical operations; after all, he is the source of error,” so “Eliminate the individual [human], and excellent results ensue” (The Technological Society, p. 136). Thus, Gunther Anders argues that we are entering a collective mood of Promethean shame, in which we are humiliated by our own replaceability in the production of the goods we consume: “Viewed from the perspective of institutions, the economy, the leisure industry, politics, and warfare — all of which make use of us as instruments of labor, consumers, or victims of some other kind — this replaceability is already an undeniable fact” (Anders, “Promethean Shame,” p. 55). In other words, we are increasingly confronted by productive processes on which we are dependent and to which we are nearly irrelevant. Our role is merely to exist as consumers and occasionally as supervisors of the mechanical process.

There is much to be said about Ellul’s and Anders’s notions of human replaceability and obsolescence in terms of the meaningfulness (and possible meaninglessness) of our lives. A sense of productive agency is probably an integral component of a sense of existential value. I want to leave all of that aside for now (though I have much to say about this elsewhere), and return to the question of the startling lack of capital investment in the reproduction (well-being) of labor-power (human workers). How healthy and contented does someone have to be simply to show up and be on hand? Does it matter whether someone mostly irrelevant to to the actual productive process is depressed, sick, obese, not having a good family life? Work of this sort is mostly just checking the box (or one worries that it will be), so maybe all that is necessary is mere existence (“Any warm body will do”). Moreover, as we move to playing a merely consumptive role in the economic cycle, one wonders how healthy and happy consumers need be to do their part. In fact, one might think a good bit of ill-health and dissatisfaction might be pretty good for business when these maladies can keep the customers coming. The human being might be worth more as a sick and unhappy consumer of pharmaceutical and culturally vapid commodities than he was as a healthy and emotionally enriched worker. Maybe he can consume more than he made, so now that machines can out produce human workers, he can be retired entirely to the consumptive side. Obesity, ill-health, emotional distress, distraction, addiction, etc., become his role in the process. Thus, with the onset of the technological quantum leaps we have lived through in recent decades and we are told are on the near horizon, one might not be surprised should capital finally have the luxury of liberating itself from investment in labor-power almost entirely. As humans become productively obsolete, there is little reason to invest in them as productive workers. So, possibly, what we are witnessing is the last gasp of any capital interest in labor-power at all. The capitalist need only burn through a couple more generations of human labor (foreign and domestic), before it will be liberated from significant dependence on human workers. Thus, there is no reason to worry over the future well-being of the current batch of workers.

We should not be too quick to think that this transformation of work will be limited to those who once made their living with their hands, blue collar workers. Those of us in the professions are no less a risk of becoming obsolete. As Ellul put it quite presciently several decades ago, our machines “before long — what with the electronic brain — . . . will attain an intellectual power of which man is incapable” (The Technological Society, p. 137). That is, as bona fide AI becomes an ever-more plausible proposal, even “knowledge workers” are slated for productive obsolescence; we are as likely to be sources of error (bugs) than productive agents within the system (features). For example, many people speculate that professions such as law will be transformed by technological development, i.e., lawyers will be left only to check the work of the machines that actually draw up the papers. Certainly, teachers of all sorts might see their work similarly reconfigured with the onset of artificial intelligence. If students are mostly being prepared for consumption (and maybe some sort of observational tasks), it is hard to see what more role educators (like myself!) will have to play beyond supervising the downloading process and occasionally hitting the reboot button. The health and well-being of even upper-middle class professionals will likewise become irrelevant to the aims of capital. Once machines get to the point of self-design and reproduction, even the elite demigods of our technocratic class will face productive obsolescence. If AI becomes creative, as some claim that it will, we will become obsolete even as technological innovators. Silicone valley may haplessly sow the seeds of its own obsolescence.

Of course this whole tale operates close to the the realm of science fiction, and I am not claiming that decisions in favor of human obsolescence have been made in some smokey backroom (or for that matter in a luxury cloister in a Swiss resort town). Rather, both Marx and Ellul suppose that the logic of capital and technological development have a sort of life of our own; these are incentives or structures that operate in our subconscious, which guide our unreflective decision making. That is not to go all the way to historical or technological determinism (and I think both Marx and Ellul have been unfairly accused on this point), but to point out that we can very easily drift into dark places unless we put up some sort of active fight. In this case, we should worry that we are moving toward a collective state of sickness, because we are no longer invested in ourselves as productive, healthy, and happy human beings.

If you found this essay interesting, you will likely enjoy my upcoming course, Living and Dying with the Machine.

Please also consider supporting my work by purchasing one of these course (for whatever price you find affordable):

The Question Concerning Technology: An Introduction to Heidegger’s Philosophy of Technology: https://jmadden.gumroad.com/l/trnat

How Not to Be a Nihilist: A Constructive Confrontation with Nietzsche: https://jmadden.gumroad.com/l/bykpye