IGCS Colloquium: Ari Linden

Ari Linden’s research intervenes in debates within Marx scholarship about the status of Marx’s Grundrisse (1857-1858), and more specifically, about the philosophical and intellectual-historical value of Marx’s views on machinery and technology expressed therein. Qualifying and challenging the prominent view that the Grundrisse offers a suspiciously “utopian” vision of technology (Heinrich, Saito) and thus that we should concern ourselves exclusively with the anti-productivist vision articulated in the volumes of Capital, Linden’s work-in-progress presents an alternative reading of the Grundrisse, according to which Marx’s phenomenology of labor provides resources for identifying a site of resistance in the human-machine relation generated by the historical transition to industrial production—and beyond. In experiencing what Marx refers to as pure “indifference” toward one’s labor and the capitalist production process tout court (as opposed to hostility or resentment, as discussed by critics such as Harry Braverman)—and in linking indifference to the marginalized role of human labor relative to the work of the machine—the worker, Linden maintains, has become “partially” automated, insofar as their mental labor need only be partially absorbed by the machine they oversee. This dynamic creates the conditions of possibility for the worker to engage in other, more intellectual forms of labor while simultaneously contributing to the production process. Such activity, Linden concludes, might hasten the process of the worker’s development into a new, anti-, or even post-capitalist subject.