Postcapitalism and Perpetual Motion Machines Jena October 2017

1. Postcapitalism and Perpetual Motion Machines Jena October 2017

2. Conversion engines

3. Turing machines

4. Simple machines hitched together with conversion engines and Turing machines can imitate, instantiate, or “reverse engineer” any rule-governed act of labour, including interpretation or translation.

5. MECHANIZATION Overcomes worker resistance (including through existential terror). Counter-move to improved working conditions, wages. Reduces labour costs. Increases productivity. Disciplines, concentrates workers. De/reskills. Standardizes work/workers/ consumption/consumers/ reproduction/reproducers Reduces necessary part of working day, increasing surplus. Speeds up circulation. Opens up new frontiers for appropriation of unpaid work of humans and nonhumans.

6. But if capital, in boosting a local surplus by deploying and refining machine models of labour, can dispense locally with some human workers and some recalcitrant aspects of human and nonhuman work for a specified period of time … … why (thinks capital) shouldn’t it be able to dispense (globally) with all human workers and all recalcitrant aspects of human and nonhuman work forever? I.e., why can’t capital create its own surplus via machines? Why shouldn't capital itself be productive of value?* *(A fetish in which capitalists need not believe, but in which capital believes for capitalists. )

7. Most of the familiar Marxian contradictions and crisis tendencies of capital accumulation (tendency of the rate of profit to fall, capital/labour, exchange value/use value, the “second contradiction of capital”, etc.) … … appear in their purest, most condensed form in this stylized figure of a capitalism powered by perpetual motion machines, a “moving power that moves itself” without the nuisance of appropriation of human and nonhuman work.* *(Regardless of whether such machines “could” exist or not.)

8. Never mind that this image, if realized, would be a picture of capital blown “sky-high” … … It's still bound to keep popping up under capitalism, for structural reasons … … and is no mere curiosity, but a useful figure to think with for anticapitalists.

9. A SIMPLE PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE Labour without labour-power. Production without energy inputs (or fossil fuels). (No value, either, but never mind … )

10. “Perpetual motion was to produce work … out of nothing. … The similarity with the philosopher’s stone sought by the ancient chemists was complete.” Hermann von Helmholtz

11. MAXWELL'S DEMON “Work” without energy expenditure (or fossil fuels), only information. (No value, either, but never mind … )

12. But energy costs (in particular, energy required for the disposal of informational waste – erasure) save the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Leo Szilard Charles H. Bennett

13. ECUADOR: an ill-fated ‘‘new bio-strategy of accumulation” propelling a productivity-based transition from the problematic ‘‘finite resources” of oil (the work of prehistoric organisms) to the ‘‘infinite resources” of a ‘‘bioknowledge” (bioconocimiento) that unleashes molecular biology on the biodiversity of the Amazon at new “knowledge cities” … René Ramírez … but leading in fact to these “infinite resources” being subordinated to the finite resources of oil and copper via intensified extraction and to political opposition from the same forces resisting extractivism.

14. CLOSED LOOP ECONOMY Sustainable development, green economy, non- growth capitalism, steady-state economy, “true cost” approaches, renewable resources, ecological modernism and all the (valueless) rest of it.

15. THE SELF-INTERPRETING RULE Ecology-less, nonrefusable, deskilling rules that can get rid of interpretive labour not just locally, partially and temporarily (dictionaries, computers, Google Translate) but globally. (And also get rid of value, but never mind … ) Ludwig Wittgenstein (formulated a general critique)

16. “INFORMATION” AS “FREE MACHINE” Not only does “infotech expel labour from production” locally, partially or over the short term; not only does “information eradicate the need for labour on a incalculable scale” locally; not only is it the case that “labour value embodied in information products can be negligible” … … in fact, “software is a machine that will last forever.” The general intellect yields “free increases in surplus value.”“Knowledge-driven production tends toward the unlimited creation of wealth, independent of the labour expended”globally.“Labour value disappears”globally. “Machines corrode value” in absolute, not just relative terms. Paul Mason, Postcapitalism

17. So just as capitalists dream of perpetual motion machines as a deliverance into the Cockaigne of not having to bother with class struggle (but the dream is also a death wish because they they would destroy capital in the same process) …

18. … so too it may be tempting for anticapitalists to dream of perpetual motion machines precisely because they would destroy capital. But mightn’t succumbing to the temptations of automatism be as dangerous for us as for the capitalist? First, of course, because perpetual motion machines don’t exist …

19. … but perhaps even more importantly because to do so hides the vast new appropriations and exploitations throughout the system that accompany any supposed “approach” to perpetual motion in one of its parts. And to do that is to risk overlooking the evolution of new life-affirming refusals of labour and enclosure that the will affect the heart of anticapitalist struggle and alliance-building … … refusals which encompass simultaneously the defence and renewal of commoning … wage struggles … the refusal of both paid and unpaid labour … and much more.

20. … including even the refusal of the Big-E thermodynamic Energy whose First Law vs. Second Law drama re-encapsulates the capitalist dilemma.