ILPC 2027

This paper critiques the purposes to which Marx’s Fragment on Machines is put in postoperaist thought. I contest the postoperaist positing of the existing realisation of the Fragment, and its uptake in present-day 'postcapitalist' literature. Postoperaists elide the persistence of the real abstraction of value and the social relations of production it expresses and proceeds through. I challenge the assertion that the crisis and redundancy of value associated with the Fragment is realised. This is because we still, in a contradictory way turned against us, subsist through the value-form. Where postoperaists see a 'communism of capital' already existing, I contend that we live, work, starve and suffer still under its rule. An alternative strand of Marxist theorising- that of the New Reading of Marx and Open Marxism- brings its full horror home. Based on an analysis of value as a social form undergirded in antagonistic social relations, I argue the Fragment’s prognosis runs contrary to Marx’s critique of political economy when the latter is taken as a critical theory of society. But recognition of the negativity it conceptualises in theory is necessary to develop the practical tools to overcome it in reality. This is all the more pressing, as postoperaist readings wield influence on contemporary left thinking via voguish ideas around postcapitalism, accelerationism and ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’. Changes in labour lead proponents to posit a crisis of measurability and an incipient communism, and endow tendencies in contemporary capitalism with a unremitting positivity. The theoretical uptake of the Fragment thus bears implications for contemporary left political praxis. I reflect on some of the possible theoretical routes through which we can escape the blind alley this wishful thinking leads us down.