Zhu Chunyan and Gao Qin: From Industrial Machines to Interpretive Machines
Machine theory is Marx’s speculative analysis of the history, logic, and operational mechanisms of the application of machinery under capitalist conditions. Within this theory, Marx both revealed the alienating effect that the application of machinery under capitalism has on all of humanity, including laborers, and elucidated the liberating significance of the development of machine applications for transforming capitalist society and realizing the free and well-rounded development of the individual. Thus, it constitutes a key link in Marx’s scientific examination of the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s discourses on the question of machine application in Capital and its series of manuscripts are relatively scattered; moreover, when analyzing related issues, he often operated within multiple contexts, exhibiting an internal tension within Marx’s machine theory itself. Furthermore, due to the differing research paths taken by various Marxist theoretical schools after Marx, disagreements have long persisted within Marxist academic circles regarding the substantive content of this theory, resulting in a pluralism of interpretations. Taking the actual development of technology as a thread to trace the understanding and development of Marx’s machine theory by major foreign Marxist schools under different historical backgrounds—and to analyze their theoretical positions and practical roots—is of great significance for applying Marxist theory to the examination of the real world in the era of digital capitalism.
I. Affirmation and Negation: Soviet Marxism versus the Opposing Attitudes of Early Western Marxism Toward "Mechanization"
Following Marx and Engels, Lenin was among the first to focus on the application of machinery. Drawing on the actual development of capitalism in Russia, he analyzed large-scale machine industry, pointing out that "large-scale machine industry is the pinnacle of capitalism, the pinnacle of both its negative and 'positive' factors." On the one hand, large-scale machine industry concentrates all the dark sides of capitalism, bringing social polarization to its zenith; on the other hand, it triggers a thorough revolution in technology, transforming production on a new rational basis, regulating production in a planned manner, and subjecting production to social supervision. Although Lenin objectively pointed out both the positive and negative factors of large-scale machine industry, given the domestic need at the time to rapidly restore and develop mechanized mass production, he placed his emphasis on its historically progressive significance.
In the 1930s, Soviet scholars formed a "textbook-style" interpretation of principles while explicating the thought of Marx and Engels. Regarding research into machine theory, they relied on Marx’s classic formulation in The Poverty of Philosophy—namely, "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist"—as well as the distinction in Capital between "machinery" and the "capitalist application of machinery" (holding that contradictions and antagonisms do not arise from machinery itself, but from its capitalist application). Based on this, they made the following judgments regarding the essence of machinery and the historical significance of machine technology:
First, the development of machine technology marks a certain level of social productive forces, and the level of productive forces in a given historical period determines the relations of production and labor relations of that period. The development of social productive forces, characterized by machinery, inevitably triggers transformations in specific social relations. For instance, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin believed that technical equipment—that is, a specific system of social instruments of labor—is a precise material indicator of the relationship between society and nature, reflecting the society's material productive forces and social labor productivity; the technical equipment of a specific society determines its labor relations. This understanding is a typical viewpoint of Soviet Marxist technological determinism.
Second, as a means and a tool, machine technology is itself neutral; the negative consequences of machine application actually stem from the specific social system of capitalism. Machine technology is the necessary means and material foundation for social development and liberation. The task of socialism lies in transforming the social system while retaining and utilizing the material and technical foundation already developed within capitalist society. The early industrialization of the Soviet Union was precisely the practice of this principle; Stalin and others advocated for the prioritized development of large-scale machine industry. Furthermore, forms of production organization suited to large-scale machine industry, such as Taylorism and other management methods, were introduced into socialist industrial practice.
In contrast to the generally affirmative attitude of Soviet Marxism toward large-scale machine industry, early Western Marxist theorists of the 1920s developed an alternative interpretation of Marx’s machine theory in response to the negative impacts that technology brought to humanity in developed capitalist societies.
In his book History and Class Consciousness, György Lukács proposed the theory of reification. Starting from Marx's method—dialectics—this theory views machinery as a "phenomenon" within the process of economic development, a specific social fact. Lukács pointed out that the understanding of the individual phenomenon of "machinery" must be placed within the "totality" [1] and proceed from the integral process of historical reality. Otherwise, the examination of machinery remains merely a factual description of individual phenomena; the former is Marx’s exposition of machinery, while the latter is the approach of bourgeois economics. Lukács further elaborated on the "rationalization" process of capitalism based on mechanization, criticizing the phenomenon of capitalist reification. He argued that the development of the labor process from handicrafts through cooperation and the manufactory to machine industry is a process of "increasing rationalization and the progressive elimination of the qualitative, individual characteristics of the worker." Ultimately, human beings will be continuously reified in both production and social life.
Following Lukács, the Frankfurt School followed the logic of reification theory to launch an even more vehement critique of technological dominance in developed industrial societies. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno pointed out that in developed industrial societies, machinery has become an objectified form of thought: "Where the development of machinery has already turned into machinery of control, the trends of technological and social development are always intertwined, ultimately resulting in a total grasp over the human being." Herbert Marcuse agreed with Marx’s prediction of automation as an "explosive prospect." He believed that, based on Marx’s analysis, the continuous expansion of automation signifies not only a quantitative growth in productive forces but also a qualitative change: "The reification of human labor power driven to the extreme will smash this reified form by severing the chain that binds the individual to the machine." However, in developed industrial societies, "the relentless fact that the physical power of the machine exceeds that of the individual and any specific group makes the machine the most effective political instrument in any society whose basic structure is organized around the machine production process." This indicates that Marx’s original vision is being transformed into the technical reality of new forms of domination and enslavement in developed industrial societies; the machine remains a mechanical system that turns human labor into something that enslaves the human being.
The affirmative attitude of Soviet Marxism toward large-scale machine industry stands in sharp contrast to early Western Marxism's reflection on the "progressive" connotations of machine technology. The latter’s development of Marx’s machine theory adhered to the following basic judgment: machinery itself is not neutral; machine technology is laden with specific social values. Upon entering developed industrial society, science and technology become a new form of domination, and the machine has evolved into a political tool. In fact, the reason why early Marxist research presented two seemingly opposing attitudes toward the question of machinery lies in their fundamentally different theoretical perspectives and methods: Soviet Marxism viewed "machinery" as a simple technical means and confined the concept of "machinery" to the scope of productive forces, generally affirming its positive role and progressive significance; early Western Marxism viewed "machinery" as a specific historical phenomenon of capitalism, grasping the concept within the scope of social relations. Here, machinery is no longer merely a material entity but has acquired symbolic connotations. Compared to Soviet Marxism, early Western Marxism developed the negative aspects of Marx's machine theory.
II. Control and Liberation: Diverse Positions on "Automation" in Labor Process Theory and Autonomist Marxism
After the 1950s, the new scientific and technological revolution developed rapidly. The increasingly important roles played by factors such as information, knowledge, and management in material production practice gave social production a new face under new scientific and technological conditions. In the second half of the 20th century, Labor Process Theory in the United States and Autonomist Marxism in Italy conducted critical analyses of the "new" monopoly capitalist mode of production and the new problems contained within its capitalist application of machinery. The former sought to reveal the control that automated machinery exerts over laborers, while the latter sought to elucidate the liberating possibilities of automated machinery for the laboring subject.
Harry Braverman was a representative figure of Western Labor Process Theory, and his book Labor and Monopoly Capital exerted a major influence on Marxist academic circles in the second half of the 20th century. As Andrew Feenberg remarked, Marx's method "found a new life through Labor Process Theory." Braverman examined the actual production process during the period of monopoly capitalism and pointed out that at this new stage of scientific and technological development, the essence of the labor process under capitalist conditions remained unchanged. In his view, besides the technical function of increasing labor productivity, machinery "under the capitalist system also has the function of depriving the masses of workers of control over their own labor." As the application of machinery spread to offices and other locations, the control over production and labor that capital exercised via machinery deepened further, extending from the interior of the factory to broader fields. However, Braverman explicitly opposed mechanical technological determinism; he argued that specific technologies and certain social relations are internally linked, maintaining that "one must never simply accept what researchers, owners, and brokers of machinery tell us about it; rather, one must make an independent evaluation of machinery and modern industry in the factory and the office." Braverman was also among the first scholars to examine numerical control (NC). In the 1960s, most machinery adopted forms of numerical control, which meant that the technological process of the machine was handed over to another component for control; this component received external instructions and converted information into signals to start the power unit and control the entire mechanical process. Consequently, control over the machine was transferred to the machine itself, the degree of automation in the production process deepened further, and the skills and knowledge required by the laborer became fewer and fewer, leading to a general devaluation of labor power. The application of NC machinery made the labor process "more complex" than in the past, but the abilities and knowledge of workers did not increase accordingly; instead, they were continuously simplified. The process of "deskilling" revealed by Marx was still occurring. Braverman’s conclusion was consistent with Marx’s: the more complex the machine—as a product of human intelligence—becomes, the less the worker can control and understand it; the more science is incorporated into the labor process, the less the worker understands that process.
Following Braverman’s path, the American scholar David Noble detailed the history of the development of automation technology in American society in his book Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, reiterating a fundamental proposition in Capital: "Relics of bygone instruments of labor possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals." By tracing the changes in the design and use of numerically controlled machine tools, Noble discovered that specific social power influences and determines the ideas in the minds of inventors, reaching all the way into the workshop production process. The capitalist system intervenes in the choices of scientific researchers in an inconspicuous manner. "This criterion is deeply embedded in the engineer's 'craft' and determines the line of design from the very beginning—without the engineer even being aware of it." Capital's choice of NC technology confirms this. The application of NC machinery reduced the influence of skilled craftsmen on production and effectively lowered the risk of workers interrupting the production process; through this, problems in the process of capital valorization were resolved, and workers were further deprived of control over the production process. Therefore, NC technology actually emerged as a great advantage and a technical solution for capital. Consequently, Labor Process Theory challenged a popular view of technology—the typical capitalist "machine" ideology—which believes that the development of machinery follows only an internal technical logic. This view severs the internal connection between specific technological choices and specific social relations. As Noble said, talking abstractly about the competition between man and machine while distancing oneself from the struggle between labor and capital causes the capital logic behind "technological progress" to be ignored, and "it precisely confuses and conceals the more serious issues regarding control and power."
Unlike the emphasis placed by Labor Process Theory on the control imposed upon workers by automated machinery, Italian Autonomist Marxism focuses on the latest developments in “immaterial labor” and informational production under the conditions of new science and technology. It emphasizes that the application of automated machinery creates possibilities for the revolutionary action and liberation of the laboring subject. Its analysis is carried out through three levels.
First, it identifies the contemporary development of "general intellect" [2] as proposed by Marx, arguing that this development creates the conditions for redefining the value of labor. In the Grundrisse, Marx pointed out a developmental trend in capitalist society: as fixed capital develops, “general social knowledge” becomes a “direct productive force,” and the conditions of the social life process itself are “under the control of the general intellect and transformed in accordance with it.” In Marx's view, machinery is essentially “objectified power of knowledge,” which means that with the development of the automated machinery system itself, the “general intellect” will become a reality in the development of the information society and the knowledge economy. Regarding this, Hardt and Negri argue that although the emergence of the general intellect does not lead directly to the complete liberation of human labor—and contemporary socio-technical labor and knowledge production remain to a certain extent governed by the logic of capital—the development of the “general intellect” provides a realistic basis for redefining the connotation of labor and thereby subverting existing definitions of the value of labor power. In their view, the general intellect is a collective, social intelligence created by accumulated knowledge, skills, and techniques. "The value of labor is thus realized by a new, universal, and concrete labor power through the appropriation and free use of new types of productive forces. What Marx saw as the future is precisely our era. This radical transformation of labor power and the act of integrating science, communication, and language into the productive forces has redefined the entire phenomenology of labor and the global landscape of production."
Second, it proposes that “immaterial labor” has become a new mode of labor in the information age, which is of great significance for the revolutionary action and liberation of the laboring subject. With the development of the computer and information revolution, the degree of automation and computerization of production has deepened. The capitalist mode of production has gradually shifted from large-scale, standardized production such as Taylorism and Fordism toward a Post-Fordist mode of production. Negri argues that in this new mode of production, it is no longer homogeneous, standardized, and decomposed labor that occupies the dominant position; instead, capacities such as affect, communication, and cooperation play a major role as core elements of the new mode of productive labor. This is the “immaterial labor” found in the service sector based on the continuous exchange of information and knowledge, which is “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication.” Previously, workers centered on the factory and moved like machines; today, people think like computers. Communication technology and its interactive modes are increasingly becoming the center of living labor, and continuous interaction has become a universal characteristic of contemporary productive activity. This means that labor practice has been transformed; capital increasingly requires the higher-level capacities of labor power and is committed to incorporating these capacities into capital’s own mechanism of valorization. At the same time, the laboring subject generates an autonomous, cooperative, and creative collective productive force. In this sense, although the development of the “general intellect” has not directly brought about the collapse of capitalism, it enables the laboring subject to exert its own power in the sense of “re-appropriating objectified labor.”
Third, it asserts that the rule of capital in the information age follows the logic of “biopolitics.” This new form of exploitation involves both a deep absorption of the subject and the possibility of the subject’s awakening and subversion. In the view of Hardt and Negri, the scientific, affective, and linguistic power of the multitude is strongly changing the conditions of social production; “ecological power” has become a medium of production, and the forces of capitalist production today are, in fact, entirely “biopolitical.” Exploitation, or the absorption of labor by capital, no longer manifests merely as incorporating the worker's abstract and one-sided labor into its own valorization process. Instead, it absorbs the worker's entire life into the logic of its own reproduction. Consequently, what capital produces is not only commodities but also subjectivity. However, if every production of subjectivity by capital implies a deeper management and control of the laboring subject, then workers, while suffering a greater degree of exploitation, also possess more possibilities for subverting capitalist production. Because humans and machines are more closely integrated, laborers can achieve an “exodus” (escaping capitalist control) along with the machines. The multitude not only uses machines to produce but also becomes increasingly mechanized themselves, while the mode of production is continuously integrated into the brains and bodies of the multitude. Autonomism recognizes that capital exercises total control and real subsumption over workers through new technical conditions, but it places greater emphasis on the significance of labor’s resistance to capital for liberation. This is because only when the laboring subject becomes aware of the development of its own capacities and utilizes this collective productive force to struggle against capital can the subversion of capitalism truly be realized.
III. Reform and Transcendence: Different Approaches of Accelerationist Theory and Interpretive Machine Theory Toward "Digitalization"
Machine theory in the second half of the 20th century, due to its historical context, focused its attention on the field of industrial production. It lacked a sufficient response to the digital technology that developed rapidly in the 21st century and the myth of artificial intelligence (AI) it brought about. It is precisely this point that has caused contemporary critiques of capitalism to encounter new theoretical difficulties. In response, contemporary Western Leftist Accelerationist theory and the “interpretive machine” theory of the British New Left scholar Larry Lohmann have grasped the intrinsic connection between technological change and social development in the New Era from the perspectives of accelerating productive forces and critiquing relations of production, respectively, addressing the new developments of digital technology and intelligent machines under the background of neoliberalism and the corresponding digital contradictions of capitalism.
Accelerationist theory germinated in the 1970s from the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and others, built upon the postwar boom of the capitalist economy and the neoliberal wave in Western capitalist societies starting in the 1990s. It advocates for achieving a transition to post-capitalism by developing technological productive forces within the framework of the capitalist system. Its representative text is found in the 2013 article "#ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" co-authored by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek. Once published, it triggered extensive discussion in Marxist academic circles. In the view of Accelerationist scholars, Marx was a “prototypical accelerationist thinker.” To achieve the transformation to a post-capitalist society, one should return to the basic position of historical materialism—that productive forces determine the relations of production and the development of productive forces will eventually break through the shackles of capitalist relations of production. This involves shifting from criticizing technology to embracing it, unleashing the maximum potential of modern science and technology under the existing capitalist system, and achieving the ultimate goal of transcending capitalism by vigorously promoting the development of productive forces. As theoretical support, they also cite Lenin’s assertion in ’Left-Wing’ Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality that “socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science.”
In the view of Accelerationism, the traditional strategy of the Western Left to resist capitalism by boycotting modern technology has failed. The new strategy for transcending capitalism should not directly oppose the existing capitalist economic structure; rather, it should regard digital technology and the liberation potential of its productive forces—which have already grown tremendously within the established capitalist framework—as the foundation and hope for change. Capitalism itself acts as an obstacle restricting the development of technological change. To break through this obstacle, one can only push at full strength the modern productive forces developed under these conditions. Consequently, Accelerationism advocates for a distinction between technology itself and the specific application of technology. it proposes that to realize a re-democratized use of technology, a radical political stance must be adopted to transform the way the existing economic base controls digital technology. The specific measures and paths envisioned by Accelerationism include: seizing technological leadership over material platforms, establishing public digital platforms relying on the government, expanding democratic participation in technological research and development, and collectively controlling the distribution of data resources.
Following this line of thought, Williams and Srnicek examined and analyzed digital capitalism in their subsequent works Inventing the Future and Platform Capitalism, continuing their Accelerationist propositions. Contemporary Left Accelerationism has drawn important theoretical resources from Marx's Grundrisse. Armen Avanessian and Robin Mackay even regard the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse as Marx’s “most overtly accelerationist text.” Using Marx's argument in the “Fragment on Machines” that the “general intellect” becomes a direct productive force leading to the collapse of the capitalist value system, Accelerationism found a theoretical basis for its analysis of digital contradictions and its critique of platform capitalism. It argues that digital capitalism and its latest form, platform capitalism, have promoted a new round of capital accumulation and achieved the exploitation of new forms of labor such as “digital labor.” They keenly discovered that the degree of real subsumption of labor to capital in the field of the digital economy is increasingly deepening, containing a new round of capitalist economic crisis brought about by the application of digital technology. Accelerationism confirms the importance of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production through the digital paradox, but its basic proposition lies in accelerating the transcendence of capitalism by developing digital productive forces under the given social relations of production.
If Accelerationism advocates for transcending capitalism by accelerating the development of productive forces to respond to the artificial intelligence myth of digital capitalism, then Lohmann’s interpretive machine theory clarifies the logic of capital behind the artificial intelligence myth and the new manifestations of capital’s internal contradictions in the digital age from the perspective of critiquing relations of production.
As a scholar of the new generation of the British New Left, Lohmann’s purpose in reflecting on AI is not to provide justification for the legitimacy of contemporary capitalism. Instead, he stands on the position of Marx’s critique of capitalism to reflect on the similarities and differences between today’s digital age and the industrial age of Marx’s time. This is intended to reveal the capitalist nature of the digital age and the essence of capital’s exploitation of the working class hidden under the discourse of artificial intelligence. Since the Industrial Revolution, “intelligence” has been regarded as an attribute detached from the worker and embodied only in the machine. Such prejudice has led to the continuous ignoring of the intellectual elements of the proletariat and the rationalization of social surveillance. The mainstream ideology of political economy further pits machine intelligence (artificial intelligence) against human intelligence, suggesting that the development of AI will lead to a widening gap between the two. In fact, from a Marxist perspective, machinery is fundamentally the objectified essential power of man, an external extension of the human brain and hand. As a technical existence, humans must always demonstrate their cognitive and expressive abilities through various artifacts. In Lohmann's view, 21st-century “artificial intelligence” is the mechanization of human interpretive ability. Although it is no longer the mechanization of manual operations, it remains the decomposition and reorganization of inherent human skills. Therefore, compared to the “industrial machines” of the industrial era, Lohmann creatively uses the concept of the “interpretive machine” to replace “artificial intelligence,” revealing the continuity between the industrial era and the era of intelligence.
On the one hand, Lohmann fully affirms the positive significance of the development of artificial intelligence for the human capacity to interpret the world. Human interpretive skills are divided into various types, possessing cognitive, symbolic, and affective connotations; they not only play a role in daily activities but also constitute core elements of living labor. Over the past decade, human interpretive capacity has achieved automation to varying degrees, such as facial and voice recognition, Google Translate programs, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and machine learning programs. With the wide application of these technologies, the interpretive machine is defined as a new “infrastructure,” becoming a new mechanism for enhancing global capitalist activities.
On the other hand, Lohman recognizes that the arrival of the digital age has not resolved any of the contradictions of the industrial age; rather, under the dominance of the logic of capital, it has carried these inherent contradictions into the contemporary era. "Mechanization" has always been a primary means of capitalist production. Early industrial machinery advanced the division of labor, decomposing the integrated craftsmanship of artisans and transforming it into simpler, more controllable components. This allowed capitalists to purchase low-skilled labor in large quantities and reduce expenditures, as the price of labor became relatively cheaper and more easily replaceable. In the 21st century, the interpretative machine [3] concentrates "intellect" and its ownership into the hands of capital in the same manner. The similarity between industrial machines and interpretative machines lies in the fact that neither mimics human activity or replicates human skills. Instead, they identify and isolate specific fragments of human behavior and then utilize the synthetic "energy" organized by thermodynamics to amplify and replicate these fragments at high speed and high frequency to produce massive, uniform outputs. This is the process by which capitalism fractures human activity and revivifies fragmented, stereotypical, and repetitive actions. At the same time, compared to traditional industrial machines, today's interpretative machines (Artificial Intelligence) have not made living labor "obsolete." Like the spinning frame, Google Translate requires electricity to operate and generates a large amount of waste, all of which requires additional human labor to support. Therefore, it is entirely fallacious to oppose interpretative machines to living labor.
Lohman’s theory of the interpretative machine demonstrates that under this new wave of interpretative mechanization, the internal contradictions of capital remain unavoidable. Interpretative machines engage in endless, energy-intensive processing of massive amounts of data through artificial neural networks, yet this data itself is produced by labor-intensive processes ongoing across the globe. With the help of "deep learning" algorithms, high-speed processors, and advanced monitoring technologies, coupled with cheap thermodynamic energy, capital is able to directly harvest the integrated interpretative skills of the global population at every moment. By transforming these into Big Data, it incorporates them into capital's "elements of profit." Regardless of how capital defines the skills and intelligence of laborers, as the application of machinery increases and the resulting tendency of the rate of profit to fall [4] manifests, capital will generate a demand for larger quantities of living labor in other regions of the system. From this perspective, the advancement of interpretative machines (AI) is not a step toward "full automation" but rather embodies a more complex strategy of "heteromation" [5] by capital—namely, the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor within computer-mediated networks. Under capitalist conditions, the mission of interpretative machines such as Facebook, Uber, and Google Translate is to increase the free living labor of the users who employ these machines and to conceal this unpaid labor, thereby constructing a fetishism of AI and an ideology of "full automation."
IV. Conclusion and Implications
For over a century, the study of Marx’s theory of machinery in Marxist academic circles has undergone a process of continuous expansion of its discursive domain and constant shifting of themes, demonstrating the powerful explanatory force of Marxist theory. In this process of historical change and theoretical development, the discussions centered on the basic viewpoints of Marx’s theory of machinery and the critiques extended by contemporary technological changes fully manifest two threads: "change and continuity." On the one hand, what has changed is the epochal development of machine technology itself, from "mechanization" to "automation" and then to "digitalization." As the forms of machine technology change, machines that were originally applied mainly in the sphere of production have gradually spread to all fields of human life and social interaction. Humanity is step-by-step entering a technological age, where "the total control of technology" has become a theme of the current era. On the other hand, what remains unchanged is that from the traditional era of industrial machines to today's era of interpretative machines, capital has always occupied the leading and dominant position in the application and development of machinery. No matter how different the new types of machines—having undergone the baptism of the new scientific and technological revolution and the rise of digital technology—are from those in Marx’s time, the fundamental logic behind them remains the laws of capitalist production and reproduction. What prevails is still the logic of capital; all that has changed is the expansion of the scope of capital's rule.
Since entering the 21st century, faced with the global challenges brought by digital technology, AI, and immaterial labor, more and more scholars have chosen to return to Marx’s texts and methods. They have "critically revealed the structural contradictions of capitalism as well as the contradictions in the mode of production, class contradictions, and social contradictions, and conducted in-depth analyses of capitalist crises, the evolutionary process of capitalism, and the new forms and essence of capitalism." This provides a beneficial reference for us to correctly understand the trends and fate of capitalist development, to accurately grasp the new changes and characteristics of contemporary capitalism, and to deepen our understanding of its shifting trajectories. An overall grasp of a century of research on Marx’s theory of machinery shows that this theory still possesses the value of truth today. The technological reality of contemporary Western society has not transcended the discursive domain of Marxist theory. Marxist theory remains of fundamental significance for us in responding to the challenges brought by neoliberalism and digital capitalism.
The development of 21st-century digital technology and interpretative machines (AI) has brought new difficulties to the contemporary critique of capitalism. In 1856, in his "Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper," Marx pointed out: "Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. ... All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force." From Marx’s perspective, the fundamental problem does not lie in the co-existence of the dual effects of machinery, but in the economic structure of capitalist society that allows these dual effects to be produced and sustained. Just as Marx used a mature critique of political economy in the 19th century to make a scientific assessment of industrial machinery and its capitalist application, today’s Marxist research on the theory of machinery also needs to employ scientific methods to conduct a more in-depth exploration of the entirely new technological reality.