ARTICLES
Capitalism as a Species of Automation
Devin Wangert
Pages 13–65| Published online: 14 April 2025
Wangert, Devin. 2025. “Capitalism as a Species of Automation.” Marxism & Sciences 4(1): 13–65.
https://doi.org/10.56063/MS.2301.04103.
ABSTRACT
For many decades, full automation has been treated as a possible outcome aris-ing from the incessant transformation of the world’s labour processes. The re-cent massification of ChatGPT and generative AI technologies has exacerbated the speculative tendency to move freely between the sense that this future is possible, on the one hand, and that it is proximate, on the other. Increasing con-fidence that this impending trajectory is already secured has incited both popu-lar literature and funding-round proposals that put dates and concrete numbers on the temporal distance between our present and its fully automated future. While many critics have noted that full automation is not a new idea, what is more crucial is that its earlier precedents did not belong exclusively or even primarily to science-fiction: the genuine belief that full automation was and now is right around the corner is not new, either. In “Capitalism as a Species of Au-tomation,” I study how and why the notion of full automation has become a re-current threshold state used to periodize the collective presents of capitalist de-velopment. What if full automation has always haunted capitalism’s proximate futures because automation is itself an anachronism? In this article, I contend that while full automation appears as a technical antagonism that repeatedly re-stages the replacement of human labour, it relates to capitalist development as a temporal antagonism defining the replacement of technology by technology. In demonstrating how the contradictions internal to capitalist development come to be reformulated as temporal dynamics animating technological development, I focalize automation as a privileged interpretant of the mechanisms through which capitalism accumulates and disaccumulates value.
KEYWORDS: Automation, accumulation, disaccumulation, media studies, real subsumption.
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