CONCEPT
The Fragment on Machines
The passage in Marx’s unpublished Grundrisse notebooks (1857-8) that described, with uncanny precision, the condition of AI: a stage of production in which the general intellect of humanity is embodied directly in the machinery, and the contradiction between collectively produced knowledge and its private ownership becomes the central antagonism of the age.
Written in a burst of intense work during the winter of 1857-8 and unpublished in Marx’s lifetime, the Fragment on Machines is a section of the sprawling
Grundrisse manuscript that has become the most-cited passage in any Marxist analysis of artificial intelligence. In it,
Marx imagines a future stage of production in which the
general intellect—the accumulated scientific, technical, and social knowledge of humanity—becomes embodied directly in the machinery itself, rather than in the brains of individual workers. At this stage, he argues, the primary productive force is not labor time but knowledge; the value of production depends not on the hours worked but on the level of science and technology crystallized in the productive apparatus. The contradiction this creates is, for Marx, the central antagonism of the advanced stage of capitalism: knowledge is collectively produced, across generations and cultures, but it