General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How’s that Marx-is-mostly-wrong stuff workin’ out for ya? [View all]Starry Messenger
(32,342 posts)Difference Engine #1's prototype was on display in the Museum at South Kensington around 1862. Marx, as we know, escaped to London in 1849 and lived and died there (1883). Considering he wrote most of Capital in the British Museum in London, I don't think it is a stretch to say he probably saw teh display, even though it would have meant a hike.
(http://www.cbi.umn.edu/about/babbage.html)
That the Engine wasn't a full working computer is hardly germane. It is absurd to think that a man like Marx wouldn't have seen the full implications of this automation of computation along with the other speed-up provided by mechanization.
Babbage is quoted in footnotes in a few chapters of Capital.
I can't see Marx coming to Silicon Valley to visit me today and altering one line of this text:
http://www.answers.com/topic/das-kapital-chapter-15
"John Stuart Mill says in his "Principles of Political Economy": "It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being." [1] That is, however, by no means the aim of the capitalistic application of machinery. Like every other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities, and, by shortening that portion of the working-day, in which the labourer works for himself, to lengthen the other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist. In short, it is a means for producing surplus-value."
(And yes, I was dorky enough to take an hour to track all that down. I'm tired of this argument that Marxism is negated by digital age technology. I live here in the heart of it.)