In this book we have looked at the ways capitalism puts our time, our subjectivities, our experiences, and our desires to work in unprecedented ways only possible on the basis of globalised technologies. The role of technology in human life has been ambivalent for socialist thinkers from the start. In a curious manuscript essay written in 1876, ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’, Friedrich Engels tries his hand at a historical materialist rewriting of evolution from the perspective of labour but gets caught up in the problem of technology. Engels takes the crucial evolutionary step from ape to human to be the development of a more dexterous human hand; he imagines how small and partial successes of proto-hands at employments that circumstances require have resulted, over the course of evolution, in the ‘freeing’ of the human hand – ‘thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour’.1 Accordingly, there was labour before there was a human, and the human only came about once labour had turned her hand into a tool. Here Engels not only reinforces Marx’s technological materialism, he also anticipates today’s philosophers of technology of different political positions, like Bernard Stiegler, who sees technology and human species as inextricably co-evolving – ‘the hand is the hand only in as far as it allows access to art, to artifice and to tekhnē’.2
Engels’s own focus is on labour as such: he sees labour gathering early humans together to bring about language, better tools, the adoption of a complex diet, and the adaptation to different climates and locales, and finally, the development of agriculture, trade, industry, art, and science. But what Engels is most interested in is how human labour reorganises its environment with consequences that often cannot be foreseen and controlled. He is concerned with ‘natural effects’, like the desertification that follows the clearing of forests, as well as ‘social effects’, like the starvation of millions in the Irish Famine of 1847, when potatoes as principal crop fatally met the potato blight. Finally, he stumbles over the steam engine:
The men who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries laboured to create the steam engine had no idea that they were preparing the instrument which more than any other was to revolutionise social relations throughout the world. [B]y concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority and dispossessing a huge majority, this instrument was destined at first to give social and political domination to the bourgeoisie, but later, to give rise to a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat which can end only in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all class antagonisms.3
According to Engels’s narrative, then, industrial capitalism is the product, however unintentional, of the evolution of human labour. There is some embarrassment in his quick announcement that this awkward stage is soon to be overcome by class struggle. The overwhelming impression at this point in the essay is that human labour and its tools – in other words, technology – have produced, as a natural outcome of evolution, the human species and capitalism both. Engels’s overall outlook is determinedly hopeful; the point he is trying to make is that however explainable by labour’s evolution, capitalism is the wrong use of the tools, atavistic in its lack of foresight and in its destructiveness of people and environment for immediate gain, a teenage humanity soon to be replaced by a more grown-up period in human history that will regulate the natural and social effects of human technologies in a way that will reflect a more sophisticated understanding that ‘we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature’.4 And yet, once Engels has made the evolution of the human hand, as well as everything else that follows, the product of labour, it is difficult to shake the impression that, with Faustian inevitability, humans will be picked up by their steam engines’ iron claws to engage in the destruction of their natural environment and themselves. Is industrial capitalism an aberration of human labour, or the inevitable development of its technologies? If historically, ‘all higher forms of production led to the division of the population into different classes’, can there be another way? The rest of his essay, before the manuscript ends abruptly and unfinished, is dedicated to more bleak images of short-sighted capitalist destruction, like that of the bare rock left behind by erosion following the burning of a mountain forest for one year’s crop.5
Like Engels’s narrative, the dominant mood of our time seems to oscillate between on the one hand a resigned acceptance of a catastrophically irreversible anthropocene, which – with the first human fire as the inauguration of man-made climate change – invites the thought that humans were always fated to destroy the habitable world; and on the other, the rejection of a capitalocene, where it is the insatiable demand for exponential economic growth that has got us to the brink of climate catastrophe.6 Either way, the temptation lingers to regard technology as an evil and quasi-mythical force of destruction. And yet, Engels’s idea of the human as a product of labour, rather than the other way round, also promises another way of looking at ourselves as technological beings. In the first instance, it opens up a way for decentring the human: there is no being human without technology; but equally, there is no being anything else without it either. As David Harvey points out, an anthill is no more natural than Manhattan; tekhnē, or artifice, engineering expertise or strategic rearrangement of matter, went into the making of both.7 If, as living beings, we meet our environment through technology as our necessary prosthesis, then there can be no question of technology as an external force that we can succeed in taming, or escaping, absolutely. But it also means, by the same token, that it is not an alien inscrutable force. As Haraway confidently put it in ‘Cyborg Manifesto’:
The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate and threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.8
Machines do threaten us, of course, all the time. But as technology, they are provisional. And therefore we can adapt them, scrap them, reinvent them, as the individual case requires, and by doing so, change ourselves alongside our prostheses. No doubt many of our digital technologies deserve to be forgotten, or change to the point of becoming unrecognisable; in some cases, what seem like digital capitalism’s excesses may end up being surprisingly useful in bringing about political change.
Even in their unreconstructed form, a generation of leftists has been using capitalist communication technologies for radical purposes. Since 2015, we have seen that it is the generation most naturalised to the ‘bad satisfaction’ of Web 2.0 analysed in Chapter 4 who have provided the campaigning base for a new wave of radical socialist parties and movements across Europe and the US. In the UK, Momentum, the left-wing campaign group founded to support Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party outside parliament, has found success by integrating left-wing politics into the most everyday social technologies of its young supporters: in viral comic videos, WhatsApp messages designed to be forwarded on to all one’s contacts, a mobile app that has taken phone canvassing out of the organised phone bank and into the spare moments of the individual activist’s day, and a ‘My Nearest Marginal’ and carpooling app, allowing activists to travel to where their contributions could make the most difference in an election. As Tiziana Terranova suggests, alternative uses of the technologies that are designed to subsume bodies under capital can work towards ‘another machinic infrastructure of the common’.9
The example points to what is concealed behind the image of evil technology; not the malign and unstoppable engine of history, but the experience of political impotence in the face of the system that shapes our technological being in the malign ways it currently does. The way out of this impotence must be political, but our historical juncture is also an opportunity to make our changing experience of technological being central to political change. This opportunity, we argue, lies in seeing ourselves as the hybrid, prosthetic, provisional beings of technologies that we can change between us. If we are unfinished beings, connected to each other and the world by tekhnē, individualism makes no sense. We have discussed new feminist writing on the left that picks up Haraway’s cyborg feminism – ‘wary of holism, but needy for connection’ – in its aim to turn technologised life towards anti-essentialist politics; we might add, once more, Jean-Luc Nancy’s view that ‘singular beings share their limits, share each other on their limits’.10 The risk and the chance of a sense of self taking and changing shape where we are exposed to others and things, whether at the limit of our skins, our ideas, or of other modifying objects, might in itself be seen as our technical relation to life. As Derrida puts it, ‘tekhnē is perhaps always an invention of limits’, but as Nancy insists, community is the experience of being unworked, interrupted, fragmented as we encounter them.11
‘Share your limits’, then, might be one slogan for a post-capitalist outlook on our technologies. In its spirit of connective interruption, we might take on the challenge to refigure our technologies, not only to minimise the climate catastrophe and redistribute resources, but also to give room for ‘unworking’ human encounters. In political terms, this might mean, instead of looking for harmony and broad brushstroke consensus, to look for the kind of creative ‘democratic agonism’ Chantal Mouffe proposes; in philosophical terms, the pursuit of what Jeremy Gilbert calls ‘experimental anti-individualism’ that resists ‘the lure of conformist communitarianism’. In terms of work, it might just mean, that as we win the fight for technologies that free up time for all, we will gain more room for what Walter Benjamin sees as the essence of children’s play: experimentation and openness to all comers to join.12