Theses on automation and labour

Never mind the future. Automation has already ripped through the past. From medieval robots to the fake chess-playing device that appears in the first of Walter Benjamin’s (1969) “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” automata have troubled “paired ideas about life and death, nature and manufacture, foreign and familiar” (Truitt 2015, 1). As Adelheid Voskuhl notes in Androids in the Enlightenment (2013), only in the age of industrial factory production does automation begin to instil the fear that modern selves and societies have become indistinguishable from machines. Andrew Ure, Charles Babbage, and Karl Marx were the prophets of this anxiety. From the spinning jenny to the assembly line of car manufacturing, automation tied industrial modernity to the experience and conditions of labour. Global labour history has taught us that capitalism appeared as much in the plantation as in the factory, and that the worker is as much a slave as a freely contracted individual. We learn a similar lesson by considering the power of the machine.