The Contemporary Reception of Marx’s “Fragment on Machines”: Critique and Elements for a Reinterpretation

Abstract

The so-called “Fragment on Machines” of Marx has become in recent decades one of his most revisited texts. This has undoubtedly occurred under the influence of the reading carried out by the school of thought known as Italian autonomism, for whom this text would anticipate the stage of capitalism that opens after the crisis of the 1970s. The “Fragment” would theoretically articulate this stage in terms of a “crisis of value measurement” that would result from the impossibility of framing the new form acquired by labor in “postfordism” into the social norm of working time. The fundamental task of this article is to discuss this interpretative key of the “Fragment” and conceptually articulate its central elements in order to undertake an alternative reading of it, which would also have the potential to critically analyze current capitalism.