Chapter 2: Capitalism and its Machines

The emergence of machines occurs through such a wide variety of discursive and epistemological domains that it becomes an intellectual feat in which to pull all of these disparate traditions together. Science, education, fictional accounts, and capitalist industries are just a few of how these are actualized. As Chapter 1 indicated, the representations of machines and their existence over a wide social sphere demonstrate their central role in our collective social consciousness. Returning to Figure 1.1, it aptly demonstrates how the forces and flows of Empire and global capitalism shape the visions, metaphors, and actualizations of how machines emerge in particular historical conjunctures. In one particular facet of life in the West, machines have been integral to transformations experienced through capitalist enterprise and the organization of labor and production (MacKenzie, 1984). Although this chapter is specifically dedicated to capitalist machines and how they haunted the visions of Karl Marx and those influenced by his work, it might be best to begin with a historical example from the 1950s that envisions a role for machines in transforming an entire industry built upon technological innovation and control.