Alien Life: Marx and the Future of the Human

Glenn Rikowski Alien Life: Marx and the Future of the Human Introduction The ‘human’ appears to be in crisis. There is a practical challenge to the constitution of humans. This challenge is diverse but comes from four main Želds of contemporary science: biotechnology (especially genetic modiŽcation of human DNA); cybernetics, in particular, the connection of microchips to the human brain or central nervous system; microchip technology, artiŽcial intelligence (AI) and robotics; and nanotechnology.1 With this new science and technology, the ‘future of the human’ appears to become open to a world of possibilities. It seems to offer powerful techniques for generating artiŽcial – rather than natural – selection. Evolution is subsumed under ‘human’ control and possibilities for redesigning the species yield ‘transhuman’ or ‘posthuman’ futures. In this scenario, the technological redeŽnition of what the ‘human’ is becomes reality. Designer humans, the downloading of consciousness into computers, bodies without organs and cyborgs (a range of humancomputer fusions) are some of the options on the 1 Nanotechnology engineers structures at extreme microlevels. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre: about 1/80,000 of the diameter of a human hair, or 10 times the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Historical Materialism, volume 11:2 (121–164) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Also available online – www.brill.nl 122 • Glenn Rikowski horizon. Some, such as the transhumanists, posthumanists and extropians welcome these posthuman futures. This article argues that the posthumanists have misunderstood history. They have ignored capitalist development and missed the essential point: we are already not-human. We are capital. Furthermore, the posthumanists rely on technological determinism and capricious ‘choice’ regarding what we can become in the future, and a disarming optimism concerning our capacity to generate a world worth living in on the back of new science and its applications to design of the species. The unfolding of the new sciences and technologies so lauded by the posthumanists does not proceed in a social vacuum. They are developing within the social universe of capital. These technologies are an expression of the deepening of capitalist social relations and capital as social force, and so they are not innocent. The horror is not that we shall be invaded by new technologies that have the capacity to reconŽgure us as a species, a deŽnite life-form. There is a deeper horror; the horror of humanity already possessed by an alien social force: capital. The new ‘inhuman’ technologies are a practical manifestation of this deep possession of the human by capital. The concept of human capital, on this account, is not some inadequate notion drawn from bourgeois labour economics but expresses our real predicament. The Žrst section notes some impending scientiŽc and technological discoveries and applications that are reconŽguring human life. The second section shows how these developments hold promises for life beyond the ‘human’ – as post/trans-human life-forms. Section III contains a critique of post/transhumanism as development of the human based on ‘autonomous’ technology. The rest of the paper explores how we are already situated posthumanly as capitalised life-forms. Our social existence as human capital is a contradictory one. It is the form of everyday life as the experience of living contradictions that provides the dynamic (and hence the explanation) for us to seek to become posthuman capital: to enable humanism – as an open future for the species. Humanism, on this basis, is our collective freedom to decide what the ‘human’ is to become, free of the fetters of capital. In toto, capital limits what we can become. For our becoming – as a species – is an expression of the ‘becoming of capital’ that Marx wrote about in the Manuscripts,2 capital as a ‘force we must submit to’.3 2 3 Marx 1977a. Marx 1992, p. 269. Marx and the Future of the Human • 123 Humanism becomes possible only on the abolition of capital as social force, and this presupposes the destruction of capitalist social relations and the social universe of capital, whose substance is value. On this account of humanism, there is no ‘essence’ of the ‘human’, no ‘getting back to where we once belonged’. Today, humanism is the struggle for an open future. The social universe of capital must be imploded in order to set in train the project of humanism as social reality. I. The appliance of science The appliance of new science and technologies to human frailties and limitations appears to be on the threshold of a new era. The Human Genome Project has caused most optimism for big breakthroughs in the near future. As Matt Ridley has dramatically put it: On 26th June 2000, the world changed. On that day, for the Žrst time, a species of living creature announced that it had grown sufŽciently complex, biologically and culturally, to have read its own genetic recipe. It now had the complete instructions for building and running the body of one of its kind. 4 For Ridley, the ‘secret of life is out’.5 The Human Genome Project (HGP) has provided a map of the human genome. It was only seventeen years ago that two Californian scientists spliced DNA and successfully transferred genetic material from one life-form to another,6 giving rise to a new applied science that spawned a new industry: genetic engineering. Yet this is only the beginning; the whole biotechnology sector has a capitalisation of only $150 billion, far less than that of the internet. Mark Williams has argued that, by the midtwenty-Žrst century, the internet ‘may seem a side-show to the main event in IT – the explosion of bioinformatics’.7 Matt Ridley stresses the dangers as well as the beneŽts inherent in mining the human genome for practical applications. He lists germ warfare, genetic engineering of human beings and social and economic division (between those who can/not afford the beneŽts owing from biotechnology) as some of the dangers at issue. Steve Jones argues that the proŽt drive may dampen 4 5 6 7 Ridley 2000. Ridley 2000. Bruno 2000, p. 262. Williams 2000. 124 • Glenn Rikowski enthusiasm for the whole HGP, as corporations attempt to patent sequences of DNA ‘without knowing what they do’.8 Ayala Ochert notes that, in the US, ‘there is serious talk of genetically modifying people’ and that scientists ‘have begun to talk openly about the possibility’ of GM people.9 More sinister is that scientists are also considering possibilities for the ‘direct control of our evolution through so-called “germline” gene therapy’.10 Somatic gene therapy – which has no consequences for offspring – was Žrst carried out fourteen years ago. However, Ayala Ochert predicts that, in next twenty years, human genetic modiŽcation – ‘germline’ modiŽcation of inherited characteristics – is on the cards. The consequences of this are that, if you ‘change the germline . . . you change evolution’.11 Ochert stresses that this work is not being carried out by a group of ‘mad professor’ types trying to produce a master race. Rather, it is growing out of mainstream scientiŽc research being undertaken in fertility clinics, in medicine, in biology and in pharmaceutical companies.12 If these trends continue, and the applications owing from the HGP are anywhere near as signiŽcant as many scientists are predicting, then, argues Kat Arney, the development of ‘cloning techniques, brain-cell transplants and micro-computers could allow people to “upgrade” both themselves and their cloned progeny’.13 Ochert’s reassurance that twenty-three European countries signed a Council of Europe declaration prohibiting ‘germline’ gene therapy may not be worth much when commentators point towards the European biotechnology sector being hamstrung by strict regulations on the industry.14 The European biotech sector has also received far less state funding for development than its American counterpart, where tax breaks for biotech start-ups tempt venture capitalists into the Želd. With no global regulation, European germline enterprises may set up in countries outside Council of Europe jurisdiction. For now, it may well be the practical difŽculties of translating new knowledge about the human genome into hard products are prohibitive. For example, 95–99.9 per cent of all ‘engineered’ embryos is damaged or defective.15 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Jones, in Cartwright et al. 2000, p. 24. Ochert 2000, p. 22. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Arney 1998. Commentators such as Guerrera and Firn 2000. Ochert 2000, p. 22. Marx and the Future of the Human • 125 The other technology where applications directly affecting the human body seem on the horizon is cybernetics. In the last few years, it has come off the science Žction shelves and into the body of real humans, or proto-cyborgs. Jeremy Campbell notes work at the University of Southern California on growing neurones on microchips ‘that are made to emigrate into the brain’16 and communicate with it. Experiments at Reading University, led by Kevin Warwick, involve implanting chips into his own arm.17 An experiment undertaken in August 1998 involved a computer programmed to respond to Warwick’s actions, and further self-experimentation is planned. 18 According to Theodore Burger, the capability exists for building computer chips that act just like nerve cells.19 From this, argues Jeremy Campbell, computer chips in the brain to boost memory become a feasible step.20 These chips would allow ‘people to “download” large quantities of information instantly, as a computer does from the Internet’, according to neuroscience writer Ray Kurzweil.21 Whilst this technological invasion appears to reconŽgure the ‘human’, this is nothing as compared with its opposite; the ‘downloading’ of our consciousness into a computer lodged within a robot. Though much further off, this leaves any conception of what it is to be ‘human’ in limbo. As Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, ponders: But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one . . . [and] . . . the robots would in no sense be our children, [and] . . . on this path our humanity may well be lost.22 Charles Platt argues that, if we downloaded our consciousness into a computer, then the resulting entities would be ‘isomorphs’ – minds without organs.23 Nanotechnology is the design and manufacture of devices to atomic-scale precision. The potential of the technology appears to be gigantic. As Natasha Vita-More notes, nanomachines could repair aged tissues and organs. They 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Campbell 1999. See Alesky 2000. In Alesky 2000. In Campbell 1999. Campbell 1999. In Campbell 1999. Joy 2000, p. 244. Platt 2000, p. 208. 126 • Glenn Rikowski could, in theory, reanimate people who have been frozen in cryonic suspension.24 With nanotechnology, argues Paul Virilio, the ‘inner core of the living’ is to be equipped with micromachines that can ‘effectively stimulate our faculties’ – including enhanced cognitive capabilities.25 Nanobots – tiny machines we could swallow – could be launched into our blood streams. They would ‘supplement our natural immune system and seek out and destroy pathogens, cancer cells, arterial plaque, and other disease agents’, notes Ray Kurzweil.26 Nick Bostrom predicts the creation of a ‘superintelligence’ within the next forty years: a cognitive system that ‘drastically outperforms the top present-day humans in every way’. 27 Such a system would fuse human cognitive capability with: . . . hardware neural networks, simulated neural networks, classical AI, extracranially cultured tissue, quantum computers, large interconnected computer networks, evolutionary chips, nootropic treatment of the human brain, biological-electronic symbiosis systems or what have you.28 Wired up in this way, we could shut down all our schools and universities. In this section, I have listed key scientiŽc developments that could shape the ‘future of the human’. Human life appears to be subject to re-design. Paul Virilio argues that, for our species, the situation has been reached where classical evolution as natural selection no longer applies. For Virilio, we are on the verge of a ‘techno-scientiŽc phase’ of evolution where artiŽcial selection, selection based on conscious choice, prevails.29 Some do not mourn this ‘passing of the human’, but look to a transhuman future that holds great promise for liberation of all kinds, and it is to this trans/posthumanism that we now turn. II. Advancing a trans/posthuman future The previous section pointed towards scientiŽc applications that have the potential to radically alter humankind. Some welcome this, and actively strive to speed up its development. Nick Bostrom summarises this outlook: 24 25 26 27 28 29 Vita-More und., p. 14. Virilio 1995, p. 101. Kurzweil 1999, p. 176. Bostrom 1998, p. 13. Ibid. Virilio 1995, p. 117. Marx and the Future of the Human • 127 Over the past few years, a new paradigm for thinking about humankind’s future has begun to take shape among some leading computer scientists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists and researchers at the forefront of technological development. The new paradigm rejects . . . the assumption that the ‘human condition’ is at root a constant. . . . This assumption no longer holds true.30 The ‘human’, it seems, is headed for history. However, for transhumanists, it is more complex than this, as the following discussion makes clear. Transhumanist politics, ethics and philosophy supplement technological wonders. A useful starting point is the notion of the ‘transhuman’. This concept posits the contemporary constitution of the ‘human’ as being in a state of radical transition. According to Max More: We are transhuman to the extent that we seek to become posthuman and take action to prepare for a posthuman future. This involves learning about and making use of new technologies that can increase our capacities and life expectancy, questioning common assumptions, and transforming ourselves ready for the future, rising above outmoded human beliefs and behaviors. 31 This deŽnition begs the question of what the ‘posthuman’ is, and this is addressed later. The ‘transhuman’ is a practical process of leaving currently constituted humanity behind. It implies a transition beyond the human condition and human ‘nature’. Transhumanism carries with it a moral and political spark: we ought to try to overcome the ‘human’ limitations resulting from our physiology and biological foundations. For Ouroboros, ‘transhumanism’ is the belief that we can, and should, try to overcome our biological limits by means of reason, science and technology. Transhumanists seek things like intelligence, augmentation, increased strength and beauty, extreme life extension, sustainable mood enhancement and the capability to get offplanet and explore the universe. These goals are to be achieved with the aid of contemporary and future technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, cryonics, megascale and space-time engineering, AI, and mind uploading.32 30 31 32 Bostrom 1998, p. 24. More undated. Ouroboros 1999, p. 4. 128 • Glenn Rikowski Max More has described transhumanism as related to philosophies of life that ‘seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and limits’.33 Science and technology are the principal means to these goals, although, for More, ‘life-promoting principles and values’ also play a role34 – however, transhumanism is no religious cult, argues More. Rather, it is founded on the belief that ‘it is good to improve oneself, physically and mentally’, and to dissolve existing biological and social limits to processes of self-improvement.35 These limits can be overcome through the utilisation of ‘rational’ methods (technology and science).36 Transhumanists advocate the ‘progressive transformation of the human condition’; there is no end point.37 The core goal, then, is the transcendence of ‘human nature’, implying the practical redeŽnition of the human. The ‘posthuman’ is the realisation of the transhumanist project. Transhumanism is therefore a ‘politics of/for the posthuman’; humans actively striving to become posthumans.38 Max More deŽnes the ‘posthuman’ in the following way: Posthumans have overcome the biological, neurological, and psychological constraints evolved into humans. Posthumans may be partly or mostly biological in form, but will likely be or partly or wholly postbiological – our personalities having been transferred ‘into’ more durable, modiŽable, and faster, and more powerful bodies and thinking hardware. Some of the technologies that we currently expect to play a role in allowing us to become posthuman include genetic engineering , neural-computer integration, molecular nanotechnology, and cognitive science.39 Following More, Greg Burch argues that the ‘posthuman’ refers to what we have changed so much that our condition no longer can be accurately called ‘human’.40 Another signiŽcant term in this lexicon is ‘posthumanism’. Posthumanism is an ‘attitude on [sic] how to deal with the limitations of the human form’, 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 More undated. More undated. More undated. Transcedo 1998, p. 1. Burch 1998, p. 1. Rikowski 1999b, p. 56. More undated. Burch, in Burch and Toth-Fejel 1999, p. 1. Marx and the Future of the Human • 129 according to Daniel Ust.41 It is a tragic feeling or attitude, focusing on the frustrations of life as merely ‘human’. It is the negative side of the positive vision of transhumanism. Two Žnal concepts are required – extropy and extropian – though there are many others that could be added in a comprehensive rendering. The signiŽcance of these two concepts is that they deŽne the position of the world’s leading transhumanist, Max More, cofounder of the Extropy Institute. The Extropian Movement was started by Max More and Tom Morrow (not their real names) in the late 1980s. They launched the journal Extropy in 1988, and there is now Extropy Online. There is also the Extropy Institute (with annual conferences), a bimonthly newsletter, an electronic email list, a boarding house – Nextropia – and parties and lunches.42 According to Beatrice Gibson, membership of the Extropy Institute is increasing.43 The annual conference is particularly important. At the Extro4 conference in 2000, the gap between extropians and mainstream scientists visibly narrowed as several scientists from a range of Želds got together formally for the Žrst time with leading extropians at a major venue.44 So what are the extropians about? According to Brian Alexander, they are ‘techno-believers with boundless faith in science’s power to amp up human potential’.45 Life extension is a major goal, with ‘deathism’ scorned. Beatrice Gibson characterises the extropians as ‘a Californian group of hardcore technological believers, who aspire one day to be able to download the informational essence of their minds onto computer databases and achieve cyber-immortality’.46 Max More deŽnes the key terms: extropy is the extent of a system’s intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement.47 It is the opposite of entropy, which is based on the second law of thermodynamics that states everything in the universe is inevitably subject to death and decay. Entropy dictates that life is subject to mortality,48 but extropians seek to extend 41 Ust undated, p. 1. See Ust undated, p. 1. 43 Gibson 2000, p. 27. 44 Alexander 2000, p. 180. 45 Alexander 2000, p. 179. 46 Gibson 2000, p. 26. For more on the Californian roots of transhumanism and cyberideology, see Barbrook and Cameron 1996, and Barbrook 2002. 47 More 1999, p. 1. 48 Gibson 2000, p. 26 and p. 29. 42 130 • Glenn Rikowski and enrich life for ‘humans’.49 They believe the best strategy for attaining posthumanity to be a combination of technology and determination, rather than looking for it through psychic contacts, or extraterrestrial or divine gift.50 More outlines the core extropian principles as: perpetual progress, selftransformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, the open society, self-direction, and rational thinking.51 Although a techno-ideology, transhumanism cannot be reduced to any single technology. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with developing a ‘master race’, argues Greg Burch.52 This becomes more apparent when some of the positive claims for transhumanism are stated. These include the dissolution of hierarchies based on gender, ‘race’ or any other ascriptive characteristic – especially age. The goal is individual choice of skin colour and texture, choice of the range of sexual organs and decision on overall body design. No single body design is deemed superior; it is just a personal preference or fashion statement – which can be altered. Natasha Vita-More speaks of a future with multiple sex organs, polymer skin that changes colour and virtual reality eyeball implants.53 Shaun Jones raises the stakes as he talks about ‘the manipulation of the Žrewalls that exist between species’, so that we may have fur instead of mere skin for part or all of our bodies.54 Why buy mink fur, with all the cruelty inherent in its production, when it can be grown on our own arms? Dramatic claims have been made for the cyborg as harbinger of a new equality. As our ‘evolutionary descendent’, it is the ‘solution to gender ’ and the solution to power differentiation.55 Thus, ‘the cyborg may appear animal and material, invincible and perishable, utopian and mythical, corporeal and opaque, male and female, historical and subversive’, notes Jeff Lewis.56 For Donna Haraway, the cyborg as a fused human-machine entity breaks down hierarchy: 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 More 1999, p. 1. See also More in Olson 2002, p. 2. More undated. More 1999, p. 2. In Burch and Toth-Fejel 1999, p. 1. In Alexander 2000, p. 179. In Alexander 2000, p. 186. Lewis 1998, p. 377. Ibid. Marx and the Future of the Human • 131 The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence . . . The relationships for forming polarity and hierarchical domination are at issue in the cyborg world.57 The cyborg promises an ‘informatics of liberation’ that would ‘seek to advance semblation beyond the entertainment perimeters of arcade games and capitalistic processes generally’.58 A posthuman future would not maintain current hierarchies. And it would be more fun. Ed Regis argues that the ‘toilet, as we know it, would be a thing of the past’; however, the transhuman’s sexual capacity would increase ‘in variety, intensity, duration, and just about every other imaginable way’, enhanced by our new sex organs and new sexes.59 This transhuman equality, choice and difference Žts cosily with some liberal-left visions, although, in terms of its politics and economics, the transhumanist outlook tends generally to support neoliberal nostrums.60 At the terminus of some transhuman futures resides the ‘body without organs’.61 A consciousness swirling around in chips inside a robot sounds like a practical case of annihilation of the ‘human’. Ian Tattersall questions whether a species can survive as a set of ‘disembodied attributes’.62 This last point opens up the general question of the relationship between humanism and transhumanism. According to Nick Bostrom, transhumanism ‘agrees with humanism on many points but shoots beyond it by emphasising that we can and should transcend our biological limitations’.63 Indeed, argues Greg Burch: The word ‘transhumanism’ consciously evokes the tradition of humanism, i.e. the secular view of man as the ‘center ’ of the moral universe. However, transhumanism goes beyond humanism, because it does not accept some immutable, fundamental ‘human nature’ as a given, but rather looks to continuing – and accelerating – the process of expanding and improving the very nature of human beings themselves. 64 57 Haraway 1991, p. 151 in Lewis 1998, p. 377. Ibid. 59 Regis 1990, p. 168. 60 See Rikowski 2000c. See also Barbrook and Cameron 1996, and Barbrook 2002 – on the cyber-politics underpinning the Californian Ideology that spawned such movements as transhumanism. 61 Bukatman 1999, p. 325. 62 Tattersall 2000, p. 75. 63 Bostrom 1998, p. 25. 64 Burch 1998, p. 1. 58 132 • Glenn Rikowski Max More argues that, like humanists, transhumanists ‘favour reason, progress, and values centered on our well being’ rather than on an external religious authority.65 However, transhumanists take humanism further by challenging human limits by means of science and technology combined with critical and creative thinking. Thus, transhumanists see humanity as a transitory stage in the evolutionary development of intelligence. We advocate using science to accelerate our move from human to transhuman or posthuman condition.66 As we have seen, for Burch, ‘transhumanism’ evokes the tradition of humanism: humankind at the ‘centre’ of the moral universe, the ‘measure of all things’.67 Transhumanism, however, does not accept some immutable ‘human nature’ as a Žxed item. There is no ‘essence’ to the human – Žxed by genetic, psychological, social or any other dimension of existence. Transhumanism seeks to continue and accelerate the ‘process of expanding and improving the very nature of human beings themselves’, argues Burch.68 Thus: ‘transhumanism is the modern heir to the humanist tradition, in fact transhumanism carries on the torch of the “humane” culture into an era of ultratechnology’.69 As Daniel Ust, notes, labelling posthumanism as inhuman merely begs the question regarding what the ‘human’ is.70 Ust argues that there is no necessary conict between posthuman existence and some of the Žner qualities we associate with humans. Indeed, argues Ust, the posthuman will extend virtues and qualities such as intelligence, courage and inventiveness, which, with much greater physical capacity and longevity, should promote increased tenderness and compassion.71 Together with the scientiŽc, medical and technological developments of the previous section, this section raises serious questions concerning the future of the ‘human’. The ‘human’ appears to be at risk. The following section puts this risk into perspective through a critique of transhumanism. 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 More 1999, p. 1. Ibid. Burch 1998, p. 1. Ibid. Burch in Burch and Toth-Fejel 1999, p. 1. Ust undated, p. 3. Ibid. Marx and the Future of the Human • 133 III. An alien critique of transhumanism Of course, different conceptions of the human subject have been proposed throughout the centuries,72 and ideas of human nature have changed substantially throughout history, from Plato to Wittgenstein and beyond,73 but the posthuman points towards a fundamental surpassing of the ‘human’ itself.74 This has consequences for any project of locating the ‘human’ in some behavioural traits such as in the capacity to ‘make ourselves’,75 or to ‘care for the things precious to us’.76 These take on new meanings within post/ transhumanist discourses that exceed old notions of the ‘human’. Neither will deŽnitions of the ‘human’ based on general capabilities hold up (such as the ‘learning animal’ or the ‘toolmaker’): these are being redeŽned as we forge ever-closer relationships with machines and computers. Furthermore, the ‘human’ is seriously at risk on some genetic bottom-line deŽnition (for example, the exact chemical composition of the DNA making up genes); 77 this is dissolving with genetic engineering possibilities. What is meant by ‘inhuman’ becomes unclear too. Keith Tester’s assertion that the inhuman is everything which forces the individual to ‘subscribe to a determined being’ (after Ortega y Gasset) is problematised by possibilities for the posthuman.78 The degree of determination by the ‘social’ is downgraded by virtue of the apparent dynamism of possibilities opened up by the posthuman. It appears that posthuman innovation supersedes not just classical Darwinian evolution but also mainstream sociological conceptions on the efŽcacy of social structures, norms and values as fetters and shapers of the social life of individuals. The posthuman crashes through social a well as biological limits.79 Tester’s claim that the ‘inhuman is everything which gives the already written script of the novel she or he is going to be able to write’, trades on old sociological verities that have no currency within the posthuman.80 The notion of posthuman sociality is a reconŽguration of all previously known forms of social life, on the accounts of the post/transhuman theorists. 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 See Morris 1991, and Smith 2002. See Trigg 1988. Rikowski 1999b. Tester 1995, p. xi. Joy 2000, p. 262. Lewontin 1995, p. 43. Tester 1995, p. xi. As in Transcedo 1998. Tester 1995, p. xi. 134 • Glenn Rikowski The notion of ‘dehumanisation’ also undergoes radical transformation within posthuman discourse. For Tester, dehumanisation ‘is the processual tendency of circumstance to foreclose on the possibilities which the individual experiences him or her self as having in relation to the situations she or he is thrown into’.81 Yet Tester realises ‘the profound difŽculty is that precisely without these circumstances and experiential determinations, the world could scarcely be a place of and for human being’.82 The posthuman changes these circumstances, radically. The posthuman condition offers a degree of malleability to the entity in question that makes prognostications about sociality difŽcult. What kind of social life does a consciousness downloaded into a computer lodged within a robot have? If the transhuman is a trajectory for the ‘human’, then all bets concerning the relevance of contemporary sociological concepts are, at best, hedged. Finally, Tester ’s claim that the ‘human and the inhuman can never be separated’ rests upon an anthropomorphism that is challenged by the posthuman.83 For, as Keith Ansell-Pearson argues: To maintain that technology is making us ‘less human’ is to suppose that there exists some Žxed nature of the human by which one could measure the excesses of technology, and so appraise its inventions in terms of some metaphysical cost-beneŽts analysis.84 The posthuman problematises the ‘human’ and technology drives this problem on ever more intensely. It demands continual rethinking of our relationship with machines.85 The posthuman also apparently generates the drive for ‘technology’s invention of the human animal’.86 Of course, as Martin Parker has noted, social organisation always involves some relation between humans and non-human materials,87 but the movement towards the posthuman incrementally blurs the distinction. Set on this trajectory, as Bill Joy urges, the question is: ‘Which is to be the master? Will we survive our own technologies?’88 From a posthumanist perspective, however, these questions are 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ansell-Pearson 1997a, p. 153. Hayles 1997a, p. 153. Ansell-Pearson 1997a, p. 153. Parker 1998, p. 504. Joy 2000, p. 256. Marx and the Future of the Human • 135 redundant; the invasiveness of technology into the becoming-posthuman is not a threat but rather a solution to the future of the ‘human’. But, as Paul Saffo argues, technologies mirror the cultures that create them, and the ‘coming world of electronic lifeforms is likely to be no different’,89 and on this point rests part of the critique of the posthuman promise, as developed later. The crisis of the ‘human’ is simultaneously a crisis of humanism.90 If humanism is ‘an account that centres human beings as the measure of all other things’,91 then the posthuman trajectory continually reconŽgures the standard of measurement. Max More argues that the real issue is a humanist courage deŽcit: Should we ‘play God’? We might expect Humanists, having accepted that there is no divine creator, shepherd, and purpose-giver, to resp ond afŽrmatively. However, I contend that many humanists, though pro-reason, science, and technology . . . still fear their own Promethean urge to challenge the gods.92 Alternatively, transhumanists ‘anticipate our future as posthumans’ and adjust their view of their lives accordingly.93 Taking the argument one stage further, according to Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone, ‘if the human is dead, the alien, the other goes with it’.94 For these analysts, however, the alien is the posthuman; they are therefore closet humanists at heart, mourning the ‘death of the human’. Katherine Hayles, meanwhile, looks forward to the excitement of the posthuman as it ‘evokes the exhilarating prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening new ways of thinking about what being human means’.95 For Hayles, the posthuman does not signify the end of humanity; rather, it ‘signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human’.96 This conception itself applied only to a small number of people – those with the ‘wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualise themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice’. 97 Thus, ‘old humanism’ is a class-based 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 Saffo 1998, pp. 2–3. Halberstam and Livingstone 1995, p. 9. Parker 1998, p. 504. More 1994, p. 1. Ibid. Halberstam and Livingstone 1995, p. 13. Hayles 1999, p. 285. Hayles 1999, p. 286. Ibid. 136 • Glenn Rikowski perspective on the human, despite protests for its universality from those supporters of the ‘liberal humanist view of the self’.98 Hayles argues that the posthuman ‘need not be recuperated back into liberal humanism, nor need it be construed as anti-human’: it has its own future.99 Others point towards the human/transhuman as continuum. Transcedo argues that both humanism and transhumanism revere rationalism and are concerned for the fate of humanity.100 They both eschew the relevance of the supernatural as guide to life. Transhumanism only parts company with humanism when the former urges on development of the ‘human’ beyond current biological constitution and human evolution. However, the shift towards the posthuman is not just a matter of us subjecting ourselves to new science and technology. Max More makes this clear: The transition from human to posthuman can be deŽned physically or memetically. Physically, we will have become posthuman only when we have made such fundamental and sweeping modiŽcations to our inherited genetics, physiology, neurophysiology and neurochemistry, that we can no longer be usefully classiŽed with Homo Sapiens. Memetically, we might expect posthumans to have a different motivational structure from humans, or at least the ability to make modiŽcations if they choose. For example . . . complete control over emotional responses through manipulation of neurochemistry.101 More leaves something out in his list of ‘things for change’: the nature of posthuman society. What he – and almost all trans/posthumanist writers – forgets is that the spectre of posthuman capitalism lurks within the future for the post/human.102 There are real social limits to posthumanisation, limits set by capital. The trans/posthumanists avoid the problem of capital in their projections. On the constitution of post/human society, the silence of the trans/posthumanists signiŽes their real techtopianism: their ungrounded belief that technology will cut through all problems and limits for the post/ human. This is where Marx enters. The problem is how to introduce Marx into the debate on the future of the human. Felicity Callard and Donald Lowe have attempted to bring Marx in 98 99 100 101 102 Hayles 1999, pp. 186–7. Hayles 1999, p. 187. Transcedo 1998, p. 1. More 1994, p. 2. Ansell-Pearson 1997a-b, and Callard 1998 are exceptions. Marx and the Future of the Human • 137 through analyses of the body.103 However, this neatly skips around some of the phenomena that take us deeply into an exploration of the ‘human’ through Marx, principally labour-power and capital. Thus, the search is on for better ways of approaching post/transhumanism through Marx. Marx and the post/transhuman There are a few texts that bring Marx and Marxism into direct contact with the problem of the post/transhuman. Keith Ansell-Pearson’s work makes some attempt to do this. However, Ansell-Pearson only discerns Marx’s relevance for subjecting post/trans-human theory to critique in the Žnal pages of the Conclusion to his Germinal Life.104 He also addressed briey the capitalism/transhuman relation in his earlier Viroid Life.105 Ansell-Pearson argues we should be sceptical about ‘depictions of evolution as moving increasingly in the direction of a posthuman phase’, as these theories biologise and hypostatise developments within capitalism.106 Secondly, post/ transhuman theories give no account of the changing relation between humans and machines – an account that Marxism has a signiŽcant stake in.107 AnsellPearson argues that it was ‘Marx’s tremendous insight that it is capital itself which develops as a metaphysics of energy’, and he hails the following quote from Marx: It [political economy/private property] develops a cosmopolitan, universal energy which breaks through every limit and every bond and posits itself as the only policy, the only universality, the only limit and the only bond.108 From this exciting beginning, Ansell-Pearson’s attempt to bring Marx into contact with post/transhumanism tails off. First, he debunks Guy Debord’s view that it is the destiny of the working class to ‘humanise the inhuman’ by gaining control over it. He dismisses Debord (on post/transhuman grounds) as an essentialist.109 In Viroid Life, he conates capital and Nietzsche’s eternal 103 As demonstrated in Rikowski 2000c. Callard 1998 and Lowe 1995 provide a ‘false start’ for understanding transhumanism through Marx by their focus on the body rather than exploring capitalist socialist relations and capital as a social force. 104 Ansell-Pearson 1999. 105 Ansell-Pearson 1997a. 106 Ansell-Pearson 1999, p. 214. 107 Ansell-Pearson 1999, p. 215. 108 Marx 1977a, in Ansell-Pearson 1999, p. 218. 109 Ansell-Pearson 1999, p. 160. 138 • Glenn Rikowski return by arguing that ‘Capital operates as a virtual machine trapped within a productionist logic of eternal repetition’.110 Thus: if the posthuman happens, it develops as a distinctly capitalist social form of life. Furthermore, it is an aspect of capital’s eternal life as eternal return of the Same. Yet this does not square with Ansell-Pearson’s contention that the ‘evolution of the system of capitalism can be de-reiŽed by exposing, through a machinic analysis, the illusion of total control it inevitably gives rise to’.111 He seeks to justify this by referring to ‘structural pressures’ that compel groups to move in opposite directions at the same time.112 Whether there is capital’s eternal return or capital’s lack of total control due to ‘structural pressures’ forcing groups into conict, is never followed through by Ansell-Pearson in either Germinal Life or Viroid Life. Nick Land’s brief posthumanist critique of Marxism is more interesting than Ansell-Pearson’s meandering.113 Land argues that Marx’s value theory of labour is anthropomorphic. Thus, ‘surplus-value is not analytically extricable from transhuman machineries’.114 The post/transhuman spells the death not just of the ‘human’ but also of the social universe of capital with its substance: value. On this account, ‘virtual capital-extinction is immanent to production’.115 Capitalism is the ‘economic base of Žnal-phase human security’ that engenders the posthuman – its real gravedigger.116 Here, Land has raised a substantial problem for Marxism. Donald Lowe seconds Nick Land’s projection on the end of surplus-value production. He argues that ‘robotic, labor-less, non-human machines do not produce surplus-value’.117 Unlike Land, Lowe explains why this is the case; surplus-value is extracted from production to satisfy bodily needs, but, with the posthuman, those needs diminish radically as we become at one with machines. The problem with this analysis is that it runs counter to the variegated posthuman futures offered by post/transhumanists. Those posthumans who choose to remain in esh-covered bodies still have needs, and are therefore potentially capable of value production. 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 Ansell-Pearson 1997a, p. 174. Ansell-Pearson 1997a, p. 176. Ansell-Pearson 1997a, p. 177. Land 1998. Land 1998, p. 78. Ibid. Land 1998, p. 81. Lowe 1995, p. 175. Marx and the Future of the Human • 139 In these circumstances, Lowe’s call for us to resist a posthuman future falls into the trap of seeming to want to retain value production. Abstract resistance against a posthuman future falls back on itself; we end up saving the very social conditions and arrangements – capitalism – that, if post/transhumanists are correct, are generating a particular (capitalist) form of posthuman future. However, Lowe redeems the situation by arguing for resistance to capital: real resistance is the negation of, and active opposition to, capital. But this misses the other target: resistance to a form of human life. With another attempt (but taking the previous two points on board too), Lowe hits both targets: Resistance is critical in the sense that it seeks to reverse the means/ends relations in the late-capitalist opposition between bodily needs and capital accumulation.118 In essence, this becomes human resistance: our resistance to the capitalisation of the human, the capitalisation of humanity – resistance to ourselves becoming truly human capital, capital as a life-form within the ‘human’. This is the real horror that the post/transhumanists hide, a horror uncovered later in this article. Having outlined key post/transhumanist concepts, and indicated through the work of Lowe how we can engage Marx with a critique of the transhuman, the following sub section pinpoints some of the basic weaknesses of the post/transhumanist outlook. An alien critique of trans/posthumanism As an old-fashioned ‘human’, I am alien to the posthuman of the future. As such an alien, a relic of future’s past, I present this sub section as a spoiler for a posthuman future. I bring the posthuman down to earth (and Earth) by posing some points of critique for my potential superior. (i) When is post? Ironically, the concept of ‘posthuman’ appears to be premised upon some naturalistic conception of the ‘human’ which implies an unwarranted essentialism. The posthuman points towards a fundamental surpassing of the ‘human’: as ‘humans’ are technologised, invaded, taken over and shaped by biochemical manipulation, computer-tech implants and human-computer 118 Ibid. 140 • Glenn Rikowski interaction, then they become something else – posthuman. However, unless the ‘human’ has been Žxed beforehand – perhaps resting on some biological or genetic bottom-line – then the posthuman theorists are never ever in a position to say whether the post- has really arrived: that the ‘human’ is history.119 (ii) Technological determinism, demon technology A further problem is technological determinism. The ‘new technologies’ appear to oat free of social relations in post/transhumanist discourse. Technology and biochemical inventions, innovations and products invade human bodies for consumption (or consumption aids), or for enhancing the productivity of labour, or for the basic functioning of the organism. These technological developments, abstracted from capitalist social relations and the structuring elements of capitalist society (value, abstract labour, capital etc.),120 form the backdrop to potentially horriŽc vistas or post/transhuman techtopias. It seems then that: Technologies have their own increasingly alien agenda, and human concerns will survive and prosper only when we learn to treat them, not as slaves or simple extensions of ourselves, but as unknown constructs with whom we make creative alliances and wary pacts.121 We must make our peace with technology, otherwise technology invades the body, argues Stelarc.122 The machine preys upon humanity, which heralds the end of (human) history, accompanied by new Luddite calls to ‘control the machine’. Post/transhuman theorists who terrorise today’s humanity with prognoses of genetically designed bodies, microchips in the brain and the rest typically lack an explanatory dynamic which underpins such developments and projections. If free-oating technology was a reality, if it really had a ‘life of its own’, then it would not be the powerful enemy it appears to be. Its externality to humans would herald our ability to halt its entry into our bodies. But technology is an expression of capitalist social relations, and these cannot just be sent to the breaker’s yard; they require fundamental forms of social destruction, a mass dismantling on a global scale. Technology, therefore, is not something external to the world of the human. 119 120 121 122 Rikowski 1999b, pp. 56–7. After Postone 1996. Davis 1998, p. 335. Stelarc 1998, p. 117. Marx and the Future of the Human • 141 (iii) No dynamic for techno-evolution Yet another problem for post/transhuman theory is its incorporation of artiŽcial rather than natural selection. As UCLA’s Gregory Stock argues, ‘Evolution is being superceded by technology. . . . Humans are becoming objects of conscious design’.123 Kat Arney argues that ‘As we near the end of the twentieth century, it feels as if mankind has ceased to evolve in the biological sense’ for ‘technological evolution has won hands-down over biological evolution’.124 Thus, the ‘survival of the Žttest no longer applies’ as ‘disadvantageous genes are passed on’.125 We are gradually removing the selective pressures that lie at the heart of classic Darwinian evolution. Ray Kurzweil argues that, in the present century, humans will have ‘vastly beaten evolution’ therefore ‘achieving in a matter of only thousands of years as much or more than evolution achieved in billions of years’.126 Paul Virilio views the posthuman through post-Darwinism. 127 For a future of human-machine integration, symbiosis and fusion, it is artiŽcial – not natural – selection that will determine the selection of types. However, there is the problem of specifying the dynamic, the mechanism for artiŽcial selection. Given the posthuman hype about diversity and choice, Virilio’s artiŽcial selection takes on a chilling note. Posthumans shall decide which posthumans are ‘selected’; thus, against apparent posthuman-liberalism, a ‘master posthuman’ is the outcome of Virilio’s ‘artiŽcial selection’ – unless some non-interventionist mode of artiŽcial selection is applied. But this move merely makes artiŽcial selection as random as natural selection, when its main advantage was that it was under rational control. But where is the dynamic for artiŽcial selection? Virilio has an answer: science will exert its own ‘will to power’ to attack ‘certain peculiarities of the species’, and scientists will decide, on some criteria or other, the future shape of the posthuman.128 From the post/human choice of selection of types, Virilio shifts to ‘the will to power of science’ for determining survival of types. Virilio reiŽes science and awards it strange (and ominous) power over human survival. We have a scientistic determinism here: science free from social 123 124 125 126 127 128 In Ochert 2000, p. 23. Arney 1998. Arney 1998. Kurzweil 1999, p. 59. Virilio 1995. Virilio 1995, p. 20. 142 • Glenn Rikowski relations and social forms. Yet, if Virilio ‘personiŽes’ the force of science, then scientists call the shots; we arrive back at post/human selection by post/ humans. (iv) Social limits to trans/posthumanism Those trans/posthumanists that call for the body to break through social barriers need to address the problem of capital, of capitalism. FM-2030’s assumption that the end of the industrial age signiŽes the end of capital/ism leads her/him to fail to take capitalism seriously.129 Stelarc screams at us that: ‘THE BODY MUST BURST FROM ITS BIOLOGICAL, CULTURAL, AND PLANETARY CONTAINMENT’, without enquiring how we are being contained by capital as social relation and social force.130 In effect, the social relations of the movement towards trans/posthumanism are untheorised. This stunts posthuman politics, for there is no realisation that technology cannot ‘burst from its cultural integument’ without a critique of the form of that containment, and a political programme for smashing through it. Without this critique, the spectre of capital haunts the posthuman condition. (v) Motivation of cybernation This point is connected to the previous one. Why should posthumans want to smash the social domination of capital when they can adjust to it? Using mood-altering drugs and other technologies, posthumans could simply redesign themselves to cope with its demands. However, the social drive to produce (surplus-) value is inŽnite in volume, speed and intensity.131 Against an inŽnite social drive, humans, posthumans or superhumans necessarily fall short. ‘Humans drop like ies’ in relation to the inŽnitude of capital’s social drives, and posthumans would too; their performance in labour (however good) always susceptible to improvement. But, as the question of motivation to terminate capital could be suppressed by technological means, then the tensions involved in producing against an inŽnite social drive for posthumans may also be subsumed. This subsection has provided criticisms of trans/posthuman theory/ prophecies that collectively pose problems for the contemporary transhumanist 129 130 131 FM-2030 undated. Stelarc 1998, p. 116 – original capitalisation. See Rikowski 2000c. Marx and the Future of the Human • 143 movement. The rest of the paper argues that the whole basis of transhuman theory and prophecy is founded on a serious misreading of history. We are already transhuman in a very speciŽc sense: we are capital, human capital, humanity capitalised. IV. Karl Marx’s social universe And even if we scatter to the stars, isn’t it likely that we may take our problems with us or Žnd, later, that they have followed us?132 Today, we exist within the capital’s social universe. This is Karl Marx’s social universe, as analysed in Capital. The substance of this social universe is value.133 Capital is value in motion.134 Value is not a ‘thing’. In its Žrst incarnation in the capitalist labour process, it inheres within some material ‘things’, in commodities; though it can also be created within immaterial commodities too.135 Thus, value, as the substance of the social universe of capital should not be thought of as some kind of ‘stuff’, some material substratum. It is, after all, a social substance. Value can be viewed as being social energy that undergoes transformations: its Žrst metamorphosis being its constitution as capital in the form of surplus-value. It is the matter and anti-matter of Marx’s social universe. 136 Social phenomena within capital’s social universe are neither self-maintaining nor constitute stable entities. These phenomena, indeed the whole social universe is constantly at risk of implosion. Through labour, we ensure its maintenance. Value is not self-generating, it cannot create itself, nor can it morph into capital on its own accord. It is labour that creates value and mediates its various transformations and forms of movement, Žrstly into capital on the basis of surplus-value, and then the myriad forms of capital springing from surplus-value.137 As Karl Marx indicated in the Grundrisse: Labour is the living, form-giving Žre; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time. 138 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 Joy 2000, p. 254. As argued in Neary 2002, Neary and Rikowski 2000, 2002, and in Rikowski 2002. See Kay and Mott 1982, and Neary 2002. See Lazzarato 1996. See Neary and Rikowski 2000. See Marx 1977b, and Postone 1996. Marx 1973a, p. 361. 144 • Glenn Rikowski Thus: the existence of the substance (value as social energy) that constitutes the social universe depends upon our labour. Labour, in turn, is dependent upon our capacity to labour, our labour-power: the energy, skills, knowledge, physical and personal qualities that we, as labourers, posses. Marx deŽned labour-power in the following way, as the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description. 139 Labour-power here has real existence: it exists as it is transformed into labour. Within the labour market, it has virtual existence within the body of the potential labourer. Labour-power is fuel for the living Žre (labour). In the labour process, labour-power (potential, capacity to labour) is transformed into labour (activity, actuality). The personal and physical qualities, powers, skills and so on of labourers are activated by the will of the labourer for the performance of labour. On the basis of Marx’s deŽnition of labour-power, we can deŽne labourpower as including not just ‘skills’ and knowledge, the foundation of much mainstream education research.140 It also incorporates the attitudes and personality traits essential for effective performance within the labour process. It depends, therefore, on what is included within ‘mental capabilities’. Empirical research on the recruitment process, where employers assess labour-powers,141 suggests ‘mental capabilities’ must include work attitudes, social attitudes and personality traits – aspects of our ‘personalities’. These, too, are incorporated within labour-power as it transforms itself into labour. In contemporary capitalist society, education and training are elements within deŽnite forms of labour-power’s social production. Empirically, these forms show wide variation. The signiŽcant point is that the substance of the social universe of capital (value) rests upon our labour, which in turn hinges on labour-power being transformed into labour in the labour process for the production of (im/material) commodities which incorporate value in its ‘cell form’.142 Labour-power (its formation and quality), rests (though not exclusively) upon education and training in contemporary capitalism. This is the real 139 140 141 142 Marx 1977b, p. 164. See Rikowski 1990. For example, in studies cited in Rikowski 1990. Marx 1977c. Marx and the Future of the Human • 145 signiŽcance of education and training in capitalism today. What constitutes ‘capitalist’ schooling and training as precisely capitalist is that it is implicated in generating the substance of the social universe of capital: value. We have come full circle. It appears that we are trapped within a labyrinth bounded by the margins of capital’s universe. Thus, it seems that, to destroy this social universe for human liberation, it must be imploded. The best place to begin this project is with a critique of the strange, living commodity, labour-power.143 Labour-power (that other great class of commodities)144 It is well known that Karl Marx opened his Žrst volume of Capital with the commodity, and not with capital. Marx Žrst of all draws our attention to the fact that the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.145 For Marx, analysis of capitalist society begins with the commodity, as it is the ‘economic cell-form’ of that society.146 It is the most basic element that can inform us about the more complex phenomena springing from it. The commodity was the perfect starting point for Marx as it incorporates the fundamental structuring elements of capitalist society: value, use-value and exchange-value posited on the basis of abstract labour as measured by labourtime.147 It is the condensed ‘general form of the product’ in capitalist society,148 the ‘most elementary form of bourgeois wealth’,149 and hence the ‘formation and premise of capitalist production’.150 Commodities are also ‘the Žrst result of the immediate process of capitalist production, its product’.151 Less well known is that, in Theories of Surplus-Value – Part I, Marx makes it clear that there are two classes or categories of commodities within capital’s social universe. For 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 As argued in Rikowski 1999a and 2000b. This sub section draws from Rikowski 2000a. Marx 1977b, p. 43. Marx had made this point previously in Marx 1973a, p. 881. Marx 1977c, p. 19. Postone 1996, pp. 127–8. Postone 1996, p. 148. Marx 1969, p. 173. Marx 1979, p. 1004. Marx 1979, p. 974. 146 • Glenn Rikowski the whole world of ‘commodities’ can be divided into two great parts. First, labour-power; second, commodities as distinct from labour-power itself. 152 These commodities are distinguished essentially on the following consideration: A commodity – as distinguished from labour-power itself – is a material thing confronting man, a thing of a certain utility for him, in which a deŽnite quantity of labour is Žxed or materialised. 153 Later, in Theories of Surplus-Value – Part I, Marx criticises Adam Smith for holding that the commodity, in order to incorporate value, has to be a physical, material thing. Value is a social substance; it has, therefore, a social mode of existence.154 However, the examples Marx uses in Capital to illustrate his arguments related mainly to material commodities: coats, iron, paper and so on. In the Žrst volume of Capital, Marx states that: ‘A commodity is, in the Žrst place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisŽes human wants of some sort or another’.155 Here, he appears to be ruling out immaterial products such as health and education. Yet a radical interpretation of Marx would start out from the commodity as inclusive of material and immaterial forms. Indeed, the distinction between material and immaterial commodities is practically dissolving on a daily basis.156 The commodity-form is taking hold of all spheres of social existence. Marx’s original distinction between labour-power and the ‘general class’ of commodities was that the latter were external to the person of the labourer, whereas labour-power was incorporated within personhood itself. However, with people buying cosmetic surgery, the market in spare body parts and the future beckoning big business in human re/design, the physical externality of the ‘general class’ of commodities to human beings is no longer what it was in Marx’s day. These developments herald the breakdown of this aspect of Marx’s original distinction between the two great classes of commodities. What, then, is the distinction between the two categories of commodities if the externality criterion is no longer what it was? A distinction may still exist on the following considerations. First, labourpower is an aspect of the person; it is internal to personhood, in a special 152 153 154 155 156 Marx 1969, p. 167. Marx 1969, p. 164 – original emphasis. Marx 1969, p. 171. Marx 1977b, p. 43 – emphasis added. Hardt and Negri, 2000. Marx and the Future of the Human • 147 sense. It is a uniŽed force owing throughout the person. The installation of a new heart – an object originally external to the person in question – does not alter this. Labour-power has no speciŽc location within personhood; it is a force owing throughout the totality of the person. Labour-power has reality only within the person, whereas general commodities have existence external to the person and can also become elements of persons, as increasing numbers of medical products become incorporated within the human. Labourpower, as a human force, cannot leave humans and act as the same force within bricks. As Marx noted, labour-power does ‘not exist apart from him [the labourer] at all’.157 It cannot be external to the person. Marx notes the ‘uniqueness’ of labour-power in this respect.158 Secondly, labour-power (unlike a brick) is under the sway of a potentially hostile will. Internality and consciousness distinguish labour-power from the general class of commodities. Labour-power on this account is the special commodity that generates value and surplus-value (the substance of capital) through its transformation into labour. Without human labour-power, there is no capital – no matter what the level of technological development.159 In contemporary capitalist society, labour-power takes on added signiŽcance. Its quality enhancement is increasingly being viewed by representatives of capital as a new strategy for increasing relative surplus-value. Relative surplus-value: on the basis of labour-power enhancement There are two main ways of producing surplus-value. The Žrst is to extend the length of the working day. This effectively extends the labour-time that labourers are engaged in producing surplus-value. Marx called this absolute surplus-value production. This form of surplus-value production has absolute limits: there are only twenty-four hours in a day and workers have to sleep, eat and reproduce. Attempts to break through the latter limits (as in the Industrial Revolution) result in the physical and mental deterioration of workers – thus ultimately affecting the quality of their labour-powers. The second method of surplus-value creation Marx called relative surplusvalue production. Here, the labour-time it takes to produce value equal to the value of labour-power (necessary labour) is reduced. The main way that 157 158 159 Marx 1973a, p. 267. Marx 1969, p. 45. Rikowski 2001a. 148 • Glenn Rikowski this has occurred historically is through the application of machinery and automation to production. Application of new technology has the effect of reducing the labour-time necessary for generating value equivalent to the value of labour-power. It increases labour productivity, and also de-values the goods labourers need to maintain their labour-powers. On a global scale, this effectively reduces the value of labour-power across the board, as the value of each of the ‘necessities’ constituting the value of labour-power, falls. This process increases the labour-time devoted to surplus-value production, as a proportion of total labour-time (whilst this remains constant). The point at which surplus-value arises from labouring in the labour process is reached earlier as compared with before the new technology was introduced. The working day is re-divided on the basis of necessary labour-time, yielding more surplus-value in the process. But this is only one way of producing relative surplus-value. In an era of the intensiŽcation of capitalist globalisation, where technological innovation spreads more quickly than ever before, capitals have been seeking new ways of generating relative surplus-value. One of these has gained increasing sponsorship in recent years: the strategy of enhancing the quality of labour-power itself. It has the effect of reducing necessary labour. The technicist point regarding whether ‘really existing’ education and training policies actually have this effect is not the issue – though it is a key concern for mainstream education and training researchers. The essential point to grasp is that in contemporary capitalism there is a social drive to enhance the quality of human labour-power. This social drive, like all of capital’s social drives is inŽnite. It would not make logical sense within the perverted social universe of capital to suggest any absolute limit on the basis of the functioning of the system.160 However, in similar fashion to absolute surplus-value production, the inŽnite social drive to enhance the quality of human labour-power clashes with a number of practical considerations. First, labour-power development depends on co-operation – which expresses itself in the ‘problem of motivation’, an individual willingness to aid development of one’s own labour-power. Secondly, when pushed too far, we witness the phenomenon of ‘humans dropping like ies’: humans buckling under as they are subjected to concrete (and hence 160 Just as there are no logical limits to value production, a moral limit on what constitutes a ‘fair wage’ or ‘a good day’s work’ has no social validity within capital’s social universe. Marx and the Future of the Human • 149 necessarily limited) manifestations of an inŽnite social drive. Thus: depression (with no terminal point to ‘improvement’); various forms of stress and ill health; and so on. Thirdly, people may protest and effectively revolt against an impersonal social drive ‘manifesting’ itself as concrete social practice. Fourthly, those generating these social practices are themselves all too human, and hence also ‘capitalised’.161 As capitalised life-forms, the designers of concrete schemes that seek to nurture a social drive that is inŽnite can do this precisely because they have some afŽnity with these social practices that express capital’s social drives. Fifthly, as ‘we’ are capital too, it is possible for us to aesthetically and logically appreciate attempted concrete expressions of inŽnite social drives, whilst also being able to see the contradiction involved.162 This contradiction is the notion that an inŽnite social drive can be concretely expressed. The prospect is absurd, as it assumes inŽnite resources, time, labour (of a quality that is ‘inŽnitely good’) and effort to activate and effect the inŽnite social drive. The analysis of labour-power is a necessary step for viewing our development: the human as capital. By this token, this section is also a resource for the alien theses on the future of the human outlined in the next section. V. Alien theses There is . . . no need to search for alien intelligent life since it is already deep within us.163 This section outlines some theses that generate our future as human capital, which is an unstable future masquerading as never-ending story. This instability at the heart of capital’s social universe – the human as capital – is an optimistic outcome. Because we are forms of capital, we also incorporate its contradictions. It is our attempts to solve these contradictions – as they ow through our everyday lives – that provides the dynamic for leading us to conclude that the only real solution to these problems is to implode the social universe of capital through collective social force.164 On this basis, capital’s social universe can never be in ‘steady-state’ mode. As Harry Cleaver notes: 161 162 163 164 See Rikowski 1999a. See Rikowski 1999b. Ansell-Pearson 1997b, p. 182. See Rikowski 1999b. 150 • Glenn Rikowski Capital can never win, totally once and for all. It must tolerate the continued existence of an alien subjectivity which constantly threatens to destroy it.165 Thus, human liberation from capital does not depend on an ethic that rests on arguing things could be otherwise (and better),166 and that people ought to want the alternative – though this helps. Rather, we are driven (individually, socially and collectively), as capitalised life-forms, to seek solutions to our predicament. This is the social form of ‘agency’ in capitalist society – the attempt to break free of the social force that deeply possesses us: capital. The irony is that, as we are capital, then this enables us to think as and through capital – all the better to grasp its workings and its madness, and all the better to locate the weaknesses in its social domination. We use capital’s existence within us as a basis for its critique and dissolution. We turn ourselves against our selves. This way of envisioning capital’s social universe has important consequences for Marxist humanism. First, the struggle to be ‘human’ has been lost within capitalist society; we are becoming capital on an incremental (generation-bygeneration) scale. Secondly, Marxist humanism is a struggle against what we have become, and also against where we are headed: the posthuman as capitalised life-form. On the above account, we are driven into this struggle. Thus: Marxist humanism has real social existence as this struggle. It is not primarily a philosophy or ethic of the liberation of mankind (though it is also this); it is much more important. It expresses a necessary struggle. Thirdly, Marxist humanism holds out a promise: our collective and individual capacity (if not right) to deŽne the ‘human’, and also posthuman futures. What is the social form of the human? The following alien theses have been developed with this question in view. (i) If social energy (or force) constitutes the social universe of capital and value is its substance, then there is no externality. There is no ‘outside’ of this social universe. Our creation constitutes itself by its extension through our labour. Neither does an ‘inside’ pertain; the social universe of capital is all that there 165 166 Cleaver in Neary 1997, p. 25. As in Postone 1996. Marx and the Future of the Human • 151 is, as the sum of ‘the social’. Hence, every social phenomenon is already situated as an element within this social universe and assumes a particular social form on this basis. This applies to the ‘human’ too. There can be no exceptions, as this implies either externality beyond the social Želd of force (i.e. existence within another social universe), or a vacuum within the Želd (the mythical ‘spaces between the margins’ of postmodern folk law). The ‘human’ as a form of capital can be conveniently called human capital; the critique of human capital, therefore, becomes a critique of the form of the ‘human’ as given by capitalist society. (ii) The development of capitalism coincides with the capitalisation of humanity.167 Humans increasingly become something Other than human: a new life-form, a ‘new species’.168 This is because capital is a progressive movement towards totality. Its development on this basis ‘consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself’ for ‘this is historically how it becomes a totality’.169 This includes the ‘human’ – there are no exceptions. With the deepening and strengthening of capital as social force within its own social energy domain, we evolve as capitalist life-form: human capital. (iii) Labour-power’s transformation into labour within the labour process generates (surplus-)value. Labour-power ows throughout personhood; it is a unitary force. Labour-power’s social form in capitalist society is as human capital. Labour-power is the ip-side of human capital. Human capital has a double form: as the social form that labour-power assumes in capitalist society, and as the form of the ‘human’. The reduction of humanity to labour-power simultaneously expresses the practical reduction of the ‘human’ to capital. Labour-power ows throughout personhood, hence the person is capital.170 I am capital. 167 168 169 170 Rikowski 1999b, p. 50. Marx 1977a. Marx 1973a. See Rikowski 1999b. 152 • Glenn Rikowski (iv) Marx provides a further thesis for the capitalisation of the ‘human’. In the capitalist labour process, labour-power becomes part of capital: it is capitalised. As Marx notes, in the labour process the worker functions here as a special natural form of this capital, as distinct from the elements of capital that exist in the natural form of means of production.171 Furthermore, labourers develop themselves as labour-power within the labour process, but as labour-power of a speciŽc kind: human capital. There is a two-fold process going on when labourers labour within the capitalist labour process: the individu al not only develops his abilities in production but also expends them, uses them up in the act of production.172 . . . [And hence] . . . Universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, capacities, abilities, activities . . .173 As labour-power is inseparable from the person (and ows throughout personhood), then we have personhood capitalised, humans capitalised, human capital.174 Taking these theses together, then: Capital becomes a living social force within the human . . . and this is the basis of the transhuman; it is this that makes us ‘extra-human’. Capital is not just ‘out there’; we are it, it is us.175 We are already transhuman as a life-form within the social universe of capital. Human capital, then, can be viewed as the social form that labour-power assumes in capitalist society. Human capital acts as a virus on labour-power in contemporary society. On the analysis owing from the above theses, contradictions of capital course through our personhoods. The contradictions between value, use-value and exchange-value, are aspects of our personhoods as they are aspects of labour-power that are expressed through corresponding 171 172 173 174 175 Marx 1973b, pp. 455–6. Marx 1973b, p. 90. Marx 1973a, p. 163. Rikowski 1999b, pp. 70–1. Rikowski 1999b, p. 71. Marx and the Future of the Human • 153 aspects of labour.176 Hence, we are ‘screwed up’ by capital as we organise our skills, capacities, abilities and personal characteristics and attitudes and other labour-power attributes to meet the contradictory demands (such as quantitative/speed imperatives clashing against qualitative drives) inherent in value creation. To the extent that we think through these categories, we are doubly confused: for example, as in attempts to frame education and training policies that are ‘coherent’ – when no such coherence is possible.177 Our social constitution (or social being) is founded on a contradiction that plays even more havoc within our individual and collective existences than those founded on the basis of labour-power as human capital. This is the contradiction between our selves as labour and as capital. The ‘class relation’ is internal to personhood, as well as external to it. Our social existence as labour clashes daily with our social existence (our constitution) as capital. We have a double life, two ways of existing (with their related and antagonistic emotions, drives, desires etc.) that clash within our personhoods. This practical dialectic blights our lives, whilst simultaneously driving us on individually and collectively to deal with the everyday problems generated by it. The only solution is to dissolve the relation, but the forces that it conjures up within our personhoods provides a dynamic, exceeding any ‘moral’ arguments for socialism, that indicates why such a dramatic dissolution through collective action is urgent for us. Class, on the analysis advanced here is: the capital relation: the dynamic, contradictory, antagonistic relation that generates and maintains the social universe of capital.178 Social class is the capital-labour relation that is internal to personhood, as well as structuring relations between people. We are divided against ourselves, and within our selves. What is required to articulate all this is a psychology of capital, a psychology of the human condition in a society dominated by capital. 176 Rikowski 2002, pp. 187–93. Basically, the value aspect of labour-power refers to the capacity to labour in relation to its quantitative element (i.e. speed and intensity). The use value aspect of labour-power pinpoints the qualitative element (consideration to the quality of labour and product). The exchange aspect of labour-power rests on the formal equality of labour, and this is established on the basis of abstract labour that is the substance of value. 177 See Rikowski 2001b. 178 Rikowski 2001c, p. 14. 154 • Glenn Rikowski Finally, as labour in capital, we incorporate two further labour-power aspects within our selves: the subjective and the collective.179 The former is labourpower in its will-determined moment, the labourer’s relative willingness to transform her labour-power into actual labour in the labour process. To the extent that this subordination occurs, the labourer becomes capital and the other labour-power aspects and attributes are developed as capital in their Žrst moments of social existence within the person.180 Yet our social constitution as labour against capital forms a social limit to our becoming capital, as we strive to better our lives (individually and collectively) on the basis of antithetical drives whose realisation implies practical challenges to capital (for example, higher wages, better working conditions etc.). It also forms a limit to the subordination of our wills under capital. The collective aspect of labour-power can be viewed as an ‘agglomeration and amalgamation of the individual labour-powers of workers set in motion for capital’.181 As Marx indicated, this: collective power of labour, its characteristic as a social force, is therefore the collective power of capital.182 As labour can be viewed as a collective force, so can labour-power, notes Marx. It can be viewed as an ‘accumulation of labour-powers’.183 This is where the quality of co-operation between labourers and their labour-powers is to the fore. Empirically, this is reected in recruitment studies that point towards worker co-operation, people ‘Žtting-in’ with other workers – which are held to impact positively on productivity. The focus on the capital relation, labour-power and labour-power aspects through the work of Marx has the potential to tell us more about the ‘future of the human’ than any whiz-bang transhumanist theses based on scientiŽc and technological developments. Consideration of the former group of phenomena opens up the possibilities for a ‘real psychology’ of the ‘human’, which is also a psychology of capital. Such a psychology has yet to be written. Exclusive focus on the technologies and science that seemingly generate the ‘transhuman condition’ avoids the social forces that set limits to what ‘the 179 180 181 182 183 Rikowski 1996, and 2002. Rikowski 1996, p. 8. Ibid. Marx 1973a, p. 585. Ibid. Marx and the Future of the Human • 155 human’ can become. Thus, the fantasies of those such a Natasha Vita-More (multiple sex organs, leopard fur on our arms etc.) are abstracted from the social universe in which we Žnd ourselves: the social universe of capital. Whilst choice, self-expression and fun are emphasised by some transhumanists, they hide their heads in sand when it comes to the social form of the human in capitalist society, and what implications such a society and such a human form might hold for the ‘future of the human’. Some critics of transhumanism such as Bill Joy point to certain dangers of realising the mainstream transhuman future.184 There is the likely high percentage of cloned humans that would die early or have defects, the possibilities that nanobots might run amok and turn everything into ‘grey goo’, or the introduction of new mental illnesses through inserting computer chips in our brains, and many more frightening possibilities. Francis Fukuyama, meanwhile, worries about the ethical status of the ‘posthuman’, our claims to rights and dignity when we attain such a state and the possibilities for authoritarian politics that the new technologies open up (such as selective breeding, life prolongation and so on).185 Of course, there may be other sorts of limits to the realisation of the posthuman – scientiŽc, technical, and economic (some human ‘improvements’ might just cost too much) – as well as those grounded in the nature of capital’s social universe. However, an exclusive focus on the feasibility of the relevant scientiŽc and technological generators of the posthuman would severely limit the critique of transhumanism. Such an analysis, by itself, would mirror the technological determinism that is one of the weaknesses of transhumanist theory. In avoiding a social analysis of the form of the ‘human’ in contemporary society, such an analysis would give succour to the closure of the ‘future of the human’. It would forestall and cloud the uncovering of the dynamic that can offer us possibilities for a way out of capital’s universe and hence possibilities for a form of the human that is not-capitalised. This dynamic is the interplay of social forces, drives and contradictions that constitute the human in contemporary society, a dynamic that can at least point towards a ‘human’ condition beyond capital, as well as indicating how we labour in and against capital. This dynamic, or dialectic, that is internal to personhood, does not just imply that resistance to capital is deŽned into social being. It implies that conformity to capital’s imperatives 184 185 See Joy 2000. Fukuyama 2002. 156 • Glenn Rikowski (through the value, use-value and exchange-value aspects of labour-power) is also incorporated within personhood. The class struggle is within us, as well as everywhere else where our labour has any effectivity – that is, everywhere we know. This is the openness at the heart of the perspective on the ‘human’ outlined in this article: resistance or conformity to capital’s imperatives? The choice is there every microsecond. On the other hand, it might appear that my rendering of the ‘human’ (or transhuman) condition is more horriŽc, more gloomy and doom-ridden than anything the transhumanists throw up. Some readers may Žnd the suggestion ‘we are capital’ offensive and repugnant, and retreat into notions of dignity, autonomy or some ‘rock-solid’ values, or into beliefs in the sanctity of Humanity. Others might think the suggestion simply in bad taste. But one of the strengths of transhumanist writings is that they pinpoint many of the weaknesses of our current situation as humans: death, disease, and gender and race inequality (these are redundant if we choose sexes, skin colours and other physical features) are key examples. It is also possible to develop transhuman principles, as Max More has done.186 However, within the social universe of capital, all moral principles – including More’s – have no social validity.187 Values have virtual existence, as ‘justice’, ‘dignity’ and other values cannot have any substance in capital’s realm, and so they exist only as the struggles to establish their possibility. It is value that determines our ‘social worth’ in capital’s universe; the value of the labour-time that goes into the social production of our labour-powers Žxes our real ‘worth’ as individuals. This point indicates the signiŽcance of education and training in contemporary capitalism, and other institutions involved in the social production of labour-power. The labour of teachers, trainers and developers of labour-power determines our individual worth qua individuals. So, people do not have equal social worth in capitalist society, though in theory it is possible.188 But this point may horrify some even more than the notion that ‘we are capital’! The horror works both ways, fortunately. The horror that is our social existence nurtures sickening dreams for ourselves as capital, especially those of us that push the ‘capital’ aspect of ourselves to the forefront of our lives. That is, for those that can be readily recognised as ‘representatives’ of capital in their everyday identiŽcations. For: 186 187 188 As in More 1999. See Rikowski 2000a; and Rikowski in McLaren and Rikowski 2001. This theoretical possibility is discussed in Rikowski 2000a. Marx and the Future of the Human • 157 [The] oppositional forces within personhood ensure openness within the social universe of capital; a universe that moves and expands on the foundation of the clashing of drives and forces within its totality. This openness does not exist within postmodernist aporias, or in some social spaces ‘in the margins’, or in the borders of this social universe. There are no such spaces, in my view. There is nowhere to hide. The social universe of capital is all that there is. Rather, the openness results from the clash of social forces and drives. . . . [And] there is one [social force] that has the capacity to destroy the whole basis of the social universe of capital. This is the collective social force of the working class acting on a global scale to destroy capitalist social relations, to annihilate capital itself, and this is the communist impulse at its most vital, when there is a massive movement of social force and energy. The capitalist social universe, whose substance is value, implodes when this social force to move human history on from prehistory generates sufŽcient pressure. In the routine running and expansion of the social universe of capital, this force is suppressed – it only has virtual existence. But it is our hope for the future.189 Conclusion: the future of the human Marx’s writings open up the future of the human. Within the closed (but ever-expanding) social universe of capital, the future of the human is already cast – preŽgured on the basis of existing social relations. This future (and this present) Žrst appears as horror; the ‘human’ possessed by capital – with no escape possible, as capital is everywhere. However, the horror works both ways; the potential for awareness of our predicament as capital also increases historically. In this awareness, hope resides, for the potentiality to loathe what we are becoming increases the more we become un-human. But hope is not enough. We may hope that critical analyses of society can expose the gap between what is and what might be. 190 We can hope that the obvious social inequalities and poverty throughout global capital Žre enough anger to burn up the source of those inequalities and impoverishment. We may hope that some emerging cyborg entity preŽgures the socialist being of the future. However, unless there are possibilities for pinpointing a dynamic 189 190 Rikowski, in McLaren and Rikowski 2001, p. 14. As in Postone 1996. 158 • Glenn Rikowski incorporated within our own personhoods that drives us towards breaking out of the labyrinth of capital towards socialism, then these hopes may be all that we are left with. This article makes inroads into uncovering such a dynamic through and exploration of the ‘human’ and the transhuman in the context of the writings of Marx. Our social constitution as both capital and labour (which also incorporates the contradictions within and between these) drives us on to seek solutions to our own condition – but with no guarantee of success. The invasive social force within us – capital – could win out. This article has explored the social form of the ‘human’ in capitalist society. Capital is an invasive social force that ‘possesses’ the human, and the intensity of this non-human force to permeate our lives, our souls, increases historically. We are becoming capitalised, which is the becoming of capital within us. Secondly, the argument shows that labour-power – that unique, living, yet most abominable of commodities – is the primary conduit through which capital ows into our personhoods. The form that labour-power takes in capitalist society is human capital, and as labour-power ows throughout our personhoods, so too does capital in its ‘human’ form. Thirdly, in this sense, the ‘transhuman’ already exists; we are already transhuman as human capital. Fourthly, as social entities, we are therefore constituted in such a way that we incorporate the contradictions internal to capital and the violent dialectic between capital and labour within our being. We are inherently unstable, messed-up social beings. The only real solution to our condition is the collective dissolution of that social force which powers our sickness: capital and its social universe based on value. Fifthly, our instability and our experiences as living contradiction-ridden lives in a world where only value, rather than values, has social validity, means that we are driven to constantly seek all kinds of ‘solutions’ to our condition and the problems of everyday life. We may also nurture hopes and fantasies that fall well short of what is required to truly make us the ‘new species’, a form of human life where selfcreation is unfettered by the iron cage of capital. For humans, notes Cyril Smith: create themselves by simultaneously creating not only the physical conditions of their own life, but also the social forms within which this creation occurs.191 191 Smith 2002, p. 14 – emphasis added. Marx and the Future of the Human • 159 In capitalist society, the social form of the human erects barriers to human self-creation and development. The development of the ‘human’ as capital intensiŽes with capitalist social development, and this process becomes increasingly obvious, if we have the courage to see and act on it. Finally, in acting on this realisation and effectively setting about changing both society and ourselves as currently constituted we open up ‘the future of the human’. We open up what we can become, and possibilities for what Cyril Smith calls ‘living humanly’ with each other.192 Transhumanists might hold this article has treated them very badly. Transhumanism and posthuman thought has been a vehicle for thinking through problems of the ‘human’. Furthermore, it has been argued that transhumanism avoids analysis of the social force that invades the human whilst also setting limits to what the trans/human is and can become; it avoids capital and the constitution of the ‘human’ in capitalist society. Thus, as a result, transhumanism engenders dreams and fantasies. Posthuman politics remains abstract. These apparently bold thinkers shy away from the impossibility of many of the futures they envisage, whilst under-analysing a transhuman future dominated by capital. In the event, they misread history and fail to adequately ground their own project. Perhaps what the transhumanist movement really needs, therefore, is a project based on Marxist theory that can open up the future in ways that excite transhumanists. A Marxist transhumanism suggests itself here, together with a posthuman politics based on destroying the social force that blocks the emergence of cuddly forms of the posthuman: capital. Perhaps this article, therefore, has done some service to the transhumanist movement, but the ball is now in the transhumanist court. The style and forms of argumentation of this article have not conformed to standard Marxist exposition and writing. But I would argue that the messy twists and turns of the text were necessary to unfold the ‘horror within’. For me, taking such risks is part of what research in critical Marxist theory is all about. Meanwhile, the potential horrors presented by the trans/posthumanists as compared with us as capital seem like Dr. Who as compared with The Exorcist. Gnat-sized robots, microscopic gyroscopes, television beamed directly onto your retina. This may sound like a grocery list for a crazed sci-Ž visionary. 192 Smith 1996, p. 100. 160 • Glenn Rikowski But all these projects are in the works today, thanks to an emerging chip technology known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).193 Be afraid, be very afraid – but not of this! References Alesky, Mark 2000, ‘Cyborg 1.0: Kevin Warwick Outlines His Plan to Become One with His Computer’, Wired, February: 145–8. Alexander, Brian 2000, ‘Don’t Die, Stay Pretty: Introducing the Ultrahuman Makeover’, Wired, January: 178–88. Ansell-Pearson, Keith 1997a, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, London: Routledge. Ansell-Pearson, Keith 1997b, ‘Viroid Life: On Machines, Technics and Evolution’, in Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, London: Routledge. Ansell-Pearson, Keith 1999, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze, London: Routledge. Arney, Kat 1998, ‘Feeling Chipper?’ The Guardian (Higher Education), 22 September. Barbrook, Richard 2002, ‘The Regulation of Liberty: Free Speech, Free Trade and Free Gifts on the Net’, The Commoner, May, no. 4, at: www.commoner.org.uk/ 04barbrook.pdf Barbrook, Richard and Andy Cameron 1996, ‘The Californian Ideology’, Science As Culture, 26, 6 (Part 1): 44–72. Bostrom, Nick 1998, Predictions from Philosophy? How Philosophers Could Make Themselves Useful. Last updated 19th September at: www.hedweb.com/nickb/predict.htm Bruno, Lee 2000, ‘Biotech Redux’, Red Herring (Biotech BrieŽng), April, 77: 262–4. Bukatman, Scott 1993, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press. Burch, Greg 1998, ‘Transhumanism’, June (506 E.E.), at: http://users.aol.com/ gburch3/thext.html Burch, Greg and Tihamer Toth-Fejel 1999, ‘A Dialogue Concerning Transhumanist and Extroprian Ethics (Dialogue 1)’ at: www.extropy.org/eo/articles/dialog1.jsp Callard, Felicity 1998, ‘The Body in Theory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16: 387–400. Campbell, Jeremy 1999 ‘Computer Chips in the Brain Will Make You Smarter’, London Evening Standard, 7 December: 17. Cartwright, Nancy and Peter Goodfellow, Steve Jones, Geoff Mulgan, Robert Plomin, Steven Rose, and James D. Watson 2000, ‘Round Table: The Meaning of the Genome’, Prospect, October: 24–30. 193 Leonard 2000, p. 162. Marx and the Future of the Human • 161 Davis, Erik 1998, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, London: Serpent’s Tail. FM-2030 undated, ‘What Are Some Highlights of New Ideological Directions in the Coming Years?’ (6 pages), at: www.aleph.se/Trans/Intro/transhuman.txt Fukuyama, Francis 2002, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, London: ProŽle Books. Gibson, Beatrice 2000, ‘Download Your Brain’, limb by limb, March/April, Issue 3: 26–30. Guerrera, Francesco and David Firn 2000, ‘European Biotechnology Caught in a Trap’, Financial Times, 27 September: 29. Halberstam, Judith and Ira Livingstone 1995, ‘Introduction: Posthuman Bodies’, in Posthuman Bodies, edited by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone, Bloomington: University of Indianapolis Press. Haraway, Donna 1991, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2000, Empire, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Hayles, Katherine 1999, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Joy, Bill 2000, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’, Wired, April: 238–62. Kay, Geoff and James Mott 1982, Political Order and the Law of Labour, London: Macmillan. Kurzweil, Ray 1999, The Age of the Spiritual Machines: How We Will Live, Work and Think in the New Age of Intelligent Machines, London: Phoenix. Land, Nick 1998, ‘Cybergothic’, in Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Posthuman Pragmatism, edited by Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric Cassidy, London: Routledge. Lazzarato, Maurizio 1996, ‘Immaterial Labor’, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leonard, Andrew 2000, ‘As the MEMS Revolution Takes Off, Small Is Getting Bigger Every Day’, Wired, January: 162–4. Lewis, Jeff 1998, ‘Digitopians: Transculturalism, Computers and the Politics of Hope’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1, 3: 373–89. Lewontin, Richard 1995, ‘The Dream of the Human Genome’, in Politics and the Human Body: Assault on Dignity, edited by Jean Elshtain and J. Timothy Cloyd, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Lowe, Donald 1995, The Body in Late-Capitalist USA, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press. Marx, Karl 1969 [1863], Theories of Surplus-Value – Part I, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, Karl 1973a [1858], Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl 1973b [1857], ‘General Introduction’ (to the Grundrisse). Translated by Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl 1977a [1844b], Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Moscow: Progress Publishers. 162 • Glenn Rikowski Marx, Karl 1977b [1867a], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume I, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, Karl 1977c [1867b], Preface to the First German Edition of Capital – Volume I, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, Karl 1978 [1878], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume II, Harmondsworth: Penguin & New Left Review. Marx, Karl 1979 [1866], Results of the Immediate Process of Production, Addendum to Capital, Vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl 1992 [1844a], ‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’, in Karl Marx: Early Writings, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin Classics & New Left Review. McLaren, Peter and Glenn Rikowski 2001, ‘Pedagogy for Revolution Against Education for Capital: An E-Dialogue on Education in Capitalism Today’, Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice, 4, 1: http://eserver.org/clogic/4–1/ mclaren&rikowski.html More, Max 1994, ‘On Becoming Posthuman’ at: www.maxmore.com/becoming.htm More, Max 1999, ‘The Extropian Principles (Version 3.0): A Transhumanist Declaration’ at: www.extropy.org/extprn3.htm More, Max undated, ‘What Do “Transhu man” and “Posthuman” Mean?’ at: www.idom.com/~arkuat/exi/faq/transpost.html Morris, Brian 1991, Western Conceptions of the Individual, Oxford: Berg. Neary, Michael 1997, Youth, Training and the Training State: The Real History of Youth Training in the Twentieth Century, London: Macmillan. Neary, Michael 2002, ‘Labour Moves: A Critique of Social Movement Unionism’, in The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work, edited by Ana Dinerstein and Michael Neary, Aldershot: Ashgate. Neary, Michael and Glenn Rikowski 2000, ‘The Speed of Life: The SigniŽcance of Karl Marx’s Concept of Socially Necessary Labour-Time’, paper presented at the British Sociological Association Annual Conference, University of York, 17–20 April. Neary, Michael and Glenn Rikowski 2002, ‘Time and Speed in the Social Universe of Capital’, in Social Constructions of Time: Structure and Process in Work and Everyday Life, edited by Graham Crow and Sue Heath, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ochert, Ayala 2000, ‘A Germ of an Idea Leads to GM People’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 January: 22–3. Olson, Sander 2002, ‘Interview with Max More’, Extropy: Journal of Transhumanist Solutions, July, at: www.extropy.org/ideas/journal/current/2002–07–04.html Ouroboros 1999, ‘The Transtopian Principles, Version 2.2’, 18 November at: http://members.wbs.net/homepages/c/r/y/cryogenic4life/index2.html Parker, Martin 1998, ‘Judgement Day: Cyborganization, Humanism and Postmodern Ethics’, Organization, 5, 4: 503–18. Platt, Charles 2000, ‘Clear the Line, I’m Sending Myself Right Now’, Wired, January: 205–10. Postone, Moishe 1996, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Regis, Ed 1990, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx and the Future of the Human • 163 Ridley, Matt 2000, ‘The Genome on CD’, a CD by Prospect, October. Rikowski, Glenn 1990, ‘The Recruitment Process and Labour-Power’, unpublished paper, Division of Humanities & Modern Languages, Epping Forest College, Loughton, Essex, July. Rikowski, Glenn 1996, ‘Apprenticeship and the Use-Value Aspect of Labour-Power’, paper prepared for the ESRC Seminar Series on Apprenticeship, Nene College, Northampton, 31 May. Rikowski, Glenn 1999a, ‘Nietzsche, Marx and Mastery: The Learning Unto Death’, in Apprenticeship: Towards a New Paradigm of Learning, edited by Patrick Ainley and Helen Rainbird, London: Kogan Page. Rikowski, Glenn 1999b, ‘Education, Capital and the Transhuman’, in Postmodernism in Educational Theory: Education and the Politics of Human Resistance, edited by Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, Mike Cole and Glenn Rikowski, London: Tufnell Press. Rikowski, Glenn 2000a, ‘Education and Social Justice within the Social Universe of Capital’, paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Day Conference on ‘Approaching Social Justice: Theoretical Frameworks for Practical Purposes’, Faculty of Education, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Hall, 10 April. Rikowski, Glenn 2000b, ‘That Other Great Class of Commodities: Repositioning Marxist Educational Theory’, paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Cardiff University, 9 September, Session 10.21. Rikowski, Glenn 2000c, ‘Messing with the Explosive Commodity: School Improvement, Educational Research and Labour-Power in the Era of Global Capitalism’, paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Cardiff University, 7 September, Session 3.4. Rikowski, Glenn 2001a, The Battle in Seattle: Its SigniŽcance for Education London: Tufnell Press. Rikowski, Glenn 2001b, ‘Education for Industry: A Complex Technicism’, Journal of Education and Work, 14, 1: 29–49. Rikowski, Glenn 2001c, ‘After the Manuscript Broke Off: Thoughts on Marx, Social Class and Education’, paper presented at the British Sociological Association Education Study Group Meeting, King’s College London, 23 June. Rikowski, Glenn 2002, ‘Fuel for the Living Fire: Labour-Power!’, in The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work, edited by Ana Dinerstein and Michael Neary, Aldershot: Ashgate. Saffo, Paul 1998, The Lifeform Generation at: www.saffo.org/elife.html Smith, Cyril 1996, Marx at the Millennium, London: Pluto Press. Smith, Cyril 2002, ‘Karl Marx and Human Self-Creation’, in The Cyril Smith Internet Archive, at: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smithcyril/works/alteration/ index.htm Stelarc 1998, ‘From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images of Posthuman Entities’, in Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Posthuman Pragmatism, edited by Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric Cassidy, London: Routledge. Tattersall, Ian 2000, ‘Will We Keep Evolving?’, Time, 155, 14: 73–5. Tester, Keith 1995, The Inhuman Condition, London: Routledge. Transcedo 1998, ‘What Is Transhumanism?’, Dutch Transhumanist Society, 20 June at: www.educa.com/transcedo/etrans.htm Trigg, Roger 1988, Ideas of Human Nature: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. 164 • Glenn Rikowski Ust, Daniel undated, ‘What Is Posthumanism?’ at: www.teleport.com/~jaheriot/ posthum.htm Virilio, Paul 1995, The Art of the Motor, translated by Julie Rose, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vita-More, Natasha undated, ‘Ageless Thinking: Creating Positive Transhuman Attitude’ at: www.aleph.se/Trans/Individual/Life/ageless.html Williams, Mark 2000, ‘Exploring the Nature Within Us in the Century of Biology’, Red Herring, September, 82: 106–8.