Matheson Workshop—Michael Hardt: Marx On Machines
Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author with Antonio Negri of several books, including Empire (Harvard UP, 2000). His most recent book is The Subversive Seventies (Oxford UP, 2023).
The first task of the workshop is to understand how Marx regarded the introduction of industrial technologies into production, how, for instance, the relation between subject and object was inverted, and how capital wielded machines as weapons against rebellious workers. Our second task is to project forward Marx's analyses of 19th-century industrial machines into the context of our contemporary productive technologies and evaluate their utility. The passage from Capital may be more useful for the former and that from the Grundrisse for the latter.