Capitalism and Human Labor
Source
* Article: Technology as the Analogical Extension and Resurrection of the Body: A Normative Historical Materialist Account. Ben Suriano.
Subsection: A Critical Analysis of Capital as Social Formation of a Subhuman Body
(This is from a draft article, received in September 2026; not yet publicly available at the time)
Discussion
A rewrite by DeepSeek, prompted by Michel Bauwens, inspired by a section of Ben Suriano's draft essay:
Main idea:
Suriano argues that Marx’s critique of capitalism is not just about money, profit, or factories. It is also about what capitalism does to the human body and to human social life. Technology, in his view, should be understood as an “extension” of the body—like tools and organs that help people become fuller, freer persons. But capitalism turns technology against that purpose. Instead of helping the body flourish, capitalist technology deforms it and hides how it is really a social relationship.
Suriano’s section argues that capitalism reverses technology’s proper role. Instead of helping the body become a fuller, freer person, capital deforms the body into a fragment and an appendage of machines. Capitalist accumulation requires not only material misery but also ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation. Even when capitalism improves health, education, or life expectancy, it often does so mainly to produce more flexible organs for capital—hiding the deformation at a higher level of social life.
1. Capitalism’s first “machine” was the human body.
Suriano says the first truly capitalist machine was not the clock or steam engine. It was the human body turned into “abstract labor power”—a pure work-machine that can be bought and sold. Before capitalism, many people worked communally, owned their tools, and made things for social use. Capitalism needed a long, violent process—primitive accumulation—to force craft workers and communities to sell their labor and give up control of their tools.
2. Capital first extended work time, then reorganized work itself.
At first, capitalists could only get more surplus value by making people work longer hours. But that hit a limit. So they began taking control of the labor process itself. They divided work into tiny, repetitive tasks, deskilled workers, and made labor cheaper and easier to replace. This happened even before large-scale industrial machinery. Sweatshops, plantations, and early factories were already “mechanical” in how they disciplined bodies.
3. This was a kind of “primitive digitization.”
Work was broken into small, measurable units—like digits or numbers. Workers became interchangeable parts. Their bodies were trained to perform mechanical motions rather than develop sensuous, creative, and social abilities. Society itself became mediated by abstract, commodified labor.
4. This changed how people experience reality.
Once labor is commodified, people begin to see the world mainly in quantities and exchange value. Objects matter because they can be priced and exchanged, not because they have qualitative, sensuous, communal meaning. Space and time feel mechanical and repetitive. Beauty, love, and deeper social bonds are not gone, but people lose the bodily and social organs needed to access them.
5. Mechanization atrophies the senses and intellect.
Marx says mechanized labor “deprives work of all content.” The body’s senses, muscles, and nervous system are numbed. Intellectual life becomes one-dimensional calculation—useful for capital, but cut off from richer human ends. Science and intellect are turned into powers of capital over labor.
6. This is why Suriano rejects the “accelerationist” reading of Marx.
Some readers of Marx’s Grundrisse hope capitalism will automatically lead to full automation, free labor from capital, and create a progressive “general intellect.” Suriano says Marx’s Capital is more sober. Machines do not simply automate labor away or liberate people. They are built by imitating and improving the prior division of labor—not mainly for productivity, but to extract more surplus value and profit.
7. The machine is really an extension of a broken, fractionalized body.
Following Babbage, Suriano says capitalists subdivide labor so they can measure exactly how much labor time each task requires. The machine then becomes a more efficient embodiment of those atomized units of power. It is a “calculator” of surplus value. Industrial machinery does not just replace workers; it extends and deepens the deformation of the social body. It makes labor cheaper, more controllable, and more disposable.
8. Capitalism captures human powers and turns them into capital’s power.
Marx says capitalist industry may release workers from some old forms of dependence, but it recreates division in a worse form: the worker becomes a “living appendage of the machine.” The productive forces of social labor become the productive power of capital. Products confront workers as “Capital.” Workers are bound to capital more firmly than Prometheus was bound to the rock.