Capitalist Use of Machinery

* Article: Panzieri, Raniero. “The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the ‘Objectivists’.” In Outlines of a Critique of Technology, edited by Phil Slater, translated by Monika Reinfelder, 44–68. London: Ink Links; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980.

URL = https://libcom.org/library/capalist-use-machinery-raniero-panzieri

Original Publication: Panzieri, Raniero. “Sull’uso capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo.” Quaderni Rossi, no. 1 (1961): 53–72.

Summary

Panzieri’s thesis is that technology under capitalism is not a neutral instrument waiting to be liberated. It is a form of capital. The left’s faith in technological progress and planning as inherently progressive is therefore deeply misguided—and the working class must fight not for a different use of the machines, but against the capitalist rationality embedded in the machines themselves.

DeepSeek, prompted by Michel Bauwens:

Raniero Panzieri’s essay is a foundational text of Italian operaismo (workerism). Its central thesis is a direct attack on a widespread belief on the left: that technology is a neutral tool that can simply be “taken over” and used for the benefit of the working class once socialists gain political power.

Panzieri argues the opposite. Technology, under capitalism, is not neutral. It is already shaped by—and inseparable from—the capitalist relations of production. As he puts it, “the relations of production are within the productive forces”. This means the form and content of science, machinery, and work organization are intrinsically determined by their exploitative class character. There is no such thing as a “capitalist use” of machinery that could be separated from a “neutral” machinery underneath; the machinery itself is capitalist.

* The Critique of “Objectivism”

Panzieri targets what he calls the “objectivism” of the orthodox left. This objectivism takes several forms: the belief that a democratic revolution must come first, that capitalism will automatically collapse in a final crisis, and—most importantly—that technological development and economic planning are neutral processes that inherently move society away from capitalism. Panzieri saw this as a dangerous illusion. It led the left and trade unions to embrace “modern management methods” and corporate planning, blind to the fact that these were new instruments of capitalist control over the workforce.

* Reading Marx Against the Grain

Panzieri goes back to Marx’s Capital to recover a critical understanding of industrial development. He follows Marx’s account of how large-scale cooperation, based on artisanal labor, was transformed by machinery. Machinery appropriates the individual knowledge and skills of the artisan worker and transfers them onto a mechanical apparatus. The productivity that results from this cooperation and “applied science” appears as the productivity and power of capital, not of the workers.

The worker, as a seller of labor-power, enters the production process as an individual. But once inside, cooperation—the reciprocal relation of workers—begins, and at that moment they “no longer belong to themselves.” They are incorporated into capital. As Panzieri quotes Marx: “As cooperators, members of a working organism, they themselves are no more than a particular mode of existence of capital”.

* The Political Stakes

For Panzieri, the working class is not a passive victim of technological change. It has the power to initiate struggle and force change on the capitalist structure—a thesis that underpinned the workerism of the 1960s. But this struggle cannot be based on the illusion that the existing machinery can simply be repurposed. The point is not to “use” capitalist machinery differently, but to recognize that the machinery itself embodies capitalist command, and to organize against that command from within the production process.