You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, then thought better of it.

Our question for our episode 361 is something like, how does mechanization affect labor? This is our final installment in our series on Karl Marx, finishing up some bits from Das Capital and considering his fragment on machines from 1858.

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This is Mark Linson-Myer, not any more radicalized than I was, despite having spent this much time with Marx in Medicine, Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin, absurdly assuming that I share something in common with the capitalist in Austin, Texas.

This is Wes Alwyn confronting my commodities in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This is Dylan Casey contemplating the free association of free men and their labor power in

Madison, Wisconsin.

All right.

So we are in the middle, or toward the end of chapter one of Das Kapital on the commodity.

And then we are going to move.

There is a later chapter in Das Kapital on machinery, and I reviewed it going into here,

but I think this fragment on machines really gets to the core.

We'll give us plenty to talk about in how we want to say labor theory of value.

That was the primary thing we covered last time.

All the value comes from labor.

Well, what happens when you introduce a machine?

It seems like that should, can't that just replace labor?

Can't that, I mean, yes, it took labor to make the machine.

Anyway, so we'll talk about why then introducing machines doesn't actually improve the lot of the laborer in capitalism, et cetera.

According to Marks, really, really historically it did.

Yes.

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