Stalin: A Man With a Machine

Extract

If (hypothesized Aristotle) if but the tool could do its own work, even as the automatons of Daedalus and the walking tripods of Hephaestus, then there would be no need of slaves and ‘prentices. And if (thought Antiparos of the water mill) we go on inventing things like this we shall certainly liberate our poor slaving women and return to the Golden Age. And Marx (who mistook the plutarchy born of the Reformation for Christianity) caustically observed that the ingenious Antiparos knew no political economy; and Aristotle not being a Christian could not conceive the intricacies of value-breeding process and other mysteries of industrial capitalism. Actually, the work of the machine, which according to Proudhon should be a protest of the ‘genius of industry against humiliating and murderous toil,’ is better described by the words which Ure applies to a modern factory, ‘A vast automaton composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force.’ Ure’s ‘benignant power of steam’ (quoted sardonically by Kautsky) does not extend its benign influence beyond its true lord and master, the capitalist (whose beaming benevolence pervades the whole working world).