This article goes through the different terminologies in political economy and labour processes with regards to technology, technics, and automation and mechanisation. The differences are presented based on a Marxian framework. Not distinguishing the difference between those two is it usual blind spot in political economy and occasionally and labour processes. To address this point, this article revisits two significant but underappreciated scholars. Ramtin (1991) and Frison (1988) are the two scholars who provided some crucial insights in their distinction. For Ramtin it is some sort of ‘tangibility’ criterion, where he distinguishes ‘technics’ as methods of production and organisation of labour, representing an objectification of human productive knowledge and experience, while ‘technology’ includes the above, but in a tangible form. For Frison (1988) though, it is the use of ‘the labour-power’ criterion, where ‘technics’ includes the analysis of labour-power as a social actor, while ‘technology’ as an analysis of the relationship between the instrument of labour and labour-power but abstracting from the latter. In other words, one cannot critically examine aspects of the labour processes if they do not have labour power as a reference point in their analysis.
Bearing labour power in mind, this article starts with the concepts of mechanisation an automation to reach the narrative of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR). While mainstream economic analysis does not distinguish between those two, other alternative approaches do. Several criteria have been put forward with regards to what distinguishes those, this article is going through the criteria of ‘mental-manual’ labour, of the ‘degree of control’ over the labour processes, of the ‘compartmentmentability of information’ in labour processes, and concludes with the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) both as a reality to happen, as a narrative and as a capitalist wishful thinking. This means that the 4IR that at in its core, advocates for the fusion of physical, digital and biological is in fact a consolidation of technics and technologies that emerged during the centuries of the social division of labour to one single employee; this ‘augmented workforce’ that the World Economic Forum (with Schwab, 2016) and the McKinsey (2022) corporation envisage is bringing the previously compartmentalised labours (physical and digital) together with aspects of nature(biological) operationable to the production process. This business plan and long-term strategy encompassing futuristic technics and technologies although powerful instruments of 'liberation' from and domination of ‘domination’ over labour are not independent of capital production as the self-expansion of value. In fact, they are seen as the exodus to the productivity crisis that capitalism faces, and they still entail the progressive deepening of the inherent contradictions of capital itself as self-expanding value.
Citation
Papagiannaki, E. (2024, April). 4th Industrial Revolution and the fusion of digital, physical and biological: A response to failing labour processes. Presented at International Labour Processes Conference (ILPC) 2024, Göttingen, Germany
Presentation Conference Type
Presentation / Talk
Conference Name
International Labour Processes Conference (ILPC) 2024
