DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK REVIEW - THE AUTOMATIC FETISH by Beverley Best

This is the worst kind of search engine optimisation

If you're a first time reader, you may know that one of my relatively long running series on this blog is 'Marx and the Death of the Author'. For better and for worse, part of the trick with engaging with it will inevitably be engaging with Marx. Can't literarily kill the author if you've not read the author. The trick with engaging with Marx, however, is he wrote in 19th century German, which was then translated to 19th century English, both of which was done, naturally and with necessity, with no concern given to the 21st century English reader. Language, of course, evolves for any manner of reasons, some of it technical (the explosion of abbreviations in the 19th and 20th century was due to printing presses and telegraph companies charging by the letter necessitating the shortening of common phrases, today phrases like 'unalive' become common parlance to avoid automated moderating software), some of it due to politics ('queer' in 19th century English being a phrase to denote something odd, by the mid 20th century becoming a derogatory slur to deny homosexual and non-gender confirming persons humanity, by the early 21st century reclaimed by the queer community to be an inclusive phrase for people outside heteronormative culture, also back to being used to mean something odd like in the late 19th century). Nonetheless, language is an evolving creature, something that can be a struggle when you're picking up a text nearly two centuries after publication, and when said text has been read and interpreted by God knows how many authors and activists, both in good faith and bad in the intervening two centuries.

If there's one thing to pick up from my M&DoTA series, it's that there are a few critical fundamental sticking point of Marx you should pick up, understand, and commit to memory as useful tools to help you analyse political economy, and then the rest is up to whatever additional research and context you pick up giving you room to 'kill the author' and establish your own meaning of these ideas, and stand on the shoulders of giants. In the history of PE, there are few giants bigger than Marx. I'd like to consider my work a proverbial ladder to help you get on these fairly crowded shoulders, and maybe even some nice safety rails to prevent you getting pushed back off again. Unless you're one of those bad faith actors, in which case I'll push you off myself.

One of those key points of Marx is the abstraction of the value of labour. This has become particularly relevant in the age of the 'great AI con'. It is this point of Marx's Capital volumes I and III that Best focuses on. If a critique of me you have is that I don't quote Marx enough in these posts, you'll find you have the opposite critique of Best, as she quotes Marx extensively in her work, this is primarily because The Automatic Fetish is nothing less than an interrogation of Marx's critique of the concept of surplus labour. In order to interrogate, she lets Marx do a great deal of the talking before she expands on it to bring it up to modern language. Considering Dr Best is from Montreal, there is still some interpretation, this time from Quebecois French to English if you're reading it in English, like indeed I am. If you can read French, it may pay to read it in the original French, as sometimes the translation is a bit rough around the edges. At least, some of the harder to read passages that's the benefit of the doubt I'll give.

For this, let's consider the following passages from the book:

The system's core characteristics, enumerated below, form a totality that requires [sic] the divergence of essence and appearance as a means of its own continuation: (1) it is a system of predominantly privately owned and managed, and therefore, uncoordinated (i.e., competitive) productive enterprises; (2) the production of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs and desires is not an end in itself, but, rather, a means to the end-pursuit of realising profit for private enterprise; and (3) viability of private enterprise is contingent on realising more profit than one's competitors over a sustained period of time. Under these conditions of operation, if some branches of industry were routinely more profitable than others, private investment would not gravitate to less profitable spheres of production, as doing so would contradict the only motive for engaging in private enterprise in the first place. As capitalist production relies on inter-capitalist trade, with each capitalist entirely dependent on their brethren for means of production, and on finding a ready-made army of workers who must also turn to the market for means of survival, the possibility for all [sic] necessary branches of production to attract capital, where each branch of industry represents at least a potential for profit that is comparable to others, is an inherent requirement of the system. inherently unequal profit-generating capacities among industries would have made it impossible for a capitalist mode of production to emerge at all, never mind reproduce itself. Here, again, we are confronted with Marx’s central thesis in Capital III: a capitalist mode of production, as a condition of its reproduction, generates, and then posits as its own presupposition, a set of appearances that inverts its inner movement.

In this process, abstract labour -- quantified units of collective production time -- can, logically [sic], only refer to social [sic] labour (as opposed to concrete labour) as that which congeals as the social substance of the commodity. The commodity, as a magnitude of value, must represent a social average of required production time rather than an individual, historically discrete expenditure of labour time. If the latter were the case, then good would remain incommensurable and exchange would remain ad hoc and accidental; capital cannot emerge in this scenario. Rather, for capital to emerge, goods must become equal magnitudes of value (and therefore must be magnitudes of social, abstract labour, i.e., social abstractions) because [sic] people and their capacities cannot be made equal. The fundamental, irreducible inequality of human beings and their capacities must be concealed behind, submerged within, the commodities that step into their places as agents. The systematisation of exchange, and the consolidation of a mode of social reproduction where the needs of society's members are met through increasingly collective but impersonal and uncoordinated productive activity of private units of producers, precipitates socially necessary labour time - an average labour time required for the production of any particular good or service - as the social content of commodities.

One has to remember that whenever I am writing one of these reviews I too am metaphorically 'killing the author'. My speciality and the projects I'm working on for publication (both the boring peer-reviewed journal kind and the more exciting public press kind) are focused on AI, digital automation, and 'development' in Africa and South Asia. To use modern parlance, AI lives 'rent free in my head' as I read Dr Best, as well as the question on the mind of the capitalist class and in the nightmares of the proletariat, 'can AI replace human labour'? Marx and Best would, here at least, argue no. Let me explain.

I bought one of those fancy coffee machines for my home. Not one of the pod-based ones since those are a) an environmental disaster, b) bacteria factories, c) companies trapping you behind proprietary nonsense (the pods are never shaped the same) so you are tricked into giving more money for less result over time, and d) shitty instant coffee with a surprising number of extra steps, you'd be better off just buying the damned powder, and not getting trapped in what I mentioned in point C. No, I got one of the fancier ones that grinds the beans and that I have to load milk into to froth. I can't stand the taste of instant coffee you see. I also recently quit drinking alcohol and the stereotype of the recovering alcoholic becoming addicted to coffee is shockingly accurate, and so a proper coffee machine became a necessity.

The proper coffee machine takes more time than the pod system. This is because to get the quality of coffee I like there really aren't any short cuts. This machine already takes the maximum number of shortcuts possible between me pressing the latte button and me getting a latte of reasonable quality. Even then, the automatic frother doesn't froth the milk to the same quality that a barista would. Frothing coffee specially is a skill that baristas build up over time and still takes a specialised knowledge of the screaming part of the espresso machine in your local coffee shop, known as the steam wand. I am aware of this because I worked as a barista whilst I was doing my first Master's degree, and so had to develop this skill whilst making coffee for irritable insurance workers every morning on a gloomy Seattle street corner.

I want you to take note of the fact that I say it takes time and skill to make a coffee-shop quality latte. This is a skill set that I still possess, over a decade since leaving that position, that my wife does not, as she never had the... pleasure... of working as a barista. This inequality of skill is what Best is talking about above. There's also, of course, an inequality of patience. Everyone might enjoy drinking the latte, but not everyone can be arsed to make it. I know how to make a latte, for example, but do prefer someone else making it. Some people do enjoy making them, even working out how to do latte art. That's a level of commitment that I appreciate that I can never hope to attain. My skills and passions lie elsewhere. (Here's hoping that at least some people think writing is one of those skills).

One of capitalism's great lies is the myth of unskilled labour. This is where capital assures you that same labour is worth more than others because of the extra level of skill involved. By capitalist logic, a barista is unskilled labour. The capitalist class loves the myth of unskilled labour for two reasons, first, it becomes self-justification for the wealth they have acquired, as they often have higher levels of education. Of course, they often have the higher levels of education because of the pre-existence of the wealth, but if the capitalist class was better at understanding the difference between correlation and causation, I would've have to spend so much time dismantling the Christ-like vestiges capitalism has put upon the shoulders of 'big data'. The other reason capital likes 'unskilled labour' is its perceived replaceability. If the barista is truly unskilled then anyone that can be grabbed off the street can be made into a barista.

Anyone who has ever been to a coffee shop with a high turnover rate knows this is simply not the case.

Further, if a barista is truly unskilled labour, then the machine necessary to replace the barista will be easy to implement and introduce.

Anyone who has ever had pod-based coffee or a latte from one of the 'Costa Express' machines popping up in grocery shops across the UK will know this is also simply not the case.

For it is down to the skills, patience, and knowledge of the keen barista that separates the neighbourhood coffee shop from the cold attempt at standardisation and deskilling that chains like Costa, Cafe Nerro, Lavazza, et al., try to implement and enforce upon the British high street. This is undesirable to modern capital, as the lack of scalability means that it cannot be turned into a maximum profit machine. It is here that we see the point Best tried to make, the quality and delivery of the good or service is not the goal of the capitalist, just an ends to a means. The executives of Costa likely know that their coffee isn't as good as found at other, smaller independent coffee shops, but that is irrelevant, as Costa is more profitable in its current form. The machine isn't as good as the barista, but that isn't the point. The machine is replaceable in a way the person cannot be, and so is more profitable.

Some of you reading have, no doubt, worked out the parallel to AI. Among the things I teach is statistical computing, namely coding in either or both the R and Python languages. Tech companies have long favoured public beta testing to costly internal quality assurance testing, and so long ago axed a considerable number of QA workers in favour of public volunteers in well-sold free labour drives called 'insider programmes' and 'early access' and other such nonsense. This has been one part of the 'enshittification' of software. The other part has been the advent of 'vibe coding' in which you reduce the number of coders you have and let Co-Pilot, Gemini, Grok, et al., take up the slack. I bring up my background in teaching coding because I have gotten used to spotting places where the student clearly used ChatGPT to do some 'vibe coding', namely because ChatGPT loves to add unnecessarily complicated extra steps to the code that almost never works, and if the student had just copied my sample code from the lectures, you know cheating the traditional way, they would've gotten a more accurate result with considerably less code. In small part, this is because ChatGPT is surprisingly unfamiliar with R's vast library of packages and so constantly re-invents the wheel in shittier ways. Part of this, of course, is because AI can't be familiar with anything, as that requires a level of cognition that computers simply lack. Part of this, of course, is because coding is a skill that you pick up with patience, practice, and instruction. The coder, like the barista, is irreplaceable. It's skilled labour.

The AI, like the Costa Express machine, makes a markedly inferior product. Often laughably inferior. The capitalist class finds ways to hand wave this annoying fact away. They might ban their workers from using the term 'AI slop', they might accuse people who find the Costa Express coffee to be 'snobs', they might say, 'well it's shit now, but I promise it will get better', despite having sacked all of the people who stand a chance of making it better. None of it matters, as long as the shareholders get profit. Under the capitalist mode of production, the product isn't the point, only the profit it may be able to generate. This isn't new either, as [Parthasarathi](https://www.cambridge.org/core/search?filters%5BauthorTerms%5D=Prasannan Parthasarathi&eventCode=SE-AU), notes in Why Europe Grew Rich, and Asia Did Not, it was no secret the textiles made by the power-looms were inferior to those made by hand in India, but it didn't matter as long as the East India Company violently enforced Britain's protectionist policies to protect the interests of the capitalist class. As was the case in the 18th century, as is the case today. Complete with violent enforcement when the interests of capital are threatened.

None of this is even touching the roles of class, colonialism, and race in getting the coffee beans, the cobalt, and the cotton necessary for any of the workers above to do their craft in the first place, one of the inconsistencies Best (and Marx) also spend a good time analysing.

But that's another reason capitalists love the myth of unskilled labour. When working as a barista, I often got the impression that they thought they were better than me because they were white-collar workers rather than a dirty barista. When I got my first teaching appointment and gave my two-weeks notice, some of the regulars caught wind and celebrated for me, as if I was moving up in life, an idea one of my mangers soured at, as it was clear these customers valued a university teacher over a barista like himself, even though he was quite skilled and passionate about running a coffee shop. Truth is, those insurance adjusters had more in common with the baristas then they did with the executives running their firms, a fact I'm sure some have learnt recently when they found themselves AI'd out of a job. But as long as the illusion remains that they outrank the baristas, as long as the illusion remains that someday their slavish devotion to capital will be rewarded with entrance to the capitalist class, then class consciousness will never emerge.

I'm a better university lecturer than I was a barista. For a thousand reasons that was a poor fit. But I'm under no illusion that I outrank baristas, and not only because of the encroachment of informalisation on academic jobs as capital seeks to extract profit from my 'industry'. Solidarity means solidarity. Everything else is an abstraction meant to distract, and allow third parties to extract value that they didn't create. Capital cannot create value, no matter how hard it tries. Only labour can do that. Once labour realises that rank, race, nationalism, and other creators of bigotry are abstractions created to 'divide and rule' we can reclaim our dignity and worth, but not a moment before.

Best ably, if not somewhat densely, does a great job of outlining why, 'even in an age of AI', labour is still the 'real deal' and capital is trying to obfuscate that fact. It's a sometimes difficult read, I'll grant that, but it's still worth it.