The “Fragment” distinguishes fixed and circulating capital, where fixed capital is embodied in a particular use value (machines) and circulating capital realizes its value in exchange (money). Like natural resources such as water and air, the general level of technology is something capital gets “free of charge” from the commons. But capital has interests in fettering tech and science, which can undermine as well as augment a given regime of accumulation.

Fixed capital replaces labor, raising productivity and profits, but capital is chasing its own tail, and as fixed capital grows, the rate of profit (supposedly) falls. Workers become obsolete. Pushing up profits is a matter of intensifying work or lengthening the working day. Capital’s problem—as Georges Bataille well knew—is not scarcity but abundance, or rather the attempt to maintain scarcity within abundance.17 Against this, Marx sketches only the faintest outline of communism as noninstrumentalist use value, a theme picked up in different ways by Bataille, Marcuse and Haraway, where use value becomes the gift or pleasure or situations.18