Some of Marx’s most compelling passages on the nature of the machine develop from this conception. For Marx, the machine is one of the essential forms of capital. Fixed capital, in the form of the self-propulsive machine or automaton, represents the objectification of subjective will. In the factory system, therefore,

the material unity [of combined workers] appears subordinate to the objective unity of the machinery, of fixed capital, which, as animated monster, objectifies the scientific idea, and is in fact the coordinator, does not in any way relate to the individual worker as his instrument; but rather he himself exists as an animated individual punctuation mark, as its living isolated accessory.53

There is a kind of reversal of roles in such a scenario—between subject and object, living and dead, material and immaterial, past and present. The machine becomes an “objectified . . . idea” and the worker a mere accessory or moment of punctuation in the syntax of the factory:

Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour process but also capital’s process of valorization has this in common, but it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. However, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labor confronts the worker during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labor-power. The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labour is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundations of machinery.