A bit of historical context is in order [...] even in the 1960s there was a fairly widespread understanding, on both the Left and the Right, that the United States was quickly becoming a new kind of postindustrial economy based around services and information rather than material goods. Early accounts of the postindustrial transition emphasized the emergence of a new class of technicians, managers, and other highly educated professionals. But such visions were almost always blind to the profoundly destructive and destructuring force of such an emergence. The arrival in the 1970s of the term “deindustrialization” marks a sense that this transition was far from smooth, bringing economic ruin and unemployment to vast numbers of manufacturing workers who, rendered superfluous by automation and competition from new producers in East Asia and Europe, were unable to transition to new jobs. Most commentators failed to foresee the swell of low-paid, routinized white-collar and service-sector jobs rather than high-tech skilled positions that eventually absorbed those expelled from the manufacturing sector, thereby ushering in several decades of wage stagnation. Clerical work, in this sense, is the dirty secret of the postindustrial “knowledge-based” economy.

It now seems safe to say that, as much as Memory is a project about work, one through which we can read the profound restructuring of work and work life taking place in the 1970s, it is also a project about technology because the history of labor in capitalism is always also, in part, a history of technology. Truly capitalist labor is labor constantly remade and refashioned—become more productive, more intense, more plastic—through changing technological means. It is labor that has been “really subsumed,” as we have seen, remade in accord with the exigencies and needs of capital and the profit drive. Indeed, we might say that capitalism proper—what Marx calls the “specifically capitalist mode of production”—really begins only at the moment in which the owners of capital begin to reinvest their profits in new labor-saving technology to extract even greater profits.49 This virtuous circle of reinvestment—profit that, by way of new more highly productive machinery, produces greater profits—is what characterizes capitalist accumulation. And therefore, since any account of the restructuring of labor in the postwar period must be, in part, an account of changing technical means, it should come as no surprise that Memory so explicitly foregrounds the role of technology from its very first pages:

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.

The standard presentation of the rising organic composition of capital assumes that its central effect is a falling rate of profit, since the rate of new value extraction also falls. The arguments around this point are complicated, highly technical, and might lead us to miss the major point here. Regardless of what we think about the profit rate, what is important is that rising organic composition of capital measures the extent to which living labor has been thrust out of the production process, the extent to which dead or past or objectified labor predominates. The results of this dynamic are various: it can produce crises of employment for those expelled from production, the so-called superfluous populations; it produces crises of underconsumption (since he or she who does not work does not eat); and it produces underutilization and underinvestment, because in cases of high-organic composition investment in new plant and machinery is unlikely to net higher profits. Because of this last effect, technical change begins to slow and capitalists pull their money out of production, instead preferring speculation in stocks and real estate. But tracking these developments in all their complexity might cause us to miss the central implication of this analysis: crises in capitalism are the result of a society that has become too wealthy and too productive for its own good, a capitalism that requires less and less work and that as a result finds its perpetuation threatened. Capitalism is a self-undermining social form.

On the one hand, these developments might seem to imply a slowing down of historical “progress,” measured in terms of technical development. But this slowing down finds itself matched by a speeding up. As it becomes difficult to extract increased profits from investment in labor-saving technology, capitalists turn instead to nontechnological means of increasing surpluses: sweating and intensifying labor, decreasing pockets of rest and downtime (the so-called pores in the workday), extending work hours, and finding ways of getting workers to do unpaid work off the job. Thus, we return, by a long and circuitous route, to the harried and frenetic temporality of Memory, which we are now prepared to think of as strongly homological with the actual state of capital and labor in the early 1970s, when the vigorous good health of the postwar economy gave way to a crisis of profitability (visible first as inflation) described persuasively by several writers as conforming, more or less, to Marx’s account of capitalist crisis.66 This intensification was felt on both sides of the double day, in the workplace and in the home, as people worked more for less money and, as a result, were forced to compensate for reductions in household spending with an increase in housework.