Technological Deformations
Mina de Pico, Minas Gerais
Mina Horizonte, Minas Gerais
Mina Germano, Minas Gerais
One of the ways that mining companies legitimise their activities is through offers of employment. However, the contemporary reality of intensive mining, is a million miles away from popular images of vast armies of miners queuing at the pit head. It is an economic sector increasingly dominated by automated large-scale machinery which allows for the extraction of natural resources to continue twenty-four hours a day. Steadily increasing the productivity of labour to maintain the rate of profit, through the mechanisation of work, lies at the centre of the history of the capitalist labour process. One of the consequences of this tendency is that the amount of ‘living’ manual labour engaged in mining is a mere fraction of what it was fifty years ago. In a situation where the means of production are collectively owned and workers are retrained to fulfil other roles without loss of salary, this is a positive thing, and in the 1960s there was a widespread belief in both east and west that the progressive automation of industrial production would liberate the individual from heavy manual labour. Workers would become free, creative intellectuals, and citizen consumers would enjoy lives liberated from need in a world of abundance. However, in the situation where the means of production are privately owned or the property of a centralised authoritarian state, workers are simply expelled from the labour process without sentiment and left to the mercy of a ruthless labour market. This is why during the early phases of capitalist industrialisation workers smashed machinery, not because they hated machines, but rather because of the consequences of mechanisation on their daily lives, unemployment, poverty and a loss of status. This is what lies behind Marx’s famous thesis on technology in Capital, where the machinery of modern industrial production stands before workers as something born of the devil, an alien power over which they have no control. “Here we have, in place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs.”[i] (Marx, 1976:503). The fusion of science and technology with the priorities of capital accumulation in the design of the leviathan machinery of modern mining, induces the same forms of alienation. The idea of a different socially useful environmentally benign kind of technology, designed to increase productivity whilst maintaining workers direct control over the labour process, has no place in the corporate imagination whose singular intention is to intensify the extraction of resources and augment profits.
[i] Marx, Karl, Capital Volume 1, (Penguin: London, 1976), p503