Turing Machines, Skilled Labor and the Labor Theory of Value

By
George Caffentzis
(Draft)

[Turing] thinks we’re undermining mathematics, introducing

Bolshevism into mathematics. But not at all.
(Diamond 1976: 67)

Introduction
Marxism has often been taken to task as being a 19th century theory of capitalism, based
on the steam engine technology while we need a social and economic theorythat is appropriate to
the 21st century’s technology for an anti-capitalist politics appropriate to our day. Since the most
important technological difference between 19th and 21st century being the transition from the
centrality of the heat engine/simple machine complex to that of the Turing machine (TMs), whose
demotic exemplars include the computer I’m writing this essay on, we must ask “What is the
impact of TMs introduction into the labor process on the soundness of the Labor Theory of Value
(LTV) that Marx developed in the 1850s and 1860s?” Is it antagonistic? Many assume this is the
case, however, others like myself see the LTV as compatible with TMs. In fact, I argue that TM
theory helps to vindicate the LTV. To prove my case in general would require an extensive
review of both LTV and TM theory, but I will show in this paper thatTMtheory is a complement
to LTV in at least one important regard. I will do this by considering first the “reduction of
skilled into simple labor” (a key component of the LTV)and then I will look at the implication of
the time [computational] complexity for the status of the LTV.
Activists might view this effort to be a scholastic exercise, but as we shall soon see, the
relation of the LTV to the TM goes to the center of the class struggle both historically and in the
present.

Part I: On the Reduction of complex to simple labor in the LTV

I claim that the TMtheory verifies Marx’s notion of the reduction of skilled labor to
simple average labor. This is not a minor matter. For one of the most telling criticisms of the LTV

1
is exactly the question of what constitutes the relation between skilled complex particular labor
and unskilled simple average labor? After all, if the value of a commodity is determined by the
socially necessary labor-time involved in its production, why should one hour of the labor of a
jeweler be equal to the one hour of work of the labor of a worker in a McDonald’s restaurant?
Surely there is a widespread recognition here that there is no evident equality between these two
kinds of labor. Marx writes:

Simple average labor...varies in character in different countries and at different cultural

epochs, but in a particular society it is given. More complex labor counts only as
intensified or rather multiplied simple labor, so that a small quantity of complex labor is
considered equal to larger quantity of simple labor. Experience shows that this reduction
is constantly being made. ...The various proportions in which different kinds of labor are
reduced to simple labor as their unit of measurement are established by a social process
that goes on behind the backs of the producers; these proportions therefore appear to the
producers to have been handed down by tradition. (Marx 1976:135)

And again:

This [skilled labor] power being of higher value, it expresses itself in labor of a higher
sort, and therefore becomes objectified, during an equal amount of time, in proportionally
higher values. (Marx 1976: 305)

Clearly there needs to be some measure between the paces of value creation due to the differences
in “skill” for the LTV to have any sort of plausibility.(see Rowthorn 1980)This simple average
labor is crucial for understanding the notion of socially necessary labor-time (SNLT)essential for
the creation of the commodity’s value, and as a corollary, the need to be repeated in order to
establish this value: for “(SNLT) is the labor-time required to produce any use-value under
conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and
intensity of labor prevalent in that society,”(Marx 1976: 129, my italics)
Moreover, the workers’ movements throughout Europe and the Americas in the mid-
nineteenth century were in the midst of a schismatic political juncture at the time of Marx’s
research for Capital around the very question of the political status of different degrees of skill.
Some saw the future of workers’ movement in the increase of skilled workers who would be
immune from threats of employers, since their labor was so crucial to production, while others

2
saw the future in the flattening out of the wage and working conditions, i.e., deskilling as having
revolutionary impact on the proletariat (after suffering and surviving the hardships of
unemployment and wage decreases).
Marx saw the working class’s future in the “flattening” process and the industrial reserve
army which is created “when the capitalist buys a greater mass of labor-power as he progressively
replaces skilled workers by less skilled...”(Marx 1976: 788) Marx was ultimately not sympathetic
to the claims of skilled workers. Though the reduction of complex labor into simple average labor
happens “behind the backs of the producers,” and is due to the higher cost (i.e., more time and
labor) it takes to produce skilled labor power,Marx attributes the conscious explanation of the
difference in the value an hour of skilled labor versus unskilled simple labor creates in the
commodity to “experience” and “tradition.” These two are suspicious categories for Marx,
especially the latter.
As for the first, “experience,” anyone trained in dialectical reasoning would be cautious
with results arrived at through experience. True, experience is the source of the materials of
philosophy, but it is far from the end of knowledge. (Hegel 1892: 12). For such knowledge is
meant to transform immediate, sensory particulars into a notion that is self-reflexive, universal
and infinite. So when Marx subtly assures us that experience “shows” that the reduction of
complex, skilled labor into simple, unskilled labor happens he is deliberately cautioning us as
dialecticians to be aware that this reduction is not completely accomplished rationally.
The second source of suspicion to the claims of skill is “tradition.” Skilled workers
commanded higher wages, and they were not easily convinced that joining in an industry-wide
union would protect their wage and craft rights. (Preis 1972: 34-43)They did not easily see that a
“flattening” of wages and privileges was in their interest, even in the long run. In return, Marx
was quite open and cutting in his suspicion of these workers’ claims for the privileges of skill. He
wrote, for example, in a stinging footnote:

The distinction between higher and simple labor, “skilled labor” and “unskilled labor,”
rests in part on pure illusion, or, to say the least, on distinctions that have long since
ceased to be real, and survive only by virtue of traditional convention; and in part on the
helpless condition of some sections of the working class, a condition that prevents them
from exacting equally with the rest the value of their labor power. (Marx 1976: 305)

In other words, not only is the reduction from complex to simple labor goes behind the backs of
the workers involved, but it is based on practices and assumptions that are antiquated and unreal,

3
hence a weak basis for militant revolutionary action. Moreover, what appears as “skilled” labor
justifying higher wages, is simply a reflection of the relative lack of power of some other sectors
of the working class are suffering...thus skill often is not measured by complexity and higher
costs of reproduction of labor power but is an index of negotiating strength.
Marx’s suspicions concerning skilled labor has a political dimension because he was
committed to the development of a working class that would not be divided by ranks and
hierarchies of wages. The “flattening out” of skill is another candidate for the list of
“gravediggers” of capitalism. In Marx’s perspective, the tendency of machinery to require less
and less skill to operate, hence as it is deployed by capital in the class war, ironically, it
eventually creates more power and unity of the working class and a crisis for capitalist who are
facing a falling rate of profit. He was expecting the further increase of plain simple average labor,
so that the average will not be a merely arithmetical result, but one with a small standard
deviation, and the simple will become one of universal interchangeability of workers, a condition
that Marx believed was a precondition for communism. As he and Engels write in the Communist
Manifesto:

[Modern Industry renders]“specialized skill...worthless by new means of production...”

while “[t]he advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces
the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due
to association...What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-
diggers.”(Marx and Engels 1967: 88, 93-94)

Marx was quite concerned with the tendency of skilled workers to demand special
“deals” for their wagedemands.This was a certain source of working class division that capitalists
played with from the beginning of their rule. The rights of skill poseda very important political
question forthe workers’ movement in the 1860s (and continued to trouble it into the 1930s)that
was often called the division between “industrial vs. craft unionism.” In the US the formation of
the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1936 gave concrete organizational expression
to “the reduction” of complex to simple labor in factory- and industry-wide contracts. The
workers’ rebellions in the auto-factories forced the CIO to take the “reduction” from behind the
backs of the producers out before the eyes of workers and capitalists under the pressure of mass
strikes and lockouts.
But is there a more objective source of measurement of the comparative complexity of
labor, i.e., what Marx dubbed as “skill”? He wrote:

4
 All labor of a higher, or more complicated, character than average is expenditure of
labor-power of a more costly kind, labor power whose production has cost more
time and labor than unskilled or simple labor-power, and which therefore has a
higher value. (Marx 1976: 305)

It was not enough to merely equate the “reduction” of skilled to simple average labor to the ratio
of the different costs of time and labor for their production. For what made complex labor more
complex than simple labor? The increased costs of reproduction of skilled labor power is an
indirect effect of complexity, not its source. Was therea “real”measure for complexity?Without an
objective standard for determining complexity or “complicatedness” of various kinds of labor, it
was not enough to measure the time and laborfor its production and reproduction.For example,
which is more complex labor in the 19th century, computing or comparing (checking and
correcting the computers’ results?) The differences in skill between human computers and
comparers in the employ of Nautical Almanac (whose tables made it possible for sailors to
determine on the high seas the longitude they were at) were not taken into account from the 1760s
until 1809, when it was recognized that “the computers’ work being more time consuming but the
comparers requiring more skill” and the decision was made by a commission in charge of an
investigation into this question, then that “the comparers’ pay exceed the computers’ by 40
pounds.”(Croarken 2009: 381)
These abstract questions might seem to be too arcane for a theorist of the workers’
movement to bother with. But they went to the heart of a major question for workers’
organizations. Marx with a few exceptions muted his skepticism of skill, however, because he
knew he was treading upon sensitive territory for many in the working class both in Britain and
Germany. He had to bide his time until capitalists’ investment in machines destroyed the power
of skill, or as Marx put it in a more subdued and ambivalent manner using the “handicraftsman”
as a stand-in for “skilled worker”:

It is machines that abolish the role of the handicraftsman as the regulating principle of
social production. Thus, on the one hand, the technical reason for the lifelong attachment
of the worker to a partial function is swept away. On the other hand, the barriers placed in
the way of the domination of capital by this same regulating principle now also fall.
(Marx 1976: 491)

5
Little did Marx know that just a few blocks away from his home in London there was someone
who implicitly had the answer to Marx’s question concerning the objective measurement of skill.
This man had periodical soirees where the crème-de-la-crème of the British intelligentsia were
invited to discuss questions concerning machines and skilled work...Marx was never invited.
(Essinger 2004: 1-5) This man was Charles Babbage (1791-1871).

Part 2: Measures of Complexity and Skill: From Babbage to Turing

In this section I will show that Turing machine theory can give a measure of
complexity(and skill) that is dependent neither on experience nor on tradition and demonstrate
why certain kinds of labor-power require higher costs of “time and labor”for their production.
To do this I begin with Mr. Babbage, the 19th century inventor I just introduced, who had
been working on a machine (he called “the Analytical Engine”) that was meant to increase the
speed and the accuracy of computations, two very important variables for a technology
increasingly dependent on eliminating even small differences in the initial conditions of repeated
mechanical processes; all the while replacing human computers and comparers who did the
arduous work of mathematical table making in that period. This machine was the centerpiece of
Babbage’slife-long effort to make British industry more efficient.
After a couple of decades of research on this issue Babbage had a break-through via
understanding the knowledge of the silk weavers of Lyons, France.(Caffentzis 2013: 197) One of
their number, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, urged on by Napoleon who was frustrated by the refractory
weavers of Lyons, whose refractoriness depended on their wondrous skill, developed a technique
that revolutionizedthe silk weaving production by the use of punched cards that would direct the
loom to do specified operations on particular silk threads.(Caffentzis 2013: 196-197) Babbage
saw in the Jacquard loom a way to carry out, at first perhaps, mathematical computations, but
soon he realized that that he had in hand “a machine of the most general nature.” (quoted in
(Essinger 2004: 89)). His “interpreter,”Ada Lovelace, describedthe Analytic Engine as “enabling
mechanism to combine together general symbols, in successions of unlimited variety and extent,
a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of
the most abstract branch of mathematical science.”(quoted in (Essinger 2004: 142)) But both
Babbage and Lovelace persisted in preserving the Analytical Engine’s ultimate connection to
mathematical science.
Babbage’s Engine, however, never established itself either theoretically or practically in
th
19 century Britain. When Babbage died in 1871 (the year of the Paris Commune)—hardly

6
anyone came to his funeral (Essinger 2004: 150)—and it looked like the notion of a machine
patterned on Jacquard’s loom, which,instead of weaving silk, weaved “information” would be
lost with Babbage in the forest of failed inventions forever.It is impossible, however, to predict
which discarded idea of today will become the essential one of tomorrow (as the “halting”
theorem shows us). Babbage’s invention was rescued from the forest of failed inventions sixty-
five years latter with the publication of Alan Turing’s article “On Computable Numbers, with an
Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” (Petzold 2008) and the subsequent work in the
construction ofelectric computers in the run up to WWII.
It will be useful, for the moment, to be more specific (but hopefully not arcane) in
defining what is a Turing machine and explaining what it has to do with the issue of skilled and
unskilled labor that sit-down strikers in Flint, Michigan were discussing heatedly while Turing
was inventing his machine in Cambridge, England in 1936.(Fine 1969: 88) What then is a Turing
machine? “Physically[sic],” it is “made” of an infinite tape divided into squares, a scanning head
that reads, prints and erases the finite set of symbols printed on the squares, and a motor
mechanism that moves the head one square to the right or left. Its program is defined by a set of
quintuples: (si, aj, sij, aij, dij) where s is a member of a finite set of states, where a is a member of a
set of symbols, and d is a direction of movement, either to the left, L, or to the right. That is it! Its
simplicity is its power.
TMs are largely defined by their “programs” (or “standard descriptions” (“S.D”s)) and
their results, such that two TMs, M1and M2 are equivalent if and only if for every possible input
they compute the same output (or neither finishes its computation)even though their S.Ds might
be radically different. (Prager 2001: 26) Of course, two equivalent machines might have quite
different S.Ds and take quite a different number moves to solve the same problem.
An important feature of TMs is that though there is potentially an infinite number of such
machines, there is a universal Turing machine (UTM) that can read the S.Ds of every TM and
simulate their operation.
Functions are mappings from one set into another.
Some functions are computable (i.e., there exists a TM when given a description of the
function and the input, TM computes its output) and others are not
Functions can represent mathematically all forms of processes, including repeatable
human labor-processes producing commodities.
It is this connection between functions, TMs and commodity producing labor processes
that is vital for my argument.

7
 There is a tremendous difference between a TM computing a function representing a
labor process and other forms of analysis of labor.
The study of labor processes in the first half of the 20th century, e.g.,was largely in the
hands of the disciples of Frederick Taylor, the devotees of “scientific management” whose
imperative was the study of “time and motion” in the labor process, which included: “the division
of all shop-floor tasks into their fundamental parts” and “the analysis and design of each task to
achieve maximum efficiency and ease of imitation.”(Rabinbach, Anson 1990: 239) But the
recognition of the complexity of human labor, when its computational structure is taken into
account, puts the Taylorist paradigm into crisis. This is not a claim that “Technology was making
corporal work obsolete.”(Rabinbach 1990: 297) For all the discussion of the dominance of
“intellectual” or “immaterial” labor, there still is a huge amount of bodily labor still essential for
the functioning of capitalism, eitherdoing manual work or repetitive assembly line labor,
especially if we cast our net globally. But it is that any labor process that is at all complex (like
following a recipe to cook a stew)can have a TM that “computes” it. In other words, time and
motion studies do not penetrate the computational structure of most labor processes. For example,
in following a recipe there are many “sub-routines” that are important to note, it is not a one-
dimensional logical structure that the TM used to simulate the recipe will represent the recipe
function in its program that takes many different values into the number of the stew at the end of
the process. This beef stew expert system would be “embodied” in a wide variety of possible
physical computers, from MacBook Airs to Martha Stewarts.
This sets the stage for the presentation of the basic claim of this essay: TM theory can
provide a unified measure of complexity of a task and skill that is objective and not dependent on
“tradition.” Let me give a definition of complexity:

M is a TM. If for every input of length n we have that M makes at most t(n) moves before
it halts, then we say that M runs on time t(M, n), or has time complexity t(M, n).
The set of TMs equivalent to M, the equivalence class of M,M, all might have different
time complexities for the same inputs. For every input of length n will, however, exist a least one
TM in M(but possibly more than one) with the least time complexity.
We shall call the least time complexity of the members of M, the relative skill of M,
R(M,n), given input of length n while t(M,n) is the actual time complexity (i.e., the moves made
by a TM, M, before it halts). The relative skill of M is a dynamic, historically transforming
number, for new algorithms might come to light that will radically reduce the number of steps
used to compute an equivalent TM.

8
 Thus, there is an objective measure of the skill required to solve a particular problem, for
R(M, n) is not the time complexity of M given input n, but a time complexity of an equivalent
TM that is most efficient (i.e., t(M,n) > or =. R(M,n). This is a situation similar to the one Marx
pointed out, where the commodity value that is created is not the clock-time involved in the
actual labor process, but the socially necessary labor-time of an average skill level.

Conclusion: The traveling salesman problem and UPS

This definitional effort to capture the notion of skill via the Turing Machine appears
abstract and quite divorced from class struggle. But that appearance and separation are false.
There are many examples where the measure of computational complexityhas a direct connection
to the labor process, the skill level that is required by it and the class struggle. One example can
be found in in Lyons in the mixed reception to the introduction of Jacquard’s loom into
production. On the one side, Napoleon would only wear clothing woven on a Jacquard loom and
granted Jacquard an annual pension of the equivalent of $100,000 for life and royalties of $1600
for every Jacquard loom put into the production for a period of six years.(Essinger 2004: 39) On
the other side, he was hated by the weavers of Lyons. As Ure noted,“The Council des
Prud’hommes, who are the official conservators of the trade of Lyons, broke up [Jacquard’s]
loom in the public place, sold the iron and wood for old materials, and denounced him as an
object of universal hatred and ignominy.” (quoted in Caffentzis 2013: 197) For in the language of
Turing Machines, he dramatically decreased the relative skill needed to transform the same
amount of silk into a shirt leading to a tremendous loss of wages.
A more contemporary example involves a connection with the “Traveling Salesman
Problem” (TSP):where a traveling salesman is presented with a list of cities to visit (never
doubling back) and returning to the home-base city in the shortest distance.(Cook 2012)
The TSP became a central problem in computer science, especially when it became clear
that, through the work of Turing, Gödel, Kleene, and Church in the 1930’s huge logico-
mathematical areas were in the territory of non-computability, unsolvability (of the halting
problem), incompleteness (of arithmetic), and undecidability (of the Entscheidungsproblem).For
once it was proven that there was an uncountable infinity of non-computable functions, the
question naturally posed itself: what are the computable functions simulating real problems and
what are the TMs that compute them?
The TSP is not only a mathematical puzzle, it is a task that is posed in a wide variety of
labor processes from transport to logistics of all sorts. At the moment there is no TM that can
compute, for any number n of cities, the shortest route. But there are results for more than 85,900

9
“cities” that computer scientists have claimed. It is a mind-numbing task that seems to require the
help of computers even for relatively small number of cities. Indeed, the last time the actual
computations were done by hand to get a new result for 49 cities was in 1954!(Cook 2012: 11)
But in actual fact, United Parcel Service (UPS) workers used to “solve” these TSPs (with
dozens of packages to deliver in one day’s run) all the time, informally, but as part of their job—
and their resistance to it. Some claim that the average UPS worker makes more than 100 “stops” a
day—a mind-boggling achievement for it implies that the delivery worker is choosing one
ordered route out of 100! possibilities (a number with 158 digits!).UPS has hired mathematicians
to use the knowledge of delivery workers in the framework of the TSP to reduce costs and be sure
that the “cities” on the UPS workers’ form an order that is maximizes profits.(Wohtsen 2013) As
the leader of the UPS project, called ORION, or On-Road Integrated Optimization and
Navigation, “is quick to emphasize that UPS doesn’t discount the value of drivers’ wisdom
accumulated during years on a route. The best system, he says, is one that relies on both human
and algorithmic intelligence, not just one or the other.”) (Wohsten 2013).
Though the articles on UPS’s ORION are generally up-beat, the “struggle between
worker and machine” still haunts the operation.The struggle between UPS workers and ORION
takes place officially in the Teamsters’ union and the negotiation table. For example, in the latest
contract the following language has been inserted according to Tom Vanderbilt: “and while the
filmed testimonials of drivers I saw at UPS were largely positive in their description of ORION, it
is interesting to note that the latest contract between the company and the union included a
provision that no driver would be ‘discharged based solely on information received from GPS or
any successorsystem.’”(Vanderbuilt 2013) But it also takes place in the resistance to making
clear to the mathematicians “the tricks of the trade,” especially when drivers stop to chat with the
recipients...including occasions for amorous interchanges.
In this UPS example workers posed a less directly violent response to the introduction of
ORION compared to the response of the weavers of early 19th century Lyons to the introduction
of Jacquard’s loom. But this does not mean that the delivery workers’ struggle against UPS
hyper-surveillance and continual intensification of their working day does not exist. The many
open strikes (especially the epic one in 1997) against the company amply indicate the continuity
of this struggle. In fact, what TM theory has opened up in Marxism is a new dimension of class
struggle in the labor process.
This brings us to the epigraphat the beginning of this article. It isa transcription of
Wittgenstein’s words spoken during a course on the foundations of mathematics that Alan Turing
attended in early 1939 at Cambridge University. In it Wittgenstein was baiting Turing a bit. Little

10
did either Wittgenstein or Turing know that they were introducing computational mathematics
into Marxism and vice versa!

Bibliography

Caffentzis, George 2013. In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of
Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press.

Cook, William J. 2012. In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of
Computation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Croarken, Mary 2009. “Human Computers in 18th and 19th century Britain.” In The Oxford Hand
Book of the History of Mathematics. Edited by Elenor Cobson and Jacqualine Stedall. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Diamond, Cora 1976. Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics.Cambridge,

1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Essinger, James 2004. Jacquard’s Web: How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fine, Sidney 1969. sit-down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937. Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1892. The Logic of Hegel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marx, Karl 1976. Capital, Vol. 1. London: Penguin.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1967. The Communist Manifesto. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Petzold, Charles 2008. The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing’s Historic
Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing Company.

Prager, John 2001. On Turing. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

11
Preis, Art 1972. Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO. New York: Pathfinder Press.

Rabinbach, Anson 1990. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rowthorn, B. 1974. “Skilled labor in the Marxist system.” Conference of Socialist Economists
bulletin. Spring, pp. 25-45.

Vanderbilt, Tom 2013. “Unhappy Truckers and other Algorithmic Problems.” Nautilus (July 18).
Accessed at nautil.us/issue/3/in-transit/unhappy-truckers-and-other-algorithmic-problems.

Wohtsen, Marcus 2013. “The Astronomical Math Behind UPS’s New Tool to Deliver Packages
Faster.”Wired (June 18). Accessed on August 21, 2016 at www.wired.com/2013/06/ups-
astronomical-math/

12