Critical Alien Phenomenology Par Excellence: Marx & Voltaire on Machine Gods
by Max Ramsahoye
Embedded Files
'The Wheel of the World' by Jean Delville
The universe as a great mechanism in which souls are trapped and suffering ensues
Voltaire's preface to the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster and Marx's The Fragment on Machines are paradigmatic works of 'critical alien phenomenology' and classical 'mechanical philosophy'. When viewed alongside each other, they reveal a 'fearful symmetry' between God and Capitalism: they are both 'life-blind' intelligent designers of amoral mechanistic universes.
❝ ‘If the miseries of individuals are merely the by-product of this general and necessary order, then we are nothing more than cogs which serve to keep the great machine in motion; we are no more precious in the eyes of God than the animals by which we are devoured. ' ❞
- Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster
❝...once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery, set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages...
it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself...
The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. ❞
- Marx, The Fragment on Machines
❝...to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital. ❞
- Marx, Capital
Both passages perform a radical phenomenological move: they inhabit the perspective of vast mechanistic intelligences—divine providence and industrial capital—to reveal humans as mere functional components within alien systems of organization.
Voltaire phenomenologically inhabits God's perspective as architect of a mechanistic universe, incapable of perceiving human suffering as mattering, seeing only the perpetual motion of the cosmic machine. Marx performs the same operation on industrial capital. He phenomenologically inhabits the machinery's perspective that experiences workers not as subjects but as instrumental resources and functional components; revealing capital as an alien intelligence with its own form of perception.
The parallel is horrifying in a lovecraftian esque fashion: both God and Capital function as "life-blind intelligent designers"—they organize reality according to their own internal logic while remaining fundamentally indifferent to human flourishing. Both possess purposiveness ("acts purposefully, as an automaton") without consciousness of human suffering. By bracketing human perspective to inhabit these alien intelligences, both philosophers reveal the same structure: vast systems that transform human subjects into mechanical components, that "see" us only as functional elements within their own self-perpetuating motions.
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