Against Technocracy (Part 1) (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a scene in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), where Captain Jean-Luc Picard comments: ‘The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money does not exist in the 24th century…The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity’.

Such sentiments draw on a long tradition of utopian thinking. A common feature of such thinking is the idea of material abundance. Abundance is what renders money obsolete.

In the painting The Land of Cockaigne by the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567), a trio of figures is depicted dozing beneath a tree, their tools of the trade lying unused beside them. This is a magical world in which a cooked goose makes itself available on a platter and a roasted pig trots past with a carving knife stuck in its flank. No need to lift a finger to satisfy one´s hunger pangs.

The painting has attracted different interpretations. For some, it represents a moralising critique of the spiritual emptiness associated with sloth and gluttony (‘consumerism’); for others, the wistful dream of a world beyond grinding labour and material deprivation.

The Cockaignian tradition can be traced to the folk utopias of early medieval Europe and even earlier. What is striking about it is the relative lack of emphasis on technology as the means of achieving abundance. Mother Nature, not human ingenuity, was the provider of plenty.

This began to change over time, Bacon´s scientific utopia, The New Atlantis (1627), being an early example. From the mid-18th century, small-scale cottage industries gave way to the factory system. This was the first industrial revolution based on steam power and mechanisation. We have since had a second industrial revolution, commencing in the late 19th century (Fordist mass production and electrification), a third in the late 20th century (automation and digital electronics) and are currently in the throes of a fourth, featuring such cutting-edge innovations as AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, advanced robotics and biotechnology.

Marx and Engels

When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, the Second Industrial Revolution had not yet begun (the first patented electric light bulb was still decades away). They held that socialism depended not only on a majority wanting it and understanding what it entailed, but also on the productive apparatus being sufficiently developed to ensure the reasonable needs of the population could be adequately met.

In the mid-19th century, this was not possible. For this reason, the Manifesto called for the ‘centralisation of all instruments of production in the hands of the State, ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible’. State ownership was thought to be a more effective way of achieving this by capitalising on economies of scale.

However, by the late 19th century, there was a clear shift in their thinking. Thus, their 1872 Preface to the Manifesto stated that, because of the advances of modern industry since 1848, the state capitalist transitional measures they earlier proposed had become ‘antiquated’ and that ‘no special stress’ should be laid on them.

Interestingly, in 1878, we find Engels writing: 

‘The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here’ (1878, Anti Dühring, Part 3).

New thinking about how to expedite a post-capitalist society was certainly required (and Marx and Engels were moving in this direction), but sadly, many supposed ‘Marxists’ today seem to be trapped in a time warp, their vision limited to nothing more ambitious than the nationalisation of the ‘commanding heights of industry’.

Edward Bellamy

Back then, socialists were not alone in recognising the growing technological potential to supersede the capitalist money-based economy. A foretaste of a non-Marxian technocratic version of this was provided by the American journalist, Edward Bellamy, in his fictional work Looking Backward (1888).

This was an enormously influential book, particularly in America, selling over a million copies shortly after publication. In it, Bellamy described the huge economic benefits that would result from dispensing with money:

‘Another item wherein we save is the disuse of money and the thousand occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an army of men was formerly taken away from useful employment’.

However, his vision of a future moneyless society was a statist one, the ‘nation’ being deemed ‘the sole employer and capitalist’ (reminiscent of Lenin’s later description of ‘socialism’). Production was organised under the aegis of a ‘General Council of the Industrial Army’.

There was limited political democracy insofar as the government was elected, with this kind of society enjoying broad support, but practical decision-making itself was generally top-down and paternalistic. Labour would take a compulsory, quasi militaristic form (unlike Marx´s idea of ‘freely associated labour’) with individual consumption being rationed via a credit card scheme.

Bellamy saw this future moneyless society as being technically advanced and exhibiting a high degree of automation. This was not a vision that appealed to everyone, however. William Morris, who likewise wrote about a future moneyless society in News from Nowhere (1890), was critical of Bellamy´s outlook – in particular, its negative depiction of work as a coerced activity requiring extrinsic incentives to motivate individuals to work.

The idea of work being intrinsically undesirable is also implicit in some contemporary representations of a moneyless future. One example is the concept of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ (FALC), associated with writers such as Aaron Bastani.

Automation will undoubtedly play an important role in a post-capitalist society, particularly when it comes to work deemed dangerous, dirty or monotonous. However, we would surely not want to eliminate all work and the potentially enormous creative pleasure to be derived from working. It is the terms and conditions under which we currently work that are the problem, not necessarily work itself.

All too often, work is unthinkingly equated with waged employment. These are not the same. In fact, even today under capitalism, most work is performed outside the money sector, not within it (María Ángeles Durán 2012, ‘Unpaid Work in the Global Economy’, Fundación BBVA).

We need work, or labour, as a form of creative self-expression. In hunter-gatherer societies, the distinction between work and play tends to be blurred. Much the same approach to work is found in Marx´s description of a higher phase of communist society in which ‘labour has become not only a means of life, but life’s prime want’ (1875, Critique of the Gotha Programme).

The Technocracy Movement

Bellamy´s futuristic society has been interpreted to represent a proto-technocratic utopia. However, the term ‘technocracy’, denoting governance by technical experts, was only coined somewhat later, in 1919, by an engineer, William Smyth. The basic idea behind this subsequently found expression in the rise of a movement in the 1930s in America (also in Canada and parts of Europe), bearing that name: the ‘Technocracy Movement’.

Though Howard Scott and Marion King Hubbert founded this movement, the individual thought to have first clearly set out the basic principles of technocracy was the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in 1921, in an article titled ‘Engineers and the Price System’.

Veblen saw technological development as paving the way to the reorganisation of the economy, leading automatically to the gradual disappearance of money. Technological innovation followed its own developmental trajectory. The price mechanism was regarded as simply a wasteful and unnecessary encumbrance on production. It did not so much ‘guide’ technological development as follow it (and profit from it).

Veblen envisaged the decline of business culture and its replacement by a more technically-minded society in which people like scientists and engineers would lead the way. There was, he suggested, a built-in or deep-seated antagonism between the pecuniary values promoted by financiers and businesspeople and the industrial values embraced by the technicians and skilled workers.

The economist J M Keynes later said something similar in his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Keynes suggested that within a century, technological progress and rising affluence would cause our obsession with money to die out. At the same time, the working week would contract to a mere 15 hours on average.

During the Great Depression, interest in the Technocracy movement grew rapidly, and the movement became quite popular for a brief period (at one point attracting hundreds of thousands of adherents) before going into steep decline following the implementation of Roosevelt´s New Deal reforms that drew support away from the movement.

Among the various ideas it advanced was the suggestion, grounded in Scott´s ‘Energy Theory of Value’, that energy units (joules) should replace money as the unit of accounting in the production and distribution of goods, with citizens being allocated ‘energy certificates’ to regulate consumption. What lay behind this was the belief that the money system was something inherently wasteful and oriented towards the perpetuation of needless scarcity. As one contemporaneous article noted:

‘Technocracy states that price and abundance are incompatible; the greater the abundance, the smaller the price. In a real abundance, there can be no price at all. Only by abandoning the interfering price control and substituting a scientific method of production and distribution can an abundance be achieved’ (Sept 1937, “What is Technocracy”, The Technocrat).

Jeremy Rifkin and Zero Marginal Cost

The claim about increasing abundance brought about by the price-collapsing effect of technological innovation is the stuff of much recent sensationalist speculation. According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of the best-seller The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2015), the ‘emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services, precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism’.

However, Rifkin´s thesis is based on a flawed understanding of marginal cost pricing. Even if the marginal cost of producing some item (the cost of producing one additional unit of this item) fell to zero, there are still fixed costs to account for. Information goods, for example, may be ‘non-rivalrous’ in the sense that if I use the internet to do a Google search, it doesn’t prevent you from doing the same. But, internet-based corporations like Google or Meta still have enormous fixed costs to pay for. They still have to generate revenue to cover these costs and realise the huge profits they make in the process.

For the same reason, the prognosis of people like the billionaire, Elon Musk, about AI eliminating all jobs within two decades is fanciful in the extreme. Remarkably, someone who has profited so much from capitalism seems to know very little about how it actually works.

Capitalist production presupposes sufficient ‘effective demand’, such that a business can expect to realise a profit meeting this demand. Without the prospect of profit, even essential needs will remain unmet. To satisfy them, workers depend on paid employment in a capitalist, money-based economy.

How would this be possible if no one had a job? Living labour, not machinery, is the source of capitalist profit. In theory, if all work were automated, the rate of profit would fall to zero, and capitalism would cease to exist.

However, this is not remotely likely to happen. Well before that, Marx’s famous ‘counteracting tendencies to the falling rate of profit’ would kick in. For instance, growing technological unemployment would depress wages, thereby paradoxically making it more profitable once again to employ more labour.

Thus, there are self-correcting mechanisms that pre-empt the sort of scenario that people like Musk have in mind. Indeed, some studies suggest AI will lead not to a reduction but to an increase in jobs overall, with its main impact being to transform the nature of work under capitalism.

We cannot depend on technological innovation alone to transcend capitalism. This is a major weakness of the technocratic paradigm, which we will examine in Part 2.

Robin Cox

Link to Part 2.

Blogger's Note:

Star Trek: First Contact was reviewed in the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Cooking the Books: UBI no solution (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’ll need universal basic income — AI “godfather” . The godfather in question was Professor Geoffrey Hinton, so dubbed because he was a pioneer of neural networks on which AI is modelled. He told BBC Newsnight that a scheme ‘giving fixed amounts of cash to every citizen would be needed because he was “very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs”. ( …) He said while he felt AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “and not the people whose jobs get lost and that’s going to be very bad for society”’.

It’s a common view: AI will lead to mass unemployment with a consequent reduction in paying demand; the remedy to this is ‘the government paying all individuals a set salary regardless of their means’. This would both sustain paying demand and reduce inequality.

But it is not a new idea. The same analysis and the same proposal were made sixty years ago, but in relation to ‘cybernation’, a word that has dropped out of common use but which means ‘the control of an industrial operation or task through processing of information with a computer’. In March 1964 a group of left-wing intellectuals formed an ‘Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution’ and drew up a report for presentation to President Johnson. One of these revolutions was the ‘cybernation revolution’.

They argued that ‘the rate of productivity increase has risen with the onset of cybernation’ and that ‘an industrial economic system postulated on scarcity has been unable to distribute the abundant goods and services produced by a cybernated system or potential in it’. To remedy this, they proposed:

‘. . . it is essential to recognize that the traditional link between jobs and incomes is being broken. The economy of abundance can sustain all citizens in comfort and economic security whether or not they engage in what is commonly reckoned as work. Wealth produced by machines rather than by men is still wealth. We urge, therefore, that society, through its appropriate legal and governmental institutions, undertake an unqualified commitment to provide every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right’ (tinyurl.com/3362249j).

They were in effect saying that capitalism had solved the problem of producing enough for everyone but had not solved that of distributing it. Theirs was a proposal as to how capitalism could do this. Johnson of course took no notice of their report. Cybernation continued but there was no consequential massive increase in technological unemployment. So where did they go wrong?

One reason was assuming that mechanisation (of which automation, cybernation and now AI are instances) takes place as soon as it just becomes technologically possible. Under capitalism it is only applied if it is cheaper than having the work done manually or by some already established machine. This slows down technological progress.

Nor does technological progress come in all at once but spreads only slowly. Overall productivity does increase but only at a fairly modest rate (averaging around 2 percent a year). This gives the economy time to adjust. There is some technological unemployment but new employment opportunities (though not necessarily for those displaced) open up as capital accumulation proceeds.

Paying a basic income to everyone while maintaining private ownership of machines and production for profit won’t work, because it would undermine both the profit motive and the wages system, two essential features of the capitalist system. The money to do this could only come from taxes and taxes ultimately fall on profits, reducing the incentive that drives capitalism. It would undermine the wages system by reducing the economic pressure on the excluded majority to work for an employer to get money to buy what they need to live.

Capitalism is inherently incapable of solving the problem of distributing enough for all.

Cooking the Books: From Marx to Musk (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his interview with Rishi Sunak on 2 November Elon Musk speculated that the widespread application of AI would usher in an ‘age of abundance where any goods and services that you want, you can have’. People would only need work for ’personal satisfaction’.

Clearly, this wouldn’t be capitalism. It couldn’t be as it would mean the end of working for wages and producing goods and services to be sold. This was understood by, of all people, Jeremy Clarkson in a surprisingly perspicacious passage in his column in the Sun the following day:

‘The fact is, then, that if machines are doing all the jobs, there will be no economy. You won’t be able to buy anything because you won’t be earning anything. And there’s no point going to the government for help because that won’t have any money either. Because machines don’t pay taxes. They just spend all day making stuff. That no one can afford to buy. This means we will need a whole new economy. A whole new system where there’s no such thing as money. And that is the biggest worry of them all because no one has a clue what that might be’.

The last bit is not true. Socialists have long understood that the answer would be a society where productive resources including machines would be commonly owned and democratically controlled and used to produce wealth to directly satisfy people’s needs instead of, as now, to be sold on a market with a view to profit. In such a society there would indeed be no such thing as money.

Clarkson may not have known it but he was describing what has recently been called ‘fully automated luxury communism’. But we don’t have to wait for ‘full’ automation to bring about a society of common ownership, democratic control and production directly for use. The productive forces are already sufficiently developed for this. Making the change is now only a question of political will.

As a matter of fact years ago Marx had anticipated the points made by Musk. Writing in the late 1850s he speculated what would happen if the application of science and machinery to production led to such a high level of productivity that not only the value added by direct human labour to each unit produced was reduced to an insignificant proportion, but so was that transferred to these units from the fixed capital deployed:

‘As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. (…) With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis (‘Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.’, Grundrisse, chapter 14).

In other words, goods and services would be so cheap — each unit would contain so little labour, both new and that transferred by machinery, etc — that the huge amount of them that could be produced could not be priced but might as well be given away or provided free.

Marx did not expect this point to be reached — he expected that the working class would have put an end to capitalism long before — but he realised that, if it were to be, it would mean the end of capitalism. Production for sale would no longer make any sense.

Editorial: Science and the Future (1942)

Editorial from the January 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the wireless a few nights ago three men were discussing the probable future of man. They were men prominent in their professions, and at least one was a scientist, and we would, therefore, have been justified in expecting to hear something fundamental on the subject—but we didn’t !

The scientist made the interesting statement that the reason why science had made less progress in the investigation of purely human questions as against the tremendous progress in engineering and the like was because scientists, like other men, had to earn a living, and consequently, had to give most of their attention to subjects that promised them a living.

The statement is interesting because, coming from a scientist, it is authentic and illustrates how completely the wages system dominates the work of science. We are often told that science was stultified in days gone by owing to the power of religion and how free it is to-day. But there are evidently serious limits to this freedom.

For a quarter of an hour these three people discussed whether men would grow more intelligent in the next five hundred years or fall back into barbarism. They believed man would progress but they were not certain. One of them anticipated that machines would be perfected to a point where they practically operated themselves, thus leaving man free for creative work such as—gardening !

The assumption evidently being that handling machines was unpleasant work whilst such things as gardening were not.

The fact is that they all missed the fundamental aspect of the question. To those who work for wages gardening is just as irksome as handling a machine. When working a machine is like gardening for a hobby its unpleasant side will have departed. The proof of this is the fact that model engineers are immersed in the joy of their work and nearly every boy is a born engineer and loves playing about with machines.

Machine work, like other occupations, is only distasteful because of the conditions under which that work is carried on—capitalist conditions. Under Socialism all will take pleasure in the work they do, including the handling of machinery, because it will be joyful work and not grinding, painful labour for a wage that does little more than provide an existence.

Robots (2013)

Book Review from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy’, by Federico Pistono. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012)

Imagine a world in which supermarkets are replaced by giant robotic vending machines; in which cars drive themselves; and in which journalists are replaced by computer generated reportage. Only, you don’t need to imagine such a world: it’s ours. The technology for all these things exists now (at the very least, at the developmental stage). This book invites us to imagine the impact of the roll-out of these technologies. It’s a sobering thought to realise that hundreds of thousands worldwide work in supermarkets, whose jobs could be extinguished in very short order by this technology.

The centrepiece of the book is an examination of the implications of Moore’s law, which is, roughly, that computer processing capacity doubles every two years. A great deal of the book is spent explaining the implications of this exponential growth. In short, it means the advent of machines which can replicate human-like thought processes. Pistono notes that whether these processes are ‘intelligent’ is unimportant: it’s the work they can do, and the processes they can reproduce that counts. He gives the example of radiographers: computers now have the capacity to ‘look at’ medical images and recognise a variety of conditions. This removes the need for a skilled human, trained over many years, to make the examination. As the book notes, though, as with the automated supermarkets, the machines will also displace unskilled labour.

The book is limited in its exposition, beyond telling us these bare facts. Pistono notes that he has not heard any good counter-arguments against the idea of technological unemployment, but his failure to rebut them in detail does not help build his argument. Luckily for us, Marx did address them in his book Capital:

‘The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself. (…) When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it’ (Capital v. 1, LINK).

Marx addressed the ‘theory of compensation’: ‘that all machinery that displaces workmen, simultaneously and necessarily sets free an amount of capital adequate to employ the same identical workmen.’ His rebuttal was:

‘The labourers that are thrown out of work in any branch of industry can no doubt seek for employment in some other branch. If they find it, and thus renew the bond between them and the means of subsistence, this takes place only by the intermediary of a new and additional capital that is seeking investment; not at all by the intermediary of the capital that formerly employed them and was afterwards converted into machinery.’ (LINK)

Marx realises that technological unemployment is off-set, in part, by the increased demand this will create in the branches of industry that supply the newly mechanised fields of production. The extent to which these will soak up some of the workers made redundant by machinery, however, ‘depends, given the length of the working-day and the intensity of labour, on the composition of the capital employed, i.e., on the ratio of its constant to its variable component’ (a ratio Marx termed the Organic Composition of Capital). Marx also identified a growth in luxury production and of the servants (what we would now call ‘service industries’) as a result of the improved productiveness of the factory system.

These off-sets would be of little help, however, if all industries were simultaneously and continuously subject to more and more technological innovation.

Pistono’s book is of little help in addressing these problems. The solutions put forward are frankly laughable: we all will have to learn to get by with less and be happy with it. Drive less; insulate your house; grow your own food: these are the suggestions put forward. These are all well and good if you own a patch of land (or even your own house) but absolutely useless for the millions of propertyless semi-skilled and unskilled workers of the world. Millions in mega-slums are already showing us how to make do with less.

At best, this book is a useful primer to introduce people to the concept of incoming and widespread technological unemployment. It is hampered by its lack of detail in explaining the debates around the issue and its abject failure to present anything like a sensible response. At its best, it is a heartfelt tract, with some useful facts and bibliography.

Pik Smeet

Will Robots Cause Capitalism to Collapse? (2013)

From the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March the Socialist Party debated with Federico Pistono, the author of a book entitled Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy (reviewed in the March Socialist Standard). His argument is typical of many who think that the market-money-wages system we call capitalism is going to soon collapse as a result of the increasing pace of technological innovation leading to constantly growing mass unemployment. Peter Joseph, the founder of the Zeitgeist Movement, put it more dramatically in a TV interview the same month:

‘unemployment is a consequence of technology, entirely. The entire reason we have unemployment in America and across the world is explicitly based on the application of technology for cost efficiency. And this is not going to stop. And this will lead to what has been called by theorists the ‘contradiction of capitalism’, to the ultimate instability of our social system: the ability to produce more with less people and cheaper rates. It’s a complete clash of the system.’ (LINK).

A computer whizz-kid himself, Pistono describes various already-existing inventions that can displace humans in production, particularly due to advances in computer technology. Two he discusses in detail, because of their impact on relatively unskilled labour, are automatic vending machines (which would replace shop assistants) and driverless road vehicles (which would replace van and lorry drivers). He then asks why, if this is all possible, we are not seeing it:

 ‘Sounds futuristic? Every piece of technology needed for making this happen already exists, and has existed for many years. Then why is it not in place already?’

Good question. Why indeed?

Why machines are (and aren’t) introduced

When a machine is introduced in a particular production unit this reduces the number of workers (living labour) required there to produce the same goods or provide the same service. But, since the machine had to be produced by living labour, extra workers must have been taken on somewhere else to build it, so the question arises of whether the two effects on employment cancel each other out at the level of the economy as a whole.

At first, economists tried to argue that this was so but they soon recognised that they were mistaken and conceded that there would be a net reduction in the total level of employment, not as great as the number of workers displaced in the productive units affected but to a level less than previously. In other words, machines sack more workers than they take on.

Writing in 1821 not long after the Luddites had been smashing knitting machinery, David Ricardo concluded:

  ‘That the opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy’(Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, third edition, Ch. 31).

He added that this reduction in total employment could, and normally would, be offset if the economy expanded as a result of new capital investment in some other field of activity. Marx, writing nearly fifty years later, agreed. This – the expansion of capitalist production – is the reason why the introduction of machinery in the past has not resulted in steadily increasing mass unemployment.

Marx made a further point about the introduction of machinery: for a machine to be genuinely ‘labour saving’ in the sense of reducing the total labour-time required to produce something from start to finish, ‘less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery.’ (Capital, Vol 1, Ch. 15, section 2). By ‘labour’ Marx meant not simply ‘living labour’ or its immediate product but also the ‘dead labour’, the product of previous living labour, incorporated in the raw materials, energy, buildings and machinery used in production.

In a rationally-organised society based on the common ownership of productive resources so that production can be carried on to produce directly to satisfy human needs instead of for profit whether or not a machine did this would be the main criterion for deciding whether to apply it to production. Not all inventions of machines do displace more labour than would be required to produce them but, in a rationally-organised society, even machines falling into this category could be introduced if it was considered that the specific labour that would be replaced was considered dangerous, unhealthy or boring.

But this is not what happens under capitalism. Built-in to the capitalist system is a drag on the use of machines. As Marx went on to explain:

  ‘For the capitalist, however, there is a further limit on its use. Instead of paying for the labour, he pays only the value of the labour-power employed; the limit to his using a machine is therefore fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it.’

Under capitalism the immediate product of living labour is divided into a part that the capitalist firm has to pay for (wages) and a part that it doesn’t pay for (surplus value, the source of profit). This means that under capitalism a machine that would genuinely save labour – the time society has to spend to produce something – would only be introduced if it also reduced the total labour that the capitalist firm had to pay for, i.e. the dead labour incorporated in the machine and materials plus the living labour it employs. If this is not the case, then the labour-saving machine will not be introduced, as to do so would reduce the amount of unpaid labour that the firm extracts, i.e. the source of its profits. In fact, the lower wages are, the less the incentive to apply labour-saving inventions, and vice versa.

Marx gave some concrete examples to illustrate that under capitalism there is a difference between invention and application:

  ‘Hence, the invention nowadays in England of machines that are employed only in North America, just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries machines were invented in Germany for use exclusively in Holland, and just as many French inventions of the eighteenth century were exploited only in England … The Yankees have invented a stone-breaking machine. The English do not make use of it because the ‘wretch’ who does this work gets paid such a small portion of his labour that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist.’

This is the answer to Pistono’s question as to why the futuristic labour-saving inventions he describes have not been used on a wide scale: capitalist firms are only interested in using machinery if it will reduce their costs of production, i.e. the labour (living and dead) that they have to pay for. They will not and do not introduce machines that will increase their costs of production, even if their use would reduce the total amount of labour required to produce them.

This is why, as long as capitalism lasts, the rate of the actual application of machinery to production will always be less than the rate at which labour-saving machines are invented. In this sense speculations such as Pistono’s about the rate at which inventions will increase (he claims, somewhat hyperbolically, that this will become exponential in the coming decades) is irrelevant. It is not this that will determine the rate at which inventions will be applied to production as the rate at which ‘robots will steal our jobs.’ That will depend on the rate at which they reduce the labour that a capitalist firm has to pay for, which will be considerably slower than the rate at which labour-saving machines are invented.

Under capitalism invention is one thing, application another. The mere invention of some labour-saving machine does not destroy jobs; only its application does.

Will history repeat itself?

The trouble with many theories of economic collapse is that, if they were true, they need to explain why capitalism has not already collapsed a long time ago. Pistono’s argument is no exception. He is aware of this, as he quotes one critic as exclaiming:

  ‘Have you ever heard of this discipline called history? We’ve gone through the same crap 150 years ago, and none of what you say has happened!’

It’s actually a good question. Mechanisation has been going on since the Industrial Revolution started in the eighteenth century (in fact, that’s what this was) but it has not resulted in steadily increasing unemployment. Pistono’s reply is that it will be different this time as in the past the pace of labour-saving technological inventions has never been as fast as it is today.

We have just seen that Pistono commits the fallacy of confusing technological invention with the application of inventions to production. Even so, as in the past mechanisation has not resulted in growing technological unemployment, since the capitalist system expanded to absorb this, a weaker version of Pistono’s contention might still be valid: that the rate at which machines are introduced (despite the restrictions on this under capitalism) might still be faster than capitalism can expand. In this case unemployment would still grow.

While capitalism does expand in the long run it does not expand, as everyone is agreed nowadays, in a straight upward-sloping line. It goes in fits and starts, booms and slumps, with each succeeding boom reaching a higher level of production and employment than the previous one.

Because capitalism grows in this way, it needs a pool of unemployed workers, which Marx called ‘the industrial reserve army of labour’, that capitalist firms can draw on quickly in a period of boom and who become unemployed again when the slump comes. So, unemployment rises and falls with the capitalist business cycle.

Pistono does not go as far as Peter Joseph and claim that all unemployment today is technological, but he does advance the increase in unemployment since 2007 as proof of his contention that the increasing application of modern technology is causing unemployment to grow.

Some of today’s unemployment will indeed be technological in the sense of being living labour displaced by machines and unable to find new employment because capitalism is not expanding (Ricardo’s worst case scenario), but most is cyclical, the result of capitalism currently being in one of its periods of slump. It is the industrial reserve army of labour returning to its slump level. Also, capitalist economists talk cynically about a ‘natural’ level of unemployment (the rate below which they say a rise in price level would result). So, by no means all unemployment today is technological; in fact, only a relatively small proportion will be.

Predictions of a continual increase in mass unemployment will only turn out to be true if capitalism does not recover from the present slump, and even then wouldn’t increase at the rate this hypothesis suggests. If it does recover then unemployment will fall.

So the question can be reformulated as: Will capitalism recover from the slump or will unemployment go on increasing until the system collapses? Both past experience and the theory of how capitalism works based on this suggest that capitalism will eventually recover, however long it takes and however hard workers have to be squeezed. There is no way of knowing, though, exactly how long it will take.

In any event, capitalism will have to be ended by the conscious action of people who want to replace it by a system where the resources of the planet have become the common heritage of all. Then, there will no longer be any barrier to the robotisation of repetitive and boring jobs. Then, robots will ‘steal our jobs’ much more quickly than today and that will be OK, as there will be no harmful side-effects since access to what people need to live and enjoy life won’t be tied to working for a wage or salary. As Marx put it, ‘the field of application for machinery would therefore be entirely different in a communist society from what it is in bourgeois society.’

Adam Buick

Is capitalism collapsing? (2019)

Book Review from the April 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Coming Revolution. Capitalism in the 21st Century by Ben Reynolds (Zero Books)

‘Capitalism is not destined to go on endlessly accumulating until the sun burns out. Capitalism will collapse of its own internal contradictions within the 21st century, within the lifetime of children born today,’ so claims Ben Reynolds, author of The Coming Revolution. Capitalism in the 21st Century published by Zero Books last year. The first sentence is true, but what about the second which Reynolds bases on something Marx wrote? Is there anything in it?

Falling prices

Under capitalism wealth takes the form of ‘value’, the economic value of a commodity (as an item of wealth produced to be sold) being determined by the time it takes to produce it from start to finish (i.e., including to extract and transport the materials, the wear and tear of the machines used to produce it, etc.). Spurred on by competition between capitalist firms in pursuit of more profits, the tendency under capitalism is for productivity in the sense of the amount of wealth produced per worker to increase, or, from another angle, for the amount of time it takes to produce items of wealth to decrease. If it wasn’t for currency inflation this would manifest itself as a fall in the prices of commodities; when inflation is discounted the real price of most items of wealth has in fact been falling.

In the Grundrisse, some notes Marx made for himself in 1857-8, there is a passage that has come to be called the ‘Fragment on Machines’ (LINK), where Marx speculated on what would happen if this process of increasing productivity and falling prices continued to its limit. His conclusion was that it would lead to prices becoming zero or as close to zero as to make no difference. It also implied an enormous development of technology and its application to production. But if prices fell to zero, this would undermine the whole basis of capitalism as a system of producing wealth as value measured by labour time. Capitalist development, Marx wrote, was contradictory in that ‘it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth.’ The enormous development of the forces of production to the point where little direct human input was required would bring this contradiction to a head:

  As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value … With that, production based on exchange value breaks down …

In other words, commodities would be so cheap that they would have to be given away free, which would remove the incentive of capitalist firms to produce them as there would be no profit to be made by doing this. Production for sale with a view to profit would come to a stop.

This, in fact, is the only place in the whole of Marx’s published and unpublished writings where he used the words ‘break down’ (zusammenbrechen) in connection with capitalism as an economic system. Not that this is how he expected capitalism to come to an end. This passage was a thought experiment about what would happen if capitalism were to continue indefinitely and which showed that in fact it couldn’t. Marx’s view about how he expected capitalism to end is set out at the end of the last-but-one chapter of Capital on the ‘Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’ where he wrote that the working class would end capitalism by ‘expropriating the expropriators’, i.e. by human action not mechanical breakdown.

On the basis of this fragment, a whole school of critics of capitalism has grown up. Reynolds is one of them and argues that capitalism has nearly reached the end point in Marx’s thought experiment. Hence his prediction that it will collapse before the end of the century, paving the way for

  A state of society in which wage labor and the production of value have been abolished. Each person contributes what they can according to their abilities and each person receives according to their needs.

What we call ‘socialism’ but which he calls ‘communism’, not that we have any objection to that as for us the two terms mean the same and are interchangeable; though not for him as we shall see.

Technological developments

Reynolds bases this prognosis on two ongoing technological developments: 3D printing via the internet, and robotics and artificial intelligence. He points out that already the written and spoken word, moving images and music are, in principle, free for anyone with a computer linked to the internet (‘in principle’ because in practice states try to prevent this through artificial ‘intellectual property rights’). What permits access to these is access to a computer code which, once drawn up, costs nothing to reproduce. The same applies, he emphasises, to 3D printing, to produce physical things; this too depends on a computer code that costs nothing to reproduce. Still in its infancy, this will allow anyone with a computer linked to the internet, and plastic material to work on, to make things of everyday use. He expects this to catch on and then, when it does as he expects it will in the course of this century, a whole range of products will be taken out of commodity production as people will be able to produce them directly and more cheaply for themselves.

The other technological development he sees as undermining capitalist production is robotics and artificial intelligence. He mentions a factory in Japan which operates 24/7 without human presence, known as a ‘lights out’ factory since, because no humans are there, the lights don’t have to be switched on. These, too, he says are going to spread and affect not just the physical production of goods but office work, teaching and health care as well. Mechanisation has gone on since the beginning of capitalism but, because capitalism continued to expand, the displaced workers were able to find jobs in other or new sectors of the economy. Reynolds says that this won’t happen this time due to this ‘radical automation’ which he defines as ‘a long-term decline in the demand for inputs of labor caused by automation’, a decline in total hours of labour across the whole economy, that is, not just to produce particular commodities. In other words, the demand for labour-time won’t increase through the continued expansion of capitalist production as before; capitalism has reached an impasse, which is manifesting itself in rising unemployment, even if partly hidden by David Graeber’s ‘bull-shit jobs,’ and in a lack of profitable outlets which means that capitalism is in a state of permanent ‘overaccumulation’ (‘when so much capital accumulates in a capitalist economy that there are few possible outlets for profitable investment’).

Are we really there?

Is this correct? Is capitalism approaching the end-point in Marx’s thought experiment? No, as productivity is nowhere near as high as Marx posited. An appreciable amount of labour-time still has to be spent to produce most goods. Reynolds does not seem to believe it either as he doesn’t see capitalism being immediately replaced by communism but by something he calls ‘socialism’ (defined as ‘a socioeconomic system where the means of production are owned by, controlled by and operated for the benefit of the working class’). Under this, commodity production (production for sale) and value measured by labour-time will continue, but organised by workers’ cooperatives. As he admits:

  The form of socialism outlined previously is still built on labor, with the workers instead of capitalists reaping its fruits. It still requires forms of money, coercive taxation and meaningful scarcity to function (pp. 248-9).

The transition to Marx’s theoretical end-point of capitalism is to take place under this ‘socialism’:

  Ultimately, labor-time will be reduced to zero. The means of production will be commonly held, work will be purely voluntary, and goods and services will be provided free for all who need them (pp.251-2, emphasis added).

The trouble is he doesn’t say how long this is to take. It could in fact take longer than by the end of this century for productivity to rise so high that the labour-time cost of goods falls to zero, even sometime in the 22nd century. So, all he is saying will happen this century is that capitalism (as we know it) will collapse and be replaced by his ‘socialism’ which is in reality the sort of ‘market anarchism’ advocated by Marx’s contemporary and rival Proudhon, an unnecessary and ultimately futile attempt to create a commodity-producing economy without profits or capital accumulation.

Already developed enough

In any event, it is not necessary for production to be ‘fully automated’ for a communist (or socialist, in its proper sense) society to be feasible. For this, what is required is that the means of wealth production should be owned in common and production geared to meeting people’s needs directly instead of as now for sale on a market. True, it does require the forces of production to be able to turn out plenty to adequately feed, clothe and shelter every man, woman and child on Earth, a point reached years ago.

Despite not being ‘fully automated’, such a society would not produce wealth as value. As Marx put it:

  Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them… (Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875, his emphasis).

Marx wrote this with reference to an early stage of communist society when the productive forces were not yet sufficient, as they wouldn’t have been in his day, to go over to full free access based on the principle of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’. In other words, he for one did not think that a communist society would not be possible until the end-point in his thought experiment had been reached. What disappears in a communist society is not work, but value-producing work, or ‘labour’ (Reynolds in fact brings out well this distinction between ‘work’ and ‘labour’). People will still need to work in a communist society, only this won’t produce ‘value’ as the products would not be being produced for sale and so would not have an exchange-value. Such work will simply be producing use values as useful things and services.

What is encouraging about books such as Reynolds’ is that they represent a return to discussing a society without production for sale, measurement by labour time, and value, as a practical possibility opened up by the continuing development and application of science and technology to production.

Adam Buick

Automation in Perspective (1965)

From the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since automation, some ten years ago, became a popular topic for newspaper writers in this country an enormous amount has been printed and spoken about its nature and likely consequences — most of it totally uninformed and misleading. Nine out of ten of the busy journalists have no time to find out for themselves all they can do is to ask the so-called experts, and write up the appropriate sensational stories that their editors suppose the readers want. Few of the “experts” are any better placed when it comes to understanding what effects automation can have on the social system.

They may know a lot about the technical side of the computers and other equipment they manufacture or operate but little or nothing about the economic laws of the world in which they are going to be used — the world of capitalism.

It is only necessary to look at the wildly different forecasts that are made to know that something must be seriously lacking in the sources of information. On one side are the prophets of abundance, prosperity and leisure on the automation road; on the other those who tell us that soon most of the working class will be out of work, displaced by automated, worker-less factories.

A couple of samples. A writer in Sunday Citizen (6 Dec. 1964), Mr. Stanley Baron, after he had talked “to the top brains in Britain; made the forecast that before the end of the century,” in every industrial country, certainly in the West, most of the essential work will be performed by about 20 per cent of the people — chiefly the most intelligent. The rest of us will work only as much as we wish – or as much as society requires.” This would, he wrote, call for new attitudes to work and leisure, new cities, new forms of education — but not a word about the need for a new social system in place of capitalism.

On the same day Mr. Arthur Helliwell, writing in the People after a visit to America, quoted trade union officials who foretell that by 1970 — no need to wait until the end of the century — American unemployment will be up to 15 million, with “the American economy grinding to a complete standstill.” It is not difficult to show that there is something wrong with Mr. Helliwell’s facts, his reasoning, or his arithmetic. He tells of experts who “estimate that robots are gobbling up jobs at the rate of 40,000 to 70,000 a week,” and that between 2 and 2½ million men “are being thrown out of work every year.” Mr. Helliwell believes that automation, which has been going ahead fast in America for many years, destroys jobs wholesale and swells unemployment wholesale, and he quoted current unemployment there is “already 5,000,000.” If he had inquired a little further he would have discovered that American unemployment is not a couple of million more than it was a year ago, but actually rather less, and that the peak of unemployment occurred about thirty years ago when it was variously estimated at between eleven and fourteen millions, long before automation had been heard of. Also that the number of workers actually in employment in manufacturing industries is higher than it was a year ago; that is in precisely the field in which automation has had relatively big impact.

In Britain, where automation has so far been adopted much less than in America, the picture as regards unemployment is much the same, unemployment is lower than it was a year or two years ago, and the number of people actually in employment is at a record level. So, with much automation in U.S.A. and little automation in Britain, the trends of employment and unemployment have been much the same.

What then is the kind of impact automation makes in the field of employment? The answer is that it is the same kind as that resulting from all the mechanical and other labour-displacing developments of the past two hundred years. So while there might be something in favour of the arguments of those who want the name automation to be kept separate from other technical developments, there is no need to differentiate when we are considering the effect on the workers’ jobs.

The fundamental cause for the introduction of machinery in the 19th century or for the introduction of automation now is that the firm which is spending money on it hopes to make more profit with it than without it, either because it reduces the cost of production, or, as sometimes happens, because it enables the manufacturer to get his products on the market ahead of his rivals even though the cost is not reduced.

These developments have almost always had the consequence of destroying traditional jobs and putting the workers out of work, often with tragic consequences for the victims, who see their acquired skills rendered useless, and who are forced to take lower-paid jobs or find they can’t get work at all.

But here is it necessary to distinguish between the disappearance of certain kinds of work and the reduction in the total number of jobs available. Mechanisation, automation, and the displacement of whole industries all have the former consequences, but do they have the latter? Those who shudder about the monster automation are sure that it does. They are sure that automation will progressively and speedily reduce the total amount of employment for the working class. One group in U.S.A., “The Labor Committee for Full Employment,” at a Conference in December 1963, heard an address from Dr. Arthur Carsters in which he declared that it will be possible within the next decade, “to produce all the goods we need in the U.S.A. with two per cent of the working population.”

The object of the Conference was “to create more jobs”: if they fail, the result, according to their way of looking at things, will be that by about 1974, 98 of every 100 workers in USA will be unemployed.

Of course it isn’t true. It is based on a common misunderstanding of the relationship of technical change to increased productivity, a misunderstanding which leads those concerned into an absurd exaggeration of productivity and the extent to which it is increased by mechanical and other developments.

The corrective for this misunderstanding it to recognise, as Marx pointed out, that the amount of labour required to produce a given article is not merely the labour of the worker engaged in the concluding manufacturing or assembly processes but also the labour embodied in the materials and in the necessary transport, the fuel and the wear and tear of machinery etc. If we make the error of looking at only one part of the process, for example the work of the telephone operator, we get a wholly distorted picture. The introduction of an automatic system which reduces or eliminates telephone operators, will seem to mark a very great increase of productivity and reduction in employment; but in relation to the whole labour process in the telephone service, including the increased labour cost for the equipment itself, it will represent a very moderate reduction.

It is astonishing that Sir Leon Bagrit, Chairman of Elliott-Automation and the leading spokesman on automation problems, suffers from this kind of blindness to what ought to be an elementary aspect of his subject matter. In the first of his Reith Lectures on The Age of Automation he led up to his theme about the increase of productivity we can expect in future through automation by telling his audience that “in the United States . . . one man on the land produces more than enough food to feed fifteen men in the cities, and in fact is a surplus of food grown even by this small proportion of American labour force.”

The statement is in fact wildly inaccurate and misleading. Food, whether in U.S.A. or Britain, is not “produced” by men on the land: it is produced through a series of operations involving also the labour of the transport workers, the makers of farm implements and fertilisers, the producers of petrol etc. etc. (Sir Leon is equally in error when he supposes that the existence of a “surplus” in relation to the market is evidence of there being an actual surplus in relation to needs.)

If the rest of Sir Leon Bagrit’s estimates and forecasts have no sounder foundation than his opinions on agricultural productivity they don’t invite much confidence.

Growth of productivity has been and is still quite slow. In Britain, measured by the estimates of total annual production, it was rising at about one per cent a year before 1914, one and a half per cent between the wars and about-two per cent since. The plan to raise it to 4 per cent has so far not succeeded and the figure for the current year is expected to be two per cent again.

It remains to link up unemployment and employment with the effects of increased productivity due to mechanisation and automation. If total production of all kinds remained unchanged year by year, then in ten years 20 per cent of the workers would be unemployed and unemployment would increase year by year beyond that level.

But total output under capitalism does not remain unchanged year after year. Over the long term the general experience of all countries is for total production to go on rising, not merely in line with population but beyond it, but equally it is normal for the growth to be interrupted from time to time by periods of “depression” when production falls or stagnates and when unemployment rises. This would happen even without changes in technical methods of production, new machines, automation and so on, though they can aggravate what would happen anyway. It would therefore be possible for capitalism to produce another depression like that before the war, not because of automation but because production under capitalism is to make profit by selling what is produced in the world’s markets. The remedy is to abolish capitalism, but people like Sir Leon Bagrit have hardly begun to understand what capitalism is (though presumably he and his firm have a clear idea of the necessity to persuade British and other firms to buy their products). One of his foolish notions is that the world is divided into “capitalist” and “communist or socialist” countries and that automation may make it possible to put human values first and thus supersede both systems.

Let us enlighten him by reminding him that on both sides of the supposed dividing line between Russian State capitalism and Western capitalism, machinery and automated equipment is bought for precisely the same means — to reduce costs of production and capture markets. Not two worlds but one capitalist world.

Let us also emphasise that automation will not solve the basic problem of the working class. The automated equipment of the future will, like that of the present, become instruments for the exploitation of the working class in the interest of the owning class. Automation will neither destroy capitalism nor change its nature into something beneficial to humanity.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letter: This “Age of Plenty” (1934)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent (Jacobus, Heme Bay) writes as follows: —

   “This is declared to be an age of plenty, but there does not seem to be much sign of it. Can you say what means will have to be adopted so that all can share in the plenty? Will the State have to devise the means ?”

Reply.

The phrase "Age of Plenty" has been popularised in recent times chiefly by the American "Technocrats” and the followers of Major Douglas. It is also used by Sir Oswald Mosley on the one hand, and by sections of the Labour Party and I.L.P. on the other. The meaning they attach to it is that there has recently been a stupendous increase in the powers of production, resulting from machinery and other improvements, and that it only requires some modification of the monetary system to enable those powers to be utilised, thus supplying plenty for everybody with a negligible expenditure of labour and without interfering with the essentials of the capitalist system of society. In this sense the notion of an "Age of Plenty" is almost wholly false. In addition it is exceedingly dangerous, since the acceptance of it turns attention away from the real problem facing the working class, and from the solution to that problem. For example, one conclusion arrived at by the Douglasites is that machinery is rapidly reducing to a negligible quantity the need for human labour in production. Therefore, say the Douglasites, there will soon be no working class, all will be unemployed, thus destroying the very basis of the working-class movement. Anyone who accepts this false argument will naturally come to believe that the possibility of the conquest of political power by a Socialist working class has also been destroyed. For these and other reasons the believers in an "Age of Plenty" necessarily find themselves on the side of the opponents of Socialism.

The true position can be summed up as follows. From the point of view of what would be possible under common ownership the present powers of production are to a large extent wasted, the waste showing itself in the voluntary idleness of many able-bodied persons whose property incomes enable them to live without working, in the compulsory idleness of the unemployed, the waste of competition and advertising, the waste of armaments, and the maintenance of armed forces, etc., etc. This aspect of capitalism has been known to Socialists ever since the beginnings of the Socialist movement. The question is gone into in our pamphlet, “Socialism," where it is shown that as regards the technical conditions of production, the volume of wealth produced could be approximately doubled if these various forms of waste were eliminated.

But how can they be eliminated? Only the Socialist can provide the answer. It is impossible to eliminate this waste until capitalism itself has been abolished. The waste arises naturally and inevitably out of capitalism; it is not accidental. Unemployment under capitalism is a necessity to the running of industry on a profit-making basis. The rivalry of interests of national groups of capitalists inevitably produces the danger of war and therefore necessitates the maintenance of armed forces. Likewise capitalism, by the stigma it attaches to work, will always encourage members of the propertied class to cultivate idleness and non-productive occupations.

Under capitalism the capitalist class own and control the means of production and distribution and there is no way whatsoever of getting those means utilised for “production for use" instead of "production for profit,” except by first taking them out of the ownership and control of the capitalists and making them the common property of society as a whole. That can only be done by a Socialist majority first obtaining control of the machinery of government, including the armed forces. When that has been achieved, the world’s powers of production will be utilised to the full, freed from the wastes and hindrances of capitalism. Even so, there will still be no question of an "Age of Plenty,” as envisaged by the Douglasites and others, for their fantastic visions of productivity already increasing tenfold and a hundredfold are the result of ignorant misreading of the facts before them. Human labour has not been ousted by machinery; productivity increases very slowly indeed, and although under Socialism all sorts of barriers will have been removed, the powers of production as they exist at present will not by any means suffice to enable the world to live without work, as is the fallacious belief of many who use the term "Age of Plenty.” 

Edgar Hardcastle

No More Work? (2017)

Book Review from the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work'. By Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. (Verso £9.99)

This is in some ways similar to Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism, reviewed in the September 2015 Socialist Standard. Indeed Mason is quoted on the front cover as describing this as ‘a must-read’. Like Mason, Srnicek and Williams discuss the possibility of overcoming scarcity and eliminating boring work; unlike him, they give relatively little attention to the information economy, though they do refer to the importance of technological developments and automation, and say that any vision of the future must be based on current tendencies. They also emphasise the  likelihood of ‘surplus population’, with capitalism needing less labour to produce the same output, so large numbers of people will have trouble getting ‘decent’ jobs.

They begin by criticising ‘folk politics’, a common-sense kind of local political activism that is prevalent on the left. This, they say, is not wrong but it is not enough by itself: it is fine for movements such as Occupy, but is problematic for attempts to overcome capitalism and climate change, as it is too small-scale. Small interventions are unlikely to change the socio-economic system, and acts of resistance are defensive rather than active. To the extent that folk politics can be seen as similar to the policy of pursuing reforms to capitalism, these remarks are unexceptionable. Some other good points are made in passing, for instance that consensus decision-making can lead to the adoption of lowest-common-denominator demands.

The alternative to folk politics is to be more ambitious and aim for a post-work world, by means of ‘non-reformist reforms’ (compare Mason’s ‘revolutionary reformism’). The four minimal demands of this are: full automation, reduction of the working week (possibly via a three-day weekend), provision of a basic income and diminution of the work ethic. As part of this, ‘the demand for a post-work world revels in the liberation of desire, abundance and freedom.’ The authors also refer to ‘the possibility of production based on flexibility, decentralisation and post-scarcity for some goods.’

It is accepted that there are various ways of realising such a post-work future. One  would be ecologically unsustainable, while another would be misogynist, with women still bound to household work. Srnicek and Williams opt for the leftist version, which among other things involves open borders, a reduction of both waged and unwaged work, an improved welfare state and a global basic income. It is acknowledged that this would still have commodity production and private property, so would not be post-capitalist, but ‘would be an immensely better world than the one we have now’.

But, just as with Mason’s book, the reader is forced to ask, why just advocate this, why not abolish commodities and wage labour? The authors do refer at one point to the aim ‘to build an economy in which people are no longer dependent upon wage labour for survival’, and they also talk about full unemployment (which is not clear, but might mean an end to the employment relation). Moreover, despite the sub-title, their vision of future society is not really post-work either, as the aim is just to reduce necessary labour as much as possible.  So they are pretty inconsistent as to what they want, and moreover they see their proposed reforms as taking decades to achieve, so it is hardly a matter of ‘something now’.

The book makes some interesting points, but, while Srnicek and Williams criticise folk politics as too timid, their own demands are essentially reformist and so are themselves not ambitious enough.  

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Immaculate conceptions (2015)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

What’s been happening lately with the people from Occupy, UK Uncut and the rest of the rebellious ‘noughties’ crowd? Whatever activity there is has sunk below the media horizon and therefore dropped off the political agenda, while the restless radical pool continues to evolve into new forms and outgrowths, clustering, merging and diffusing in ways that seem more organic than organised. The big splashes in the morning papers have given way to a grey drizzly afternoon of self-doubt, boredom and endless questions.

What is one to do with a world ‘absolutely in thrall to capitalism’, where most radical groups ‘coalesce around a hollow capitalist meliorism’ or else focus on the bogus rhetoric of having no leaders at the expense of any real strategy, democratic oversight or ability to adapt to changing circumstances?

Thus speaks Novara Media, an ‘outgrowth’ of this very milieu and a sort of alternative online news service cum political analysis show aimed at the young radical, non-state anticapitalist sector. Its founders are a likeable and highly articulate pair of young postgrads/postdocs by the name of Aaron Bastani and James Butler, and five minutes of their quick-fire patter is enough to make your head spin.

What does Bastani say about non-state communist strategy in the 21st century? That the 20th century of mass one-way communication was the great outlier and that today’s pathways of communication through disparate and affinity-based back-channels is more akin to the 18th century. What does Butler say about the activist’s disavowal of theory? He explains that doers are always suspicious of thinkers: ‘there’s a history of people thinking that thinking means that one should be in charge of things and lead things, and movements led by thinkers and intellectuals is [sic] always a bad thing and tends to lead to paranoia and narcissism and overidentification’. They observe that protest should be offensive not defensive because defensive strategies become conservative and ‘fail to stake a claim on the future’, and they make clear that ‘people argue about political power needing to be purified, but it doesn’t, it needs to be overthrown’. Butler adds poignantly ‘we have been losing for so long that we’ve forgotten to ask how do we win, and what would winning look like?’

Well, what would winning look like for Novara Media? It would look like something called fully automated luxury communism (FALC). The argument is simple enough. Machines are taking all the jobs, so the future should be one of luxury and leisure. People have said this before but Messrs B&B don’t make the elementary mistake of thinking that this will happen without a revolution to overthrow the powerful elites. What’s appealing about their argument is that it emphasises what you can have tomorrow rather than what you have to put up with today. Communism for them is a glittering prize and an orgy of abundance, not an exercise in hair-shirt asceticism.

Do they mean non-state communism the same way we do? Oddly, Bastani mentions a ‘living wage’, which doesn’t fit the picture. Wages and money presuppose property relations and markets, which inevitably give rise to states. Leaving that to one side, are they anyway overegging the pudding? When talking about post-scarcity socialism we tend to talk about sufficiencies, not luxury. We do sometimes speculate about shortages in the short term as farmers switch from cash crops to subsistence, the ‘bottom billion’ are prioritised for food and healthcare, and the world productive system learns to readjust. Is it realistic and in fact responsible to promise luxury as standard?

As is common with future-gazers, Novara may have been seduced by their own vision. One only has to recall the utopian predictions of early advocates of nuclear power to remember that technology is always rosiest at dawn.

When considering anything to do with automation, indeed any machinery, one shouldn’t ignore that unwritten rule of the universe, Sod’s Law. If it can go wrong, it probably will, and just when you least expect it.

People who can only afford to drive old cars will have noticed that the more sophisticated the technology, the more unfixable and often disastrous it is when it ages and breaks down. It may be that the rate of development of complex systems always outstrips our ability to diagnose failures within those systems or, in the vernacular, we’re too clever for our own good. Why might this be so? Because as you add new features, sensors, cruise controllers, drop-down displays and so forth in arithmetical fashion into a closed network, the number of potential failures and multiple-node failures tends to increase in geometrical fashion.

In the immaculate world of the futuretopians, nothing ever goes wrong and everything always works at its optimum. If you ask what happens when the system breaks you get the response given out about the Titanic and Chernobyl: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got a system to cover that’. There is just now a debate in airline circles about whether to develop fully-automated planes without pilots, controlled just by their on-board computers. This is how capitalism drives technology - the purpose is simply that the airlines would save a pilot’s wage. Would socialists be interested in this too? Opponents will point out that a driverless car which fails can just stop, whereas a driverless plane that fails has no good outcome.

How much complexity is too much? What is so endearing about clunky, old-fashioned, non-electronic cars is that there’s not so much to go wrong, and not much you couldn’t fix yourself given a shed, a few tools and a basic grounding in car maintenance. Socialism would have production plants and factories for the sake of economy of scale, but not to the exclusion of local, small-scale production and maintenance.

Socialist production, being non-market and not for profit, would work quite differently from the capitalist market process. If you’re giving up your time to build a bus, a power station or a piano, you don’t want to have to put in further work repairing it, nor create work for others by making it difficult to repair. You would use standardised and recyclable parts which could be swapped out easily. You would not bother adding features which looked impressive but didn’t do anything. You would only use quality components, not cheap ones intended to fail. And you’d keep it simple. But simple doesn’t have to mean plain, or plain ugly. Taking a cue from William Morris we could stipulate that beautiful things should be useful, and useful things should be beautiful.

Fully automated luxury communism is a vision based on two assumptions, that people want luxury and that they hate work. We suggest that neither of these is correct. Sufficiency is sufficient for security, and security is what people really want, not to live like Roman emperors, even if today capitalism makes people fantasise about getting stuff for the sake of having stuff. Second, there is the obvious fact that labour, even quite hard manual labour, can be a huge pleasure when freely and cooperatively engaged in. If that were not so there would be no art, no hobbies, and no sport. Full automation, where machines do everything, is probably more a fantasy of capitalism’s stressed-out wage-slaves than a healthy aspiration of free people. And let’s remember to ask, what if it breaks down?

Novara is keen to stress that their ideas are negotiable and do not come fully formed and fixed. It is a fact to gladden the hearts of socialists that people like Butler and Bastani are out there keeping revolutionary ideas alive and fresh, but when concocting revolutionary recipes we would always counsel a pinch of salt.

Paddy Shannon