In 1987 the US National Academy of Sciences published a report titled Technology and Unemployment. In it, restated almost word for word, is Marx’s criticism of technological change under capitalism, the key diference being the report’s authors consider such change to be wholly positive:
Historically and, we believe, for the foreseeable future, reductions in labour requirements per unit of output resulting from new process technologies have been and will be outweighed by the beneficial employment efects of the expansion in total output that generally occurs.
So while production becomes ever more eficient, and leisure is valued as a social good, increased productivity doesn’t lead to more free time but simply the production of more goods and services. In fairness to those defending it, such a view was not only founded on economic orthodoxy but also two centuries of observable change under capitalism. The diference with Marx in the Grundrisse is he thought there was an alternative, and that only in pursuing it could humans achieve freedom.
Communism: A World beyond Scarcity
While the average political commentator likes to cast Marx as an idealistic dreamer, the man himself repeatedly stated his distaste for describing what communism might actually look like – what he termed writing ‘recipes for the cook-shops of the future ’. While admirable in its humility, that is also irritating because one of the greatest minds to describe the shortcomings of the emerging system was well placed to at least suggest what might replace it. Marx’s view, however, was that workers in struggle were uniquely positioned to arrive at concrete solutions.
What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism?
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