Once again similarities between Drucker’s thinking on the matter and that of his predecessors, particularly Marx, are clear. As Marx would write in the Grundrisse,
But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful efectiveness’ … depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production.
Remarkably, Marx even adds how this undermines labour as the central factor of production:
No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing as middle link between the object and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor.
Just like Drucker, Marx believed that this tension, between knowledge becoming a central factor of production and an economic system built on labour, inevitably meant a transition. Only for him the result was inexorable conflict, with the new only able to substitute for the old as the result of class struggle. According to Marx, even with the most developed machinery the worker could well be forced to ‘work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools’. Technology transformed work, and could improve people ’s lives, but only if it was coupled with an appropriate politics.
What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism?
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