By Ted Reese
Republished from the author’s blog.
Humans have longed to be free from toil. The Greek poet Antipater, a contemporary of the Roman statesman Cicero, welcomed the invention of the water mill, which worked “without labour or effort”, as the foundation of a “Golden Age” and the liberator of slaves.
Now in the epoch of late-stage capitalism, after a long and painful evolutionary road, the possibility of a ‘post-work’ world — with the ongoing development of robotic machinery, artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of increasingly sophisticated automation — seems like a tangible reality. Decades of relatively small, quantitive innovations (with computing power, for example, tending to double every two years) have led up to a point now promising huge qualitative technological leaps.
At the same time, the global workforce has been increasingly ‘deindustrialised’ — moved from manufacturing to services. The proportion of manufacturing workers in the total workforce in the US fell from 26.4% in 1970 to 8.51% in 2018.[2] Even Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have been deindustrialising in the past decade, from a much lower starting point than Asia.[3] Whereas industrialisation peaked in western European countries at income levels of around $14,000, India and many Sub-Saharan African countries appear to have reached their peak manufacturing employment at income levels of $700 (both at 1990 levels).[4]
As McKinsey Global Institute Director James Manyika said in June 2017: “Find a factory anywhere in the world [our emphasis] built in the past five years — not many people work there.”
The ‘fourth’ industrial revolution?
The bourgeois (capitalist) narrative trumpets the automation revolution as the ‘fourth’ industrial revolution.[5] Is this accurate?
The evolution of production is a process of developing man’s mastery over nature, of harnessing nature to serve our needs. New technologies give rise to new needs. For centuries — comprising the primitive communal, slave-owning and feudal systems — manual labour determined the technological basis of society. As the continual improvements and specialisations of the implements of labour reached their limits and slavery and feudalism became fetters (restraints) on the further development of the productive forces (technology and humans) as a whole, mechanisation (machine-aided production) necessarily replaced manual labour. Man was no longer the source of power which wielded the implements of labour.
Consolidating capitalist relations of production, this was the first industrial revolution — it marked a radical change in the technological mode of production, i.e. the mode of combining man and technology. Where man had controlled and wielded the inanimate elements of work, machines now dictated the inputs of man and relieved him as, in Marx’s words, “chief actor”;[6] but, in creating a division of labour, did not free him. “The hand tool makes the worker independent — posits him as proprietor. Machinery — as fixed capital — posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated.”[7]
Dominant versions of history tell the story that — since it was the most obvious contrast between machine production and the handicrafts and ordinary manufacture of small ‘cottage industry’ workshops — the upgrade of the steam engine made by Scottish engineer James Watt around 1775 was the fundamental catalyst of the first industrial revolution. By extension, it was considered the primary factor behind the rise of British capitalism and the ensuing industrial and economic dominance of its Empire. All thanks to the supposed individual genius of Watt (or was it his ‘Britishness’?).
This is an example of idealism, the theory that man’s ideas or ever-improving rationality determine the course of history. Marx’s method of dialectical materialism — that history is driven by ongoing conflict or interaction between material and social forces — enables the understanding of history per se, rather than individual versions of it. (Indeed, it also explains man’s ever-improving rationality.) That it was Watt who made this innovation is merely a ‘historical accident’ — if he had never been born someone else would have realised this inevitable evolutionary development.
Behind this ‘accident’ lay the driving necessity to develop machinery and liberate industry from the confines imposed by nature in terms of a power source. The development of steam power removed the reliance on water power and therefore enabled industry to be moved to other locations more freely. With steam power, the primary factor became access to coal, the source of the energy needed to generate steam, which in turn enabled greater access to coal. With the development of electrical power, industry was further liberated, and has therefore invariably moved to wherever the cheapest labour can be found.
The origins of the steam engine can actually be traced back to the ancient Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria. Within a system of slavery, though, it could not be utilised. Marx therefore argues:
“The steam-engine itself, such as it was at its invention during the manufacturing period at the close of the 17th century, and such as it continued to be down to 1780, did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the contrary, the invention of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam engines necessary. As soon as man, instead of working on the object of labour with a tool, becomes merely the motive power of a machine, it is purely accidental that the motive power happens to be clothed in the form of human muscles; wind, water or steam could just as well take man’s place.”[8]
In his 1967 book Era of Man or Robot? The Sociological Problems of the Technical Revolution, Russian Soviet philosopher Genrikh Volkov writes that what made an industrial revolution for Marx
“pivoted on finding the correct methodological approach. His examination focused on changes in the joint working mechanism and the combination of the inanimate and human elements of the process of production. Whether the machine is driven by an animal, a man or steam, Marx showed, is immaterial. The source of power, being part of the machine, only serves the system of working machines.”[9]
What is defined as the second industrial revolution by bourgeois scholars was therefore merely the ongoing development of the first. Taking place in the decades before World War I, it saw the growth of existing industries and establishment of new ones, with electric power enabling ever-greater mass production. Major technological advances included the telephone, light bulb, phonograph and the internal combustion engine.
The ongoing digital revolution — with the emergence of digital record-keeping, the personal computer, the internet, and other forms of information and communications technology — is considered to be the third industrial revolution. This is, perhaps, more arguable. The instruments described certainly amplify man’s mental capacity. But the digital revolution is a technological revolution and actually part of the automation revolution; not an industrial revolution by itself:
“Mechanisation begins with the transference to technology of basic physical working functions, while automation begins when the basic ‘mental’ functions in a technological process actually materialise into machines. This becomes possible with the appearance in production of supervising, controlling or programming cybernetical installations.”[10]
The productivity of machines is slowed down by the physiological limits of human bodies, and so automation becomes necessary; man is increasingly excluded from direct production and now works alongside fully mechanised machines, calling forth a radical change in the man-technology relationship. As Marx said of automation:
“Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.”[11]
This therefore means that capitalism “works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production,”[12] says Marx, since capital’s exploitation of human labour is the source of profit and exchange-value (the worker keeps less value than they create, with the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist and realised as profit through commodity sales).
The point of automation, therefore, says Volkov,
“should be to remove the contradiction between the inanimate and human elements, between man and machine, to break the shackle that made man and machine a single working mechanism, to act as Hercules setting Prometheus free to perform his great deeds. Potentially, automation can enable man to become Man with a capital letter, and the machine to become Machine in the full sense of the word. Freedom for man’s development is, at the same time, freedom for technological progress.”[13]
Defining automation
In Automation and Social Progress (1956), English socialist Sam Lilley defined automation provisionally as “the introduction or use of highly automatic machinery or processes which largely eliminate human labour and detailed human control”.[14]
The term is of course applied to a very broad field ranging from semi-automatic machinery to automatic factories. These are qualitatively different notions and so must be understood carefully. Volkov writes:
“Semi-automatic technology (semi-automatic machine-tools and lines, so-called cyclic automatons) represents a transitional form from ordinary to automatic machines. In this form, ‘automation’ is usually affected by mechanical means without, as a rule, recourse to cybernetical devices. The worker is still directly included in the process, which he supplements with his nervous system, intellect and, partly, muscular energy (loading and unloading of machines). At this stage, the new technology does not yet constitute automation proper and lacks its most characteristic features. As a matter of fact, semi-automatic technology stretches to the limit the adverse aspects of mechanisation by simplifying things still more, robbing working operations of all their creative content and contributing to their further fragmentation.”[15]
Automation proper can therefore be subdivided into three stages:
1. Initial or partial automation (separate machine-tools fitted with programme control, separate cybernetically controlled automatic lines). Here, the worker has relative freedom of action. They are included in the process only in so far as their duties include the overall supervision of operations, maintenance and adjustment of the machines.
2. Developed automation, e.g., automatic factories equipped with overall electronic control of all production processes, regulation of equipment, loading and unloading, transportation of materials, semi-finished and finished products. In this stage of automation the worker takes no direct part in the production process.
3. Full automation, which ensures automatic operation of all sections of production, from planning to delivery of finished products, including choice of optimum conditions, conversion to a new type of product, and auto-planning in accordance with a set programme. The planning of production as a whole and the overall control of its operation are also to a considerable extent transferred to automatic installations. “Automation of this kind is equivalent to automatic production on the scale of the entire society,” says Volkov. “Here, not only the labour of workers, but that of technicians and, to a considerable extent, of engineers as well, is excluded from the direct technological process. This does not mean, of course, that such work disappears altogether. It is only shifted to another sphere, becomes more creative and closer related to scientific work.”[16]
Base and superstructure
Under capitalism in the first part of the 21st century, we are still a fair way from achieving a singular fully automated system of production (The production process includes the transport of commodities to the point of sale/consumption, so workers who transport commodities (such as Deliveroo and other courier drivers) and check-out/till-point workers add value to a commodity. Drones, autonomous vehicles and self-serving tills are therefore automating the last stage of production.) That does not mean we are not moving relatively rapidly towards that outcome or witnessing an industrial revolution. McKinsey and Co expects “the near-complete automation of existing job activities” somewhere between 2060 and 2100, with the “most technologically optimistic” scenario putting the date at 2045.[17]
The first industrial revolution began before and necessitated the rise of capitalism (the printing press being the first generalised example of machine-aided mass production), just as the second begins before and necessitates the rise of socialism.
Marx recognised that the technological-economic base of a society determines its political and class superstructure. (Although the two of course interact and influence each other, the former dominates.) An industrial revolution has far-reaching consequences that go beyond the framework of technology and even beyond that of material production.
The first affected the character of labour (manual to mechanised); social structure (artisan and peasant turning into worker/proletarian);[18] the correlation of economic branches (agriculture being supplanted by industry); and, finally, the political and economic field (capitalist relations superseding feudal relations). Volkov spells out the most characteristic features of the second industrial revolution.
1) The production of material wealth has a tendency to turn into fully automated production “on a society-wide scale”. The second industrial revolution therefore “marks the completion of the establishment of industry”. At first, large-scale machine industry had a relatively limited area of diffusion, having taken the place of handicrafts and ordinary manufacture. But with the second industrial revolution, “industrialisation tends to spread also to the whole of agriculture, beginning with mechanisation, followed by comprehensive mechanisation and, eventually, by automation. Industrialisation is spreading to house-building, distribution, the community services (eg public catering) and even intellectual, scientific work. In this way, industry becomes the universal form of producing material wealth.”
2) While the first industrial revolution was local in character, being limited to a few developed European countries, the second industrial revolution “tends to involve all the countries of the world” as newly industrialising countries begin by installing the most up-to-date industrial equipment involving comprehensive mechanisation and automation. “This presents features of the first and second industrial revolutions at one and the same time. Consequently, the second industrial revolution is global in character, laying the groundwork for a subsequent economic and social integration of nations.”[19] (Our emphasis .)
3) The modern industrial revolution leads to substantial structural changes in the various spheres of social activity. Because of the ever-decreasing need for manpower for material production, scientific production increases both quantitatively and qualitatively and tends to assume priority over the direct production of material wealth. “Hence, science is the helmsman of the modern industrial revolution.”[20]
4) The dominant feature of the automation revolution concerns its social implications. As we know, the first industrial revolution led to the consolidation of capitalist exploitation. Large-scale industry spelt wholesale ruin for artisans and peasants, longer working hours, intensification of labour and narrow specialisation (the breaking down of the production process into a series of repetitive, monotonous tasks). In contrast, the modern industrial revolution in the socialist nations “leads to a shortening of working hours, an easing of labour, a modification of its nature (work becoming more creative and free), and to the elimination of the essential distinctions between town and countryside, and between mental and manual labour. While yielding the industrial basis for an abundance of material wealth and to distribution according to need, it also opens up possibilities for unlimited spiritual improvement of man’s personality.”
Volkov adds:
“The second industrial revolution resolves the contradiction between the machines and those who operate them, i.e. the contradiction within the joint working mechanism. By completing the automation of production, it paves the way for the implementation of the principles of socialist humanism in society. Hence, the very logic of the second industrial revolution strengthens man’s personality and humanism.
“In capitalist countries, however, this logic and the above-mentioned features of the second industrial revolution contradict the very essence of the relations of exploitation. All the same, mechanised labour gives way to automation, the antithesis between mental and physical labour tends to disappear. And the cultural and technical standard of the workers tends to rise. Substantial changes also occur in the social structure and in the relation between the various economic branches. In other words, many of the essential elements of an industrial revolution are distinctly on hand.
“The fundamental difference between the revolution in capitalist countries and its counterpart in the socialist states consists in its leading to the breakdown, [our emphasis] instead of the consolidation, of the existing relations under the conditions of the private ownership of the means of production. The modern industrial revolution has strained to the utmost all the contradictions of capitalism…. It does not reform capitalism. Instead, it creates the material preconditions for a social revolution and paves the way for the eventual replacement of capitalist relations of production by communist relations.”[21]
The automation revolution cannot be consummated under capitalism — socialism must be established to finish what capitalism started.[22]
The technological determinists who see automation as the ‘fourth’ industrial revolution do not put the development of technology in its proper socio-historical context, but instead in isolation from the human component of the productive forces. They fail to see “the genuine dialectics [interactions] of the forces and relations of production, [and] deny the inverse influence of the relations of production on the productive forces and the development of science and technology”.[23]
Recap
To summarise: over many centuries, manual labour determined the technological basis of society. The technological mode of production, the mode of combining inanimate and human elements, was subjective.
The next stage, paved by the specialisation of implements in manufacture, began when the main working function — control of partial implements — of the ‘living mechanism’, the worker, transferred to the mechanical mechanism, the machine. From human-inanimate, the working mechanism became inanimate-human. The technological mode of production became objective and labour became mechanised. This is then the first industrial revolution.
Finally, the third historical stage in technological development is ushered in by automation. The working mechanism becomes fully technical and the mode of combining man and technology becomes free and labour itself is automated. This then is the second industrial revolution.
Marxists therefore reject the bourgeois definition that posits the automation revolution as the fourth industrial revolution.
Towards a Single Automatic System
The maturity of technology that socialism will inherit in the 21st century means that the problems of planning associated with the 20th century Soviet Union will be much easier to overcome. (Indeed, in hindsight it is arguable that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proved to be somewhat ‘premature’, given that the Bolsheviks thought capitalism was entering its final crisis at that time.)[24] Thanks to contemporary computing power, ‘big data’ and stock coding, the dominant ‘command and control’ military style planning that overlooked the finer details is no longer necessary.
As Volkov writes:
“Let us anticipate the future and suppose that it has attained its zenith and that its characteristic features… have reached full development. We shall then have a society with fully automated production of material wealth, ensuring abundance. Such production will form a Single Automatic System which, for the sake of maximum efficiency, will incorporate all the branches of industry and agriculture, centrally controlled according to a single plan.
“From the social point of view, this will be a single society, because there will no longer be any workers or peasants previously associated solely with physical labour, and because the distinction between mental and manual labour, and between town and countryside, will have vanished. Creative work incorporating intellectual, emotional and manual activities will predominate. The life of society will be governed by the laws of free, instead of working, time, and so on.”[25]
The direction of history towards turning world productivity into a Single Automatic System shows that the final stage of socialism before the higher stage of communism is a de facto single world state. To get there each nation-state obviously needs to become socialist, with its own governing structure and centrally planned system working towards full automation in that country. A Communist International would be required to oversee development and trade between each socialist state — making sure, for one thing, that the plan incentivises the sharing of technologies and material wealth (including human resources) — which would act with the same semi-autonomy in relation to the International as a region of a country does to its central government or a state to federal level (or a local soviet to its regional soviet, and so on).
As this system develops, the Single Automatic System and a de facto one-state world would come into being, with borders being rejected as fetters on productivity — there being no transfer of ownership when it comes to trade in a socialist political union, anyway — and individual nation-states withering away in all but regional name.
We can see then that, whereas capitalism in the long run has a historically centralising tendency, socialism in the long run has a historically decentralising tendency. This then is the path to a borderless, stateless world, not the fantasy anarchist one, which, with its desire to introduce federations of fully autonomous communes, would effectively introduce new borders and undermine internationalism. The necessary aim of communism is to unite — to un-divide — the working class and humanity as a whole.
Conclusion
The essential point that must be grasped about automation is that it is abolishing the source of profit and exchange-value, i.e. capital’s exploitation of commodity-producing labour. This process is not reversible. Innovation and the tendency for machinery to grow relative to labour continues throughout history, under any mode of production. Under capitalism, the process is driven by the needs of capital accumulation.
Commodity-producers must continually expand production to overcome the inherent contradiction contained in the commodity: it is both a use-value, a utility; and an exchange-value, containing surplus value and sold for profit. The quicker and more abundantly commodities are made, the less labour, exchange-value and therefore profit tends to be contained in each commodity, compelling the capitalist to expand production yet further, only to continually intensify the contradiction. All production under capitalism is governed by this, the law of (exchange-)value.
This contradiction is also expressed in an overaccumulation of capital (a surplus that cannot be (re)invested profitably, resulting also in the equivalent surplus labour (unemployment)) and a contraction in economic output. This is at the same time an underproduction in surplus value. The necessary reaction for capital is to expand and cheapen the labour base and raise its productivity through innovation, only to increase the underproduction of surplus value in the long-run, since the amount machinery and capital employed tends to rise relative to the total surplus-value-producing labour employed.
Commodity-producers continually have to attract greater investment to turn a profit. As a company gets bigger, though, its costs get larger and more unsustainable, and so greater profits need to be generated than before (hence the dominant tendency towards the ever-greater monopolisation of industry, for economies of scale (efficiency)).
Since wages eat into thinning profit margins, expenditure on wages must be slashed. Robots do not need toilet/rest/lunch breaks, sick or holiday pay, and are therefore much more productive and cheaper to employ. (There is no such thing as ‘technological unemployment’, though; people go unemployed when capital can no longer afford to employ them (so socialism, capable of permanent full employment, would take advantage of automated production by training and employing far more scientists, doctors, teachers, etc). Even police and soldiers, who do not produce surplus value and are therefore paid out of the surplus produced by commodity-producing workers, are increasingly being replaced by surveillance technology and autonomous weapons, since one effect of shrinking profit margins is shrinking government tax bases, at least in relative terms per capita.)
Innovation is necessary to continually raise the productivity of labour, to meet the demands of accumulation — only the size of the ever-expanding total capital eventually becomes too large for the ever-dwindling pool of surplus-value-producing labour to renew and expand. The underproduction of surplus value becomes insurmountable. The system comes up against a historical limit of accumulation and breaks down into barbarism, necessitating socialist revolution.[26] Indeed, interest,[27] GDP and general profit rates have all trended historically towards zero,[28] along with commodity prices.[29]
As with previous modes of production, the contradictions between the productive forces (the means of production) and the productive relations (the ownership of production) are being driven into irreconcilable conflict by sheer historical force. While this contradiction has always been expressed under capitalism by the private appropriation of the products of collective, socialised labour, it is now increasingly expressed by automated labour and a diminishing source of profit, tending ever-closer towards the self-abolition of the law of value.
Just as capitalism matured in the womb of feudalism through the concentration of industry, socialism has matured in the womb of capitalism through the further concentration and monopolisation of industry and the deindustrialisation, servicisation, automation and digitalisation of labour. The new technological-economic base demands a new, applicable superstructure; ie public ownership of the means of production; an all-socialist state (a people’s democratic republic); centrally planned production on a break-even basis; and the replacement of money by digital (non-transferable) vouchers pegged to labour time.
Indeed, fiat money is becoming more and more worthless — pound sterling having lost more than 99.5% of its purchasing power during its lifetime, for example. Worldwide hyperinflation is already on the horizon.[30]
The age-old arguments about which system works better, capitalism or socialism, are quite redundant — the answer has of course always been socialism, but the point that now has to be stressed is that, for the first time, socialism is becoming an economic necessity.
As Volkov concludes:
“As the mass of exploited manual workers decreases due to scientific and technological progress, particularly automation, the mass of exploited intellectual workers, i.e. white collar employees, engineers and scientists [who increasingly contribute to commodity production] also increases in reverse proportion (or even more rapidly)…[31]
“Capitalism in the age of automation increasingly turns the majority of the population into proletarians and, in doing so, creates all economic, social and political prerequisites for the system’s downfall.”[32]
Ted Reese is author of Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown.
