Automation represents the second — not ‘fourth’ — industrial revolution. Just as the first necessitated capitalism, the second necessitates socialism
Tags: Automation, Socialism, Communism, Marx, Capitalism

[1] Aristotle’s Politics, translated by Carnes Lord, book I, chapter 4 (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

[2] According to the US Census Bureau, the service sector produces intangible goods, more precisely services instead of goods, and, it comprises various service industries including warehousing and transportation services; information services; securities and other investment services; professional services; waste management; health care and social assistance; and arts, entertainment, and recreation.

[3] Similarly: although the absolute number of slaves in the US continued to grow, the number relative to the whole population tended to fall before slavery was abolished in the US (approx. 25% in 1790 versus 16% in 1860). “Population of the United States, 1790–1860,” ncpedia.org.

[4] “Premature deindustrialization in the developing world”, Dan Rodrik’s Weblog, 12 February 2015.

[5] Andrew Norton, “Automation will end the dream of rapid economic growth for poorer countries”, TheGuardian.com, 20 September 2016.

[6] “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, World Economic Forum (weforum.org).

[7] In hunter-gatherer societies, the male and female sex practiced a form of group marriage, and as paternity could not be established descent was traced through the mother. The emergence of agriculture, surplus production and private property relegated women from a position of equality to one of primarily producing labourers to work the land. As the obvious inheritors of private property had to be legitimate heirs, this precipitated the invention of monogamous marriage and the enforced fidelity of the wife, replacing the matrilineal system with a patrilineal one so that paternity could be determined. Communism then will also complete the ‘sexual revolution’ as women (including those not in the sex trade per se) will no longer have to ‘sell sex’ to men in return for economic security; and contraception will be abundant and free for all; while the material basis for the exploitative sex trade will of course also disappear. People will finally be able to enjoy relationships free of economic considerations. A number of studies found that women (and all genders and sexualities) enjoyed much more satisfactory sex lives in socialist East Germany compared to capitalist West Germany, since sex was seen as a natural need and something to share rather than trade. Indeed, birth rates in late monopoly capitalism are falling and people are generally having far less sex since the 2007–09 global financial crash. (Ghodsee, K., Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism And Other Arguments For Economic Independence, Vintage, London pp. 132–9.)

[8] Slavery itself represented progress relative to the preceding universal war. During the US Civil War (1861–5), Marx wrote in support of the ‘bourgeois republic’ in the North against the slave oligarchy of the South, convinced that the complete abolition of slavery was a precondition for the emancipation of the US working class and that “labour in white skin cannot achieve dignity as long as it is despised in a black skin”. Furthermore, writes Henryk Grossman, slavery’s “inherent expansionist tendencies limited the possibilities for northern industrial capital and hence the development of the industrial proletariat”. Slavery was inherently dependent on expansion since land was cultivated by means of extensive farming — i.e. the intensive nature of slave labour exhausted the land. To preserve themselves, slavers had to export slaves and seize new territory. For Marx, the US form of slavery differed to the purely consumptionist system of antiquity (the ancient past) since it was part of the present profit-making system that served the world market. Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 came with the demand from Republicans to limit slavery to the South, to push it back out of the ‘free states’. The union therefore became worthless to the South. Its war against the North was not a defensive one for the status quo but a war of aggression and conquest. “It was not difficult to predict that, in this case, the living standards of the white working class of the North would gradually be forced down to the level of the slaves,” says Grossman. Lincoln eventually accepted that, to save the Union — and its most agricultural regions — slavery would have to be abolished. “It was an unavoidable struggle between two social systems that could no longer peacefully coexist, because the continued existence of the one was only possible by virtue of its victory over the other!” Grossman, H., edited by Kuhn, R., Henryk Grossman Works volume 1, Brill 2017 pp. 455–8. Soviet leaders that promoted peaceful co-existence with imperialist powers apparently did not adopt the same sort of logic, although their position was more likely driven by the impossibility of defeating US imperialism at that time. The lessons for the coming global struggle for socialism are clear: the old ruling class — representing a decaying political superstructure that is being made increasingly obsolete by the evolving economical-technical base — is compelled to start the class struggle. Eventually the old ruling class must ‘bite off more than it can chew’, i.e. attack — too intensely — an unmanageably large proportion of the masses, who are therefore compelled to fight back and overthrow the old ruling class; and become the new ruling class.

[9] After the so-called Black Plague (1346–53), the contraction in the labour market saw the demand for labour rise dramatically in relative terms (per labourer). Labour militancy exploded to the point that the peasantry abolished serfdom (the condition of a tenant farmer bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of a landlord). While the ex-serfs enjoyed ‘The Golden Age of the Proletariat’ over the course of the next century or so, ‘elites’ suffering from ‘disaccumulation’ plotted to brutally re-expropriate common land through the enclosure movement (which took place alongside the even more brutal process of colonialism). The re-loosening of labour markets and innovations that enabled greater mass production and concentrated capital into fewer hands doubtlessly aided the process.

[10] Marx, K., Grundrisse, p. 705 (Penguin Classics, London, 1993).

[11] Ibid, p. 702.

[12] Marx, Capital vol I, pp. 496–7 (Penguin Classics, London, 1990). The first generalised example of machine-aided mass production was the printing press, which revolutionised the production of text — the first globally mass-produced product — and images. The cost of books, which had been extremely labour intensive to make, fell to 2% in England of the price of an average manuscript prior to the advent of printing. “A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his 50th year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more than perhaps all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330.” Quoted in Reynolds, B., The Coming Revolution, loc. 122–31 (Zer0 Books, 2018). “Ultimately, the explosion of production created by the printing press made it necessary to overcome the limitations of local markets,” says Reynolds. “Thus, the printing press established the industrial production paradigm” (the technical foundation of a mode of production). While it took around 350 years for the industrial production paradigm to expand to other commodities, and 45 years for the steam-powered loom to overtake the handloom in textile production in Britain, it took only a decade for personal computers to make minicomputers obsolete (loc. 569).

[13] Volkov, G., Era of Man or Robot? The Sociological Problems of the Technical Revolution, p. 159 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1967).

[14] Ibid, p. 40.

[15] Ibid, p. 40.

[16] Ibid, p. 700.

[17] For mathematical proof of the labour theory of value, see Kliman, A., (1999) “Debt, economic crisis, and the tendential fall in the profit rate: a temporal perspective”; and Cockshott, P. (2008), “How physics is validating the labour theory of value”.

[18] Volkov, op cit, p. 45.

[19] Sam Lilley, Automation and Social Progress, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1956), p. 13.

[20] Volkov, op cit, p. 50.

[21] Ibid, pp. 50–1.

[22] Turner, A., Capitalism in the Age of Robots: Work, Income and Wealth in the 21st Century, Institute for New Economic Thinking, April 2018, p. 5.

[23] As the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel writes, the “final dark episode” of the enclosure movement of the 17th and 18th centuries — the privatisation of common land that brutally expropriated and proletarianised the peasantry — “coincided exactly with the Industrial Revolution”. Less Is More, Windmill Books, 2021, p. 39.

[24] The peasantry remains in some small vestiges of rural life in what may be called the neo-colonies of ‘developing nations’, particularly on the African continent. A significant branch of artisanal labour has not yet been eliminated either; namely, the traditional arts. The painter, for example, still produces commodities before securing a sale of their labour-power. In general, they do not own capital, locating this relationship as an artisanal one. While modern branches of the arts (beginning with film) work by the relations of capital and certain traditional artists operate as capitalists, the general organisation of the labour remains in this form.

[25] Half the population in Nigeria now has access to the internet, for example. But rather than going through the sequence of adopting landline access and then mobile access, as in Europe and North America, Nigeria leapfrogged the former and adopted mobile internet en masse. (Bastani, A., Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, Verso, London, 2019, p. 108.) This is not to claim that capitalist imperialism has not continued to under-develop, or slow the process of development, of the neo-colonies. Most countries, however, have now industrialised to an extent that was obviously not true before WWII, even if this development has been severely limited due to imperialist parasitism (i.e. the export of capital (machinery) and high-interest loans; and land grabs by multi- and transnational monopolies based (mainly) in North America and western Europe). The 20th century Marxist Henryk Grossman backs up the point: “It is not necessarily true that in countries recently opened up to capitalist production the organic composition is always lower. While West European capitalism may have needed 150 years to evolve from the organisational form of the manufacturing period into the sophisticated world trust, the colonial nations do not need to repeat this entire process. They take over European capital in the most mature forms it has already assumed in the advanced capitalist countries. In this way they skip over a whole series of historical stages, with their peoples dragged straight into gold and diamond mines dominated by trustified capital and its extremely sophisticated technological and financial organisation.” Grossman, H., The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System (abridged), Pluto Press, 1992, p. 183.

[26] Indeed, many areas of science in the era of late-stage monopoly capitalism are beginning to shake off mechanistic (seeing nature, including human bodies, as (merely productive) machinery) and dualistic (sentient humans, the thinking subject, versus the lifeless objects of nature, to be possessed; or civilised versus savage, justifying colonialism) bourgeois theory — and look more and more ‘pre-socialist’ (that is, dialectical (dynamic processes), systematic, holistic). As Hickel writes: “Science today is beginning to catch up [albeit, as far as Hickel is concerned, with indigenous and peasant animist theories (which capitalist ideology aimed to crush), which perceive all things — animals, plants, weather systems, etc — as animated, alive and essentially interconnected ­– a worldview hardly incompatible with Marxism]. Biologists are discovering that humans are not standalone individuals, but composed largely of microorganisms on which we depend for functions as basic as digestion. Psychiatrists are learning that spending time around plants is essential to people’s mental health, and indeed that certain plants can heal humans from complex psychological traumas. Ecologists are learning that trees, far from being inanimate, communicate with each other and even share food and medicine through invisible mycelial networks in the soil. Quantum physicists are teaching us that individual particles that appear to be distinct are inextricably entangled with others, even across vast distances. And Earth-systems scientists are finding evidence that the planet itself operates like a living superorganism.” Hickel, op cit, p. 33.

These developments in science reflect the increasing interconnectedness of the global economic-technical base and are therefore ‘permitted’ (while the political superstructure outwardly reinforces dualistic thought for the purposes of divide and conquer) in order to keep developing the base in order to keep cheapening labour and accelerating the circulation and turnover of capital — culminating in ‘the internet of things’, an online network of physical objects embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems over the internet. This development in itself reflects capital accumulation’s increasing dependence on monetising data — especially personal data created through unpaid labour, since next to no labour is needed to produce each unit of data, resulting in an increasingly invasive and oppressive superstructure — which has become more profitable than oil. See “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”, The Economist, 6 March 2017.

This dependence on data is especially significant because as Grossman says, “The physical nature of the commodity is a necessary precondition of its accumulation. Values enter the circulation of commodities, and thereby represent an accumulation of capital, only insofar as they acquire a materialised form.” Grossman, 1992, p. 153. Data is certainly physical in the sense that it must be stored somewhere, but this storage (per unit) is increasingly small. The nodes on a computer chip are measured by the nanometre (nm) — ie one billionth of a metre, or 100,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper. The smaller the node, the more can be fitted into the same small space. In 1965, a single transistor spanned the width of a fibre of cotton and cost $8 in 2018 money. Now, billions of transistors can be squeezed onto a chip the size of a fingernail, with the cost per unit having fallen to a tiny fraction of a cent (Bastani, op cit, p. 43). Sales of the 10nm class began in 2016, following on from 14nm in 2014, 22nm in 2012, and 32nm in 2010. Production of the 7nm class began in June 2017 and the 5nm class was expected to go on sale in 2020, but suffered delays, doubtlessly due to the deepening crisis of capitalism. At the same time, however, the exponential increase in data maintains rising demand for energy and storage tech in absolute terms.

[27] While it is true that the cultural and technical standards of the working class have tended to rise, the commodity fetish (the fetishisation of commodity/money/wage relations that obscure exploitative social relations) tends to strengthen in reaction to the increasing prospect of economic collapse. The ruling class also does everything in its power to lower and scramble class consciousness. The lower the general rate of profit gets, the more the mass (privately owned) media (which is compelled to cheapen its own production, anyway) aims to ‘dumb down’ and desensitise the working class to the violence, oppression and exploitation it faces. While the conservative factions of the ruling class tend to promote ‘traditional’ bigotry, the liberal faction tends to feed into this ‘culture war’ by promoting largely illusory ‘progress’ for individual ‘identities’ (genders, races, sexualities, ‘sex workers’, etc.) with the aim of reinforcing economically/socially constructed divides within the working class. Communists oppose discrimination against oppressed minorities but stress that doing so successfully requires focusing first and foremost on building working class unity. Furthermore: during the unprecedented global ‘lockdowns’ imposed by the ruling class in response to the arguably manufactured ‘COVID-19 pandemic’ starting in late 2019 — just as GDP growth had ground to a complete halt — brains shrank as a result of sensory deprivation and cerebral inactivity (“I have ‘pandemic brain’. Will I ever be able to concentrate again?”, The Guardian [online], 2021); and, with schools closed, child literacy fell significantly (“Covid ‘may leave 12 million children unable to read’”, The Guardian (online), 2021). (For an analysis of developments since late 2019, see Reese, T., “Capital’s profitability now depends on ‘lockdowns’, acute social enclosure, and ‘medical’ tyranny”, grossmanite.medium.com.) Deploying an array of bewildering psychological operations — usually aimed at creating a public clamour for stronger police/state powers, for example, by exaggerating spikes in crime or even manufacturing crime — the ruling class is waging an all-out assault on human consciousness. With capital’s dependence on monetising data rising exponentially and scientists having claimed to be able to implant memories in the brains of mice (“False memories implanted into the brains of sleeping mice”, The Guardian [online], 2015), we cannot rule out the possibility that the most ruthless sections of the ruling class are aiming to increasingly lock humanity into a world of virtual reality, as in the film Ready Player One or even The Matrix (where robots use unconscious humans as a power source). With surplus labour time tending towards completely subsuming necessary labour time, the ruling class will be compelled to attempt to re-establish absolute slavery if it is not to be overthrown by socialism. And with the fairly constant plundering of personal data, the trend towards 24/7 exploitation is already well underway. Even if any such extreme ‘dystopian’ scenario could somehow be established, however, the limit to exploitation (24/7, 365 days a year) remains, and so socialism remains an economic historical necessity.

[28] Volkov, op cit, pp. 162–4.

[29] Obviously fully automated production needs to be achieved without neo-colonialism or turbocharging the climate crisis. Along with other fibrous plants, such as kenaf and bamboo, hemp can potentially largely replace the materials that we currently extract from the earth (including trees).

Firstly, though, we should establish the role automation itself must play in solving the environmental and climate crises, since renewable energy is essentially a form of automation. Volkov wrote: “The opinion of sociologists and economists varies as to the main trends of scientific and technological progress, and their relative importance and role. Some lay emphasis on automation, others on atomic energy or conquest of outer space, and still others on the development of production mainly along chemical lines. But automation is not just one of these trends. It is a historically conditioned form of industrial development in a new historical stage of technical development, and is an element of all modern scientific and technological progress, and all its trends. The development of production along chemical, biological, or ‘cosmic’ lines (i.e., the application for industrial purposes of space, and, in terms of the future, also the organisation of production in outer space), and the use of the new powerful sources of energy — all this is tied up with automation and is inconceivable without it.” This is because a new form of energy “will not yield a substantial increase in the productivity of social labour unless the necessary technical conditions are provided for obtaining and using it, including automation as an indispensable factor. It is not until these conditions are available that the new source of energy will accelerate technological progress and act as a pusher of further changes in the ‘man-technology’ system.” (Op cit, p. 54.) Marx could see that the mechanical treatment of materials would give way to chemical methods. But before those methods could be applied in industry, they had to be given the corresponding technological form in terms of mechanisation or automation. Unlike mechanical methods of treating matter, “chemical reactions do not require the use of implements exerting a direct influence on the object of labour. The chemical properties themselves play the role of such ‘implements’. Nor is there any need for the power required in mechanical methods for driving the tools. Once the substances have been brought into contact, the reaction generally proceeds automatically…. In addition, whereas mechanical treatment is the result of a series of discrete, disjointed, singular movements, chemical treatment is continuous by nature, since chemical reactions go on without interruption. Automatic processes and continuity are the indispensable features typical of automation. Hence, chemical methods of treatment correspond to the very essence of automation (which cannot be said about mechanical and certain physical methods). Furthermore, chemical methods cannot dispense with automation, inasmuch as many chemical processes are harmful to health, and also because their control requires absolute precision, which only cybernetical devices can ensure. Close alliance between chemistry and automation will lead to the creation of new synthetic materials with miraculous properties, and this will revolutionise automation itself. Bulky automatic lines consisting of mechanical units with their complex and noisy systems of transmission and transportation will give way to compact, noiseless, elegant and dependable plastic installations.” (Op cit, p. 56–7.) Imagine, then, a lightweight Single Automated System built out of plant-based plastics/graphene. What’s more — and this was something, Volkov points out, that sci-fi novelists and other bourgeois prophets failed to anticipate — because “light, space and greenery are absolutely redundant for cybernetical installations… it seems more likely that automatic production of material wealth will be transferred underground, for man will thus avoid polluting the atmosphere and encumbering our planet, while enjoying to his heart’s content the vegetation and sunshine on its surface”. (Op cit, p. 64.) The accelerated development of automation under socialism — since the fetters on production of the profit motive and surplus capital will be removed — will minimise the mass of land dedicated to industry, increasingly creating more space above ground for reforestation, rewilding, hemp farming, countryside, public parks, and so on. In this way, whereas automation intensifies the alienation between man and nature under capitalism, it reunites them under communism.

One of the most institutionalised forms of this alienation — the worker is alienated from the products she makes that are appropriated by the capitalist; and since these products are made from nature, she is also alienated from nature — has been the prohibition and under-utilisation of hemp. Hemp in Latin actually means ‘useful’ — surely making it the ideal match for the use-value basis of socialism — since it is one of the only plant species that provides food/medicine, fuel and fibre. It was used prolifically by humans for at least 10,000 years before capitalism, which had to prohibit its production because its low labour intensity makes it relatively unprofitable and its versatility and cheapness threatened labour-intensive extractive industries. It is only now that the fossil fuel and other extractive industries have become so capital-intensive and therefore increasingly unprofitable that hemp and cannabis prohibition has started to end.

Hemp grows very quickly with little water, making it drought-resistant; heals and cleanses even the most damaged and poisoned soil, reversing land degradation and desertification, thanks to its deep aerating root system; and draws down CO2 from the atmosphere faster than any other plant. Since it grows tightly packed, nor does it need toxic pesticides that damage and ruin the soil and its biodiversity. Biofuel obviously releases gasses previously trapped in the plant back into the atmosphere when burned. But the unburned products made from hemp sequester the CO2 indefinitely. Highly-insular hempcrete makes the entire process of constructing and using buildings carbon-negative. A worldwide hemp/plant-based industrial revolution is therefore absolutely essential if we are to reverse desertification and stabilise the climate; and with the added bonuses of ending pollution, whether plastic or atmospheric, and furthering technological and industrial advancement: scientists have found that hemp graphene outperform lithium and conventional graphene as supercapacitors and conductors.

(Similarly, mycelium, a type of fungus, can be coaxed, using temperature, CO2, humidity and airflow, to rapidly build fibrous structures for things such as “packaging, clothing, food and construction — everything from leather to plant-based steak to scaffolding for growing organs”; all with minimal (mostly compostable) waste and energy consumption. (Bayer, E., (2019), “The mycelium revolution is upon us”, ScientificAmerican.com.) Mycelium is also used to bind hemp bricks. See also: Adamatzky, A., (2018) “Towards fungal computer”.

Other examples of fibrous plants that can be used in hi-tech production: banana peel can be made into high-performance sodium-ion batteries. Solar panels can be made from leaves and grass clippings (‘MIT creates solar cell from grass clippings’, Extreme Tech (online), 2012.) Other general options include: carbon-negative ‘sky mining’. This can be employed, for example, to make diamonds that are physically and chemically identical to those mined from the earth by drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. Producing a conventional one carat diamond requires the shifting of around 1,000 tonnes of rock and earth, consumes almost 4,000 litres of water, and generates more than 100kg of carbon emissions. (‘UK ‘sky mining’ facility creates carbon-negative diamonds’, Engineering & Technology (online), 30 October, 2020.) Gold that is ‘purer’ than mined gold, meanwhile, can be grown in labs. (Mettal, G., et al., (2018) Nobler than the Noblest: Noncubic Gold Microcrystallites, Angewandte Chemie.))

We are not calling for a hemp monoculture. In 1984 it was estimated that just 6% (90 million acres) of contiguous US land cultivating hemp could supply all then-current demands for oil and gas, while maintaining a neutral carbon system. (‘Coincidentally’, the US government pays farmers not to grow on 6% of the farming land (to keep food prices high.)* Clearly the figure would have to be higher than 6% if hemp were also to replace steel, concrete, plastic and lithium, etc. While the economy is now much bigger than in 1984, a lot of what we presently produce is completely wasteful — much novelty tat, bombs, energy-intensive financial systems, etc. — made only to serve the needs of accumulation. As things like lab-grown food and 3D-printing become more diffuse and ‘localised’, as local life becomes more pleasurable, and public transport improves exponentially, private forms of transport like cars will become increasingly obsolete, too. And as the means of production become smaller and move underground, there will be more overground space to revive the environment and biodiversity. So a hemp monoculture is not necessary. (Sources: ‘History of hemp’, Hemp.com; Burns, J. (2020), ‘How cannabis coevolved with humanity, and could save it now’, Forbes.com; Briggs, J. (2012), ‘Hemp fuel guide’, Hemp Frontiers; Kaucic, G. (2019), ‘A sustainable alternative to fossil fuels: hemp & biofuel’, Hemp History Week; Mitlin, D., et al (2013); Interconnected Carbon Nanosheets Derived from Hemp for Ultrafast Supercapacitors with High Energy’, American Chemical Society Publications; Murray-Smith, R. (2017), ‘The hemp battery performs better than the lithium battery’, Cannabis Tech; UK Hempcrete, ‘Better-than-zero-carbon buildings’; Martino, J. (2012), ‘How hemp became illegal: the marijuana link’, Collective-Evolution.com.)

(There is also a growing body of anecdotal evidence that hempcrete can absorb reasonable quantities of electromagnetic interference (EMI). (“Why we should build with Hempcrete”, Hemptank.co.uk, 2019.) The electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as possibly carcinogenic to humans.)

There is also the potential for micro-organisms to supply a near-infinite source of energy. In 2018, scientists in the US confirmed a theory first proposed by Soviet geologists when they found huge populations of bacteria living in the extreme temperatures of Earth’s crust, despite the lack of photosynthesis and nutrients, living solely from chemical reactions fuelled by geothermal energy. They estimated that up to 23 billion tonnes of micro-organisms live in this “deep biosphere”, making it the largest ecosystem on the planet and accounting for nearly 400 times the amount of carbon found in all living humans. Here lies a potential source of abundant energy (although we will have to assess whether the benefits outweigh the impacts of drilling).

Other scientists have even found that the Geobacter bacteria found in human waste can convert sewage into fresh water and produce electricity in the process. It is now thought that one day microbial fuel cells could power our phones, household appliances — and even spaceships.

Investment in microbial fuel cells will remain seriously limited, however, until value-creation is based solely on utility instead of exploitation and profit, since capital cannot exploit the labour time of microbes!

Emissions-free, energy-dense nuclear power, is also an option. The initial impact of mining uranium on the environment must be re-assessed by an independent socialist state, but to prove our earlier point, nuclear has not been abandoned because of safety fears, but because its capital-intensity has become unprofitable as ever-growing total capital becomes harder and harder to expand by the relatively diminishing pool of human labour. In terms of worker safety, nuclear is the safest form of energy production.

There is also the prospect of space-based solar power and associated wireless transmission, without the intermittency of night time or winter suffered by solar panels and wind turbines on Earth. This, too, however, has proven too expensive for investors who won’t invest without the prospect of a higher return.

[30] Volkov, op cit, p. 166.

[31] Volkov, op cit, p58–9.

[32] Ibid, p60.

[33] Ibid, p60–1.

[34] Ibid, p62.

[35] Having inherited an undeveloped peasant-based economy decimated by WWI and then counter-revolution, the Soviet Union faced many major problems, including widespread illiteracy and the dominance of cultural social conservatism (i.e. fiercely patriarchal, religious and xenophobic ‘values’ that the ruling class had cultivated in all classes). Yet there were many phenomenal successes, including the abolition of both unemployment and economic recession (outside of wartime), and the stunning lead the Soviet Union initially took in the space race. Soviet inventions included: the radio antenna; 2- and 3-D holography; artificial satellite; the programmable computer; the nuclear power plant and nuclear-powered submarine; the AK assault rifle; the mobile phone; and Tetris. See “Russian inventions in the soviet era”, inventions-handbook.com. According to an eye-witness account from Lilley, in the 1950s the Soviet Union also had the two most advanced automated factories in the world. The continual aggression the Soviet Union faced from western imperialist powers, however, forced it to spend increasingly heavily on defence at the expense of its civilian economy and again decimated its population and infrastructure during WWII. The situation combined with the scarcity that arose from this was bound to bring about a centralisation of power to a greater degree than desired and at times also manifested in regressive social policy (such as restrictions on abortions when contraceptives could not be imported). That the Soviet Union, where it could circumvent sanctions, had to import various goods and raw materials from capitalist countries also meant it could never fully plan its economy, since volatile foreign prices could not be predicted. For the same reason, nor could money be abolished (although it was used internally, at least at first, only as a kind of index). This also meant there was some logic to allowing a black market to flourish, in order to build up foreign currency, especially the US dollar, the world’s reserve currency, upon which the socialist bloc eventually became too dependent. All this held back the Soviet Union’s ability to transition to the higher stage of communism, resulting in relative economic stagnation and a growing pressure in the direction of capitalist reform, especially from skilled workers and intellectuals who knew they would earn more under capitalism. This latter problem understandably convinces many people that socialism cannot work because of ‘human nature/greed’, but as capitalism is now abolishing itself for good, this potential problem will soon no longer exist (not to mention that world socialism will bring about abundant material wealth for all).

[36] Volkov, op cit, p. 169.

[37] At the end of May 2021, it was reported that, “A military drone may have autonomously attacked humans for the first time without being instructed to do so, according to a recent report by the United Nations Security Council. The report, published in March, claimed that the AI drone — Kargu-2 quadcopter — produced by Turkish military tech company STM, attacked retreating soldiers loyal to Libyan General Khalifa Haftar. The 548-page report by the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Libya has not delved into details on if there were any deaths due to the incident, but it raises questions on whether global efforts to ban killer autonomous robots before they are built may be futile.” (“Military drones may have attacked humans for first time without being instructed to, UN report says”, The Independent (online), 31 May 2021.)

Like the rise of CCTV and new forms of advanced surveillance, such as face-recognition tech, the primary reason for the rise of ‘killer robots’ is again the demands of accumulation: wages eat into profit margins, even when paid by the state — such money could otherwise go to subsidising capital directly. The other benefit of increasingly sophisticated surveillance is the data that can be gleaned from people’s phones and computers and sold on to third parties.

Could robots turn on humans in general? As an ‘ethical safeguard’, autonomous weapons should apparantly be programmed to ‘target combatants only’ — but what if, in a war-torn world where all humans have been reduced to surplus labour, every human is forced to become a combatant, scavenging to survive? This hypothetical scenario evokes a fight for socialism that becomes a protracted struggle by an already classless, lumpenised humanity against the common enemy of the ‘dictatorship of artificial intelligence’. Something like this would have to unfold in stages, of course. Perhaps robots could be programmed not to kill a select group of controlling human dictators, at least at first. Autonomous weapons may not need to become ‘self aware’, as in Terminator, to instigate ‘Judgement Day’, though (when the war of man versus machine begins). In April 2018, the RAND Corporation warned that AI could undermine the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) rationale that is meant to deter nuclear war. Geist and John, (“How Might Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War?”, RAND.org, 2018.) Programmers have claimed that the algorythms autonomous machines run on are already “out of control” since ‘machine-learning’ means they have learned to self-code. (“Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control?”, The Guardian (online), 15 June 2018.) This ‘learning’, though, seems to be based on extrapolations of information starting from that input by biased or Machiavellian human programmers. Predictive policing algorithms have proven to be racist, for example. (“Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled,” MIT Technology Review, 17 July 2020.)

Tesla owner Elon Musk, seeing only a business opportunity, has claimed that humans will only be able to survive the robot age by merging with machines. Under capitalism, the latest developments in technology would be used increasingly to raise the productivity of labour, fight wars and strip away human rights. A ‘think piece’ on ‘human augmentation’ on the UK government’s website published in June 2021 (since deleted) stated that: “People have legal rights and machines do not, but human augmentation will make it increasingly difficult to adopt this binary approach as machines are integrated with our bodies… It could be argued that treatments involving novel vaccination processes and gene and cell therapies are examples of human augmentation already in the pipeline. Genetic engineering refers to the modification of reproductive cells. Germline modification affects all cells in the organism and the change is passed on to the next generation. Brain interfaces, also known as neural interfaces or brain computer interfaces, enable direct communication between brain and computer. Neurostimulation can be used to change brain function. One company has developed a neurosurgery robot capable of implanting flexible polymer threads, each the width of a human hair fitted with 32 electrodes, into the brain. The technology is being used on rodents and is intended for future human use. Implanted augmentations incur medical risk and there may be side effects that manifest long after safety certification has been awarded.”

Socialism will not throw the baby out with the bathwater, of course. Innovation continues under any mode of production, and socialism is needed to complete the automation revolution. See page 13, under the heading ‘Automation: a humanised (self-controlled) force’.

[38] Labour militancy in the past has often been at its most powerful as loose labour markets tighten (i.e., when high unemployment turns into high/full employment), usually via war, famine, etc., diminishing competition between workers and making the demand for labour (per worker) higher, increasing labour’s bargaining position and economic independence as a whole. (Loose labour markets provide capital with a reserve army of cheap labour, compelling the employed to accept lower wages.) Such militancy has usually ended in compromise between capital and labour, even after extremely bloody continent- or globe-straddling conflicts. There are very striking similarities between labour’s massive gains in ‘the Golden Age of the European proletariat’ of approx. 1360–1500 (the overthrow of serfdom, etc.), after the so-called Black Death, versus the following four centuries of rollbacks (enclosure, colonialism, etc.); and the post-WWI/II gains (a number of socialist revolutions plus numerous social democracies that included significant nationalisation programmes) versus the post-1973 rollbacks (globally). Two encouraging differences: firstly, labour ‘went further’ in the second period of gains, presumably because the number of poor peasants and labourers had grown relative to the number of landlords and capitalists; and because the economic crisis was deeper. Secondly, the second period of gains and rollbacks took place over a shorter period of time (approx. 150 (gains) versus 400 years in the first; 70 versus 45 and counting in the second), indicating that history tends to accelerate/periods of class struggle tend to shorten, presumably because of technological advances and, again, the growth of labour relative to capital and the deepening of economic crisis, i.e. the greater level of overaccumulation. The final crisis combined with the automation revolution, however, poses the likely new problem of an ever-looser labour market, amid populations exponentially greater than even a century ago. Marx certainly thought developments that “put the majority of the population out of [work]” would “cause a revolution” (1991, p. 372). Paul Mattick, writing in 1934, after the failures of several revolutionary situations, concluded that: “Only when the proletariat must necessarily be absolutely pauperised are objective conditions ripe for a real revolutionary movement.” (“The Permanent Crisis — Henryk Grossman’s Interpretation of Marx’s Theory Of Capitalist Accumulation”, Paul Mattick Texts 1, 1926–70, p. 114 (Word doc.)). With automation abolishing the source of profit, compromise and reform will finally no longer be an option. Exactly how long the global revolution may take is impossible to say, but the prospect of money becoming increasingly worthless for the vast majority of people; and the possibility that capital may not be able, at some stage, to pay/feed/fuel its police, spies and armies* (which are being privatised and automated) does at least generate the possibility of the kind of mass defections that have not usually been possible in the past (other than in the case of the near bloodless seizure of power in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (and when hyperinflation sparked the collapse of the Soviet Union), when Russia was badly losing a world war that bourgeois and social democratic reformist leaders wanted to continue). (There is also the possibility that capital will attempt to resort to chattel slavery, which could even form part of plans to colonise Mars, etc. (since there is presently no labour to exploit there). This would ultimately fail for the same reasons as in Nazi Germany: the resistance and lethargy of slaves meant they were very unproductive; and the fuel and other costs of transporting, housing and exterminating became too onerous.) Clearly, compromise on labour’s part in the past has often been driven, perhaps even always, by exhaustion and war-weariness (including in terms of the Soviet Union taking up a position of ‘peaceful co-existence’ (in practice, to varying degrees) with imperialist powers during and after WWII). To limit conflict as much as possible (especially given the complication of the impact of modern-day weapons on the climate crisis), it may be prudent to compensate the last capitalists (most will go bust before any successful revolution, anyway) for expropriations (just as the extremely rebellious final slave-owners were) via long-term debt repayments, and permit them to keep their houses and holiday homes. Obviously if genuinely reasonable offers are rejected, they will have to be expropriated without compensation.

* In 2011, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congress that a US government default (failure to repay its debt) would cause interest rates to spike globally because US Treasury bonds represent the benchmark borrowing rate and investors would no longer be as sure of future payment. “Secretary Geithner sends debt limit letter to Congress”, Treasury (online), 1 June 2011.

[39] The base interest rate in the US and UK, the long-time dominant imperialist powers, had never been lower than 1% and 2% respectively before 2010, but has now been stuck at 0% more or less ever since.

[40] According to estimates by the Marxist Esteban Maito, the general rate of profit in the ‘core’ i.e. imperialist countries fell overall from a decade average of 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. As of 2014, it is on course to reach zero around 2054. The Historical Transience of Capital: The Downward Trend in The Rate of Profit Since XIX Century, Universidad de Buenos Aires (2014), p. 18. Average GDP growth rates in what the World Bank defines as ‘high income countries’ are already closing in on zero, having fallen every decade apart from the last one for the past half century: from 5.59% in the 1960s, to 4.15% in the 1970s; 2.93% in the 1980s; 2.35% in the 1990s; and 1.78% in the 2000s. The figure rose slightly to 2.1% in the 2010s, but this minor reprieve, based on murderous austerity measures and record levels of debt, has already proven to be unsustainable. My calculation. Source: WorldBank.org “GDP growth (annual %) — High income” (online).

The history of interest rates provides further evidence of the same phenomenon. Paul Schmelzing, an economic historian from Harvard University, has produced the most comprehensive survey to date of long-term interest rates, going back to the 14th century. His work shows that today’s low short-term yields follow logically from a downwards historical trend. “The century-average safe real rate peaked in the 15th century at 9.1%, and declined to 6.1% in the 16th century, followed by 4.6% in the 17th, 3.5% in the 18th century, and 1.3% (thus far) for the 21st century… My new data showed that long-term real rates — be it in the form of private debt, non-marketable loans, or the global sovereign ‘safe asset’ — should always have been expected to hit ‘zero bounds’ around the time of the late 20th and early 21st century, if put into long-term historical context.” Even negative long-term real rates “have steadily become more frequent”. Schmelzing says, therefore, that low rates cannot be explained merely by ‘secular stagnation’, i.e. a long-term period of low or no economic growth, as is claimed by mainstream liberal economists. The US ‘libertarian’ right blames the establishment of a central bank and the severing of the gold standard in 1913. The overall trend, though, has “persisted across a variety of monetary regimes: fiat- and non-fiat, with and without the existence of public monetary institutions… The long-term historical data suggests that, whatever the ultimate driver, or combination of drivers, the forces responsible have been indifferent to monetary or political regimes; they have kept exercising their pull on interest rate levels irrespective of the existence of central banks, (de jure) usury laws, or permanently higher public expenditures. They persisted in what amounted to early modern patrician plutocracies, as well as in modern democratic environments, in periods of low-level feudal Condottieri battles, and in those of professional, mechanised mass warfare.” Paul Schmelzing, “Eight centuries of global real interest rates, R-G, and the ‘suprasecular’ decline, 1311–2018”, bankofengland.co.uk, 3 January 2020, pp. 3–79.

[41] For example, whereas the world’s fastest supercomputer in 1975 commanded a price of $5m ($32m in 2013’s money), an iPhone 4 released in 2010 with the equivalent performance was $400. Whereas the first example of Human Genome Sequencing — which, in line with socialist principles, is set to revolutionise health care by making it preventative — required 13 years and billions of dollars, it now takes under an hour and could cost “as little as flushing a toilet” by 2022. (Bastani, op cit, p. 146.) Aerospace companies producing engines in 2010 for $24m in 24 months are now 3-D (three-dimensional) printing them for $2,000 in two weeks. Furthermore, rather than having globalised supply chains, such companies foresee the entire rocket being built ‘at home’. (Ibid, p. 123.) While ‘offshoring’ manufacturing jobs to the ‘low-income economies’ saves up to 65% on labour costs, replacing human workers with robots saves up to 90%. (Quoted in Stewart, H., “Robot revolution: rise of ‘thinking’ machines could exacerbate inequality”, The Guardian (online), 5 November 2015). 3-D printing is a type of additive manufacturing, which is far more flexible than traditional manufacturing, since products are built by layering component materials from the bottom up. While commercial prices of 3-D printers fell from $100,000 in 1988 to $1,400 in 2015, open-source designs can be assembled for as little as $300. The first printers have only been able to print in plastic or steel, but the development of continuous composite printing means they will be able to work with multiple complementary materials simultaneously. Scientists have even developed the ability to print living human kidneys and artificial skin. Edible products like structures made of chocolate or sugar can also be printed and decent-sized housing structures can already be printed for as little as $5,000. In the future it is likely that printers will be capable of producing goods at the molecular level, i.e. capable of printing anything composed of the molecules used. Ben Reynolds describes additive production — which “fulfils the promise of the personal computer as a means of production” — as a paradigm shift from industrial production to distributive production. “It is conceivable that the logical fulfilment of distributed production — nearly instant production of anything, at will, anywhere in the world — will arrive within the lifetime of children born at the time of this writing… Distributed production fundamentally erodes the basic pillars of capitalism… Any industry that finds itself competing with a form of distributed production will no longer have the option of adaptation through monopolisation. Instead, that industry will flail wildly as prices fall back toward their values [i.e. measured in labour time] and as its entire business model disintegrates in slow motion.” Reynolds, op cit, loc. 589–673, 1813.

[42] Ending a recession usually requires an average 6% cut in the base interest rate set by central banks — but most are already stuck at zero. Governments may be compelled to go deep into negative rates, but this option is limited by how much money can be converted into stocks and bonds. Eventually rates will have to go back up, making already unsustainably high government debt even more expensive to repay, at some point causing panic selling of government bonds — with investors switching to hard assets, especially precious metals — bursting the global bond bubble, the biggest financial bubble in history, and sending prices through the roof. The US banking system would collapse, the US government would go bankrupt and tax bases around the world, since the US dollar is the global reserve currency, would hit rock bottom. The US dollar is being devalued at record speed. As of 23 November, 21% of all US dollars in circulation had been printed in 2020, taking the figure to 75% over the past 12 years. The Federal Reserve (the US central bank) prevented a deflationary spiral (although inflation was close to 0% for 18 months during ‘lockdowns’, below the target 2% that provides stability while incentivising lending) in asset prices after March 2020 (when the US stock market crashed by 30% in record time) in order to keep, for example, pension and hedge funds afloat. As of 29 February 2020, the Fed held $2.47 trillion, 14.6%, of $16.9 trillion marketable US Treasury securities outstanding, making it by far the largest single holder of US Treasuries anywhere in the world. By the end of March 2020, this rose by an unprecedented monthly increase of $650bn, to $3.12 trillion. One estimate said that if this pace of buying continued, the Fed would “own the entire Treasury market in about 22 months”. (Martens P., Martens R., “The Federal Reserve now owns 15 percent of the US Treasury Market; at its current rate, it could own the whole market in less than two years”, Wall Street on Parade (online), 28 March 2020.) Capital is increasingly dependent on state subsidies and purchases, making the state increasingly dependent on electronic ‘money’ printing from the central bank, with the ‘pandemic’ response (i.e. subsidising capital with soaring public debt, especially ‘Big Pharma’ and ‘Big Tech’) producing state spending in terms of the percentage of debt-to-GDP equivalent to the world wars. (The countries that lost the world wars temporarily went deep into negative interest rates, incidentally). In August 2020, the chief US equity strategist at US multinational investment firm Morgan Stanley, Mike Wilson, said that the Fed “may not be in control of money supply growth, which means [it] won’t have control of inflation either, if it gets going”. The prospect of worldwide hyperinflation fits logically with the historical devaluation of fiat (unbacked — by gold, for example — paper) currency. The US dollar lost more than 97% of its purchasing power between 1635 and 2019, but this devaluation has tended to accelerate — the figure is 96% when the starting point is taken from 1913, having remained nearly unchanged in the previous 120 years; 91% from 1947, when the US became the world’s leading imperialist power; and 85% since 1970, around the time the postwar productivity boom ended. For British pound sterling, the figure is more than 99.5% compared to 1694, the year it was adopted as the Royal Chartered Bank of England’s currency (93.5% since 1970). (Source: officialdata.org.)

[43] Ibid, p. 102.

[44] Ibid, p. 164.