Marx vs. the Robots (original) (raw)

Debates about automation and the future of work have proliferated in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. From smart software to nimble industrial robots, new labor-saving technologies seem to explain why the post-Recession period has witnessed the decoupling of economic growth and employment. This essay argues that Marx's contribution to the automation debate is his critique of the contradictions and hollow promises of capitalist technological progress. For Marx, although robots could potentially help transform labor time, they are ultimately frauds that express the emancipatory potential of science and technology in the inverted form of humanized machines and mechanized, superfluous humans. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. […] All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. (Marx, "Speech" 655-66) I. Rise of the Robots Derek Thompson's article "A World Without Work," published in The Atlantic in 2015, features fictionalized photographs of what I imagine to be a Museum of Work. One photograph shows a businessman encased in glass: "Full-Time Worker Circa 2016." Another image is of a coffee mug, which is labeled "Typical Workplace Warm-Beverage Container," while another picture of "Factory Man…Extinct" depicts a man in a hard hat who resembles the stuffed hominid ancestors that we find in the anthropology wing of today's museums. The photographs suggest that what we now understand as work will soon belong to antiquity; the future of work is that work, as we know it, has no future. What if the "experts [who] have predicted that machines would soon make workers obsolete," the article's caption submits, "weren't wrong, but only premature?" "A World Without Work" is one of many popular and professional discourses on automation that have been circulating widely in the United States since the Great Recession of 2007-2009. From Barack Obama to Elon Musk, from The New Yorker to Jacobin, it seems everyone has a position on the "robots." The burning question is whether we are on the verge of a jobs apocalypse, a future for which "humans need not apply" (Kaplan). To be sure, it seems that every time people invent new systems of automated production, there are renewed fears that auto