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"Marx, lying in his grave, and at present almost universally scorned, has a slow smile creeping across his face as he sees the convulsions ahead." New Perspectives Quarterly, Fall, 1996
In Charles L. Mee's play, Lower Depths, you could hear a pin drop when Tertius, a homeless aristocrat from Boston, screams at his white, black, Jewish, Bulgarian, Asian and Puerto Rican comrades living in an abandoned factory in the rustbelt. "This is how it's going to be for everyone in ten years," he warns. In this powerful play based on Maxim Gorky's vision of the downtrodden leading a social revolution, the audience is forewarned that America is poised on the brink of a social explosion.
Mee is not the only social critic sounding the alarm. Jeremy Rifkin, author of The End of Work, says we are heading for a near workerless world and predicts that as a result of the robot, less than 2% of the global workforce will be in factories in twenty years. Today, less than 2.7% of the world's population is engaged in farming, down from 60% in 1850. And, the Japanese are working on a robotic melon picker that uses sensors, not people, to determine if a crop is ready to pick. Rifkin asks - What will become of the people left behind by the technological revolution?
As Rifkin proves, the world is an integrated and connected whole. The microchip has thrown a radically new quality into the global economy. As chips develop, they infiltrate new areas of production, increasing output and replacing the need for human labor in production. According to a recent United Nations report, 80% of people already live in extreme poverty, and 20% of those live on the equivalent of $1 a day. At the other end of the spectrum, 477 billionaires wallow in unprecedented wealth. Something will have to give.
As this society is destroyed by the robot, a new one must be born. But in whose interests will a new society be? Will it be a modern-day Rome where a small group of exploiters maintain their privileges while the exploited majority lives off their crumbs, if live at all? Or as Rifkin asks, will the 'end of work' signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit?
To answer these questions, we will examine some of the programs, schemes, and "wishes" for a more "humane" (and possibly worse) capitalism that some leading spokespersons on the left and the right are proposing. Our purpose is to make clear that today there are no reforms left within the capitalist system. There is no "third sector," no redistribution of wealth, no capitalist "restraints" no taxing of the rich that can solve the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society in the era of electronic production. This is expressed in the fact that, if people do not work, they cannot eat. Today, the only solution is for society to utilize the struggle for reform to take the next historical step. That is, to reorganize society cooperatively.
Solutions Proposed
It is no surprise that all kinds of conscious forces, from the left and the right, are talking about the impending economic collapse and putting forward non-partisan programs to forestall the inevitable social upheavals. Everyone realizes that the economic revolution is having a profound effect on social life, from the working-class blacks, first hit by electronics, to the formerly secure blue and white collar workers to the middle managers, and new books and theories about this are being written every day. Peter Drucker, the acclaimed author for business executives, warns in Forbes that few can imagine the "hatred, contempt and fury" millionaire-bosses have created among their middle management professionals. In an article published in the Atlantic Monthly entitled, "The Capitalist Threat", George Soros, one of the wealthiest billionaires in the world, alerts the capitalists to the dangers of the growing gap between wealth and poverty. He proposes 'some' sharing of the wealth. Republican William J. Bennett, in a speech to the National Press Club, warns that unbridled capitalism presents a serious problem for all human beings.
Writers like Rifkin, William Greider, author of One World, Ready or Not, William Julius Wilson, author of When Work Disappears, and Alvin Toffler, author of the well-known book, Future Shock, accurately portray the objective nature of the global economic crisis. However, much of their writings envision what they call a more "humane" or "democratic" capitalism in which the market economy is preserved (the system of private ownership of the means of production). Greider argues for "owner-workers" so that capital can be shared. He cites the paradox of "poverty amidst plenty", but argues that this can be reconciled without destroying the market system. Rifkin favors transferring a portion of the productivity gains from the market to a "third," non-profit sector. Wilson proposes a 21st century version of the WPA work program and a "partnership" between the private and public sector to create sub-minimum wage public service jobs that pay 10%-15% below the minimum wage. Toffler favors a society where majority rule is replaced by 'minority rule.'
The question is: If technology is eliminating human labor and small scale production, while producing more necessities than ever in history, why must people work? Why must people still engage in repetitive, demeaning or exploited work when human labor is no longer required for production of most commodities? Why must schemes be invented to create worker-owned businesses or new sectors of the economy? Or for people to work at sub-minimum wage jobs, barely eking out an existence? Why must we look backward, seeking to save capitalism? Why not reorganize society so that the globe's incredible social wealth is distributed to people based on need, and, in doing so, end poverty once and for all?
Greider admits that today the world's capacity to produce food, for example, has far exceeded the "entire human population's need for nourishment." Yet, neither he, nor others, envision a world without private ownership of the means of production.
If Marx has a "slow smile creeping over his face," it is because he proved the 'secret' of the capitalist's profit and the eventual destruction of the system. Surplus value, the source of all profit, comes from unpaid labor. Capitalism's survival rests on the extraction of surplus value, or profit, on a constantly increasing scale. However, laborless production in the robot does not create surplus value, thus capital cannot create a profit. While it is true that speculative capitalists are raking in billions, labor replacing technology increasingly separates a new and growing propertyless class from wages and money and thus any means of survival. The workers can no longer sell their ability to work and the capitalists can no longer sell the product of the workers' labor. Objectively, these developments signify the end of the capitalist system. No amount of "sharing" of capitalist wealth, development of a non-profit or "third" sector of the economy or "reducing of the work week" can reverse this process.
A New Cooperative Society
In a historic sense, the electronic revolution can be compared to the discovery of fire. Fire was the foundation for separating humans from animals. Today, we can take that final step begun over a hundred thousand years ago and leave the dog-eat-dog world of exploitation, greed, national, sex and race hatred and be free to become truly human. Today, with the unprecedented level of productive capacity in electronics, we can only begin to imagine the potential of education, communications, pleasure, as well as the cultural and spiritual growth of every person on the globe. In a new society where the means of production are commonly owned, the whole notion of "work" could be redefined as one's contribution to society. This new world could not be won in the era of industrial society in which Marx wrote, but it can be won today. Can we settle for anything less?
If we agree that the "market" economy is obsolete, then the question becomes: how will we achieve this new world? And, specifically, who will lead us? Toffler, Greider and others bank on the world's elite as the leaders and creators of the new society. However, the electronic revolution is creating a social revolution and the engine of social change is the class struggle. Throughout history, as new tools developed, new classes arose. Today a new class of propertyless people, structurally forced away from production and a new class of speculator capitalists, is being formed. The new class of poor will move against the private property relations which prevent it from eating. Thus, this is the only class in modern society where "each for all and all for each" and "from each according to ability, to each according to need" makes economic sense. The ideals of a cooperative, communist society are no longer subjective. They are real, objective, economic and inevitable.
An Organization of Revolutionaries
Defending our future depends upon the leadership of an organization of visionaries capable of arousing and enthusing the masses of people to the goal of the communist reorganization of society, not as an ideology but as a practical reality. What the American people have lost has been lost forever. We have to grab the future, not the past. For this task, an organization of revolutionaries is needed that can pull the chain together and supply that one missing link. Literally millions of revolutionaries are trying to do this. They are exposing capitalism and educating people. Elisabet Sahtouris, for example, rejoices in "The Biology of Globalization," because the words "community" and communal values" are back in our vocabulary. The League of Revolutionaries for a New America needs to meet these forces and together build an organization of revolutionaries that can fulfill its historic task: education of the American people so they can gain the economic and political power to overturn this system and build a new world.
(c) 1997 by the League of Revolutionaries
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