The profit motive produces its own “gravediggers.” That’s what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued in The Communist Manifesto.
Marx’s very own writing explains why the future he and his patron envisioned will never come to be. At least not in the way that the duo imagined.
Quoting George Will’s recent quotation of Marx in a piece about Democratic Socialists, “Under capitalism, he wrote, man ‘is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.’ But in communist society nobody will be so confined." Socialism will enable everyone to “become accomplished in any branch he wishes … to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.’”
Realistically without any irony, precisely the employment bounty that Marx predicted socialism would shower on man is revealing itself through the profit motive. Thanks to machines that will increasingly do and think for us all, production is set to explode.
That’s of course what Elon Musk means about robots. As opposed to an unemployment-increasing burden, machines and robots that can do and think will be introduced into the market economy by the billions, only for production of necessities and former luxuries to soar. It will be the “cheap revolution” described long ago by Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard, only it will make the one he described appear quite unaffordable by comparison. The only barrier to true abundance is the very division of labor that Marx criticized, and in the future that division will unfold brilliantly.
Where Musk goes wrong is in assuming mass production will associate with mass indolence. Surely one of the biggest myths in economics is the shirtsleeve-to-shirtsleeve narrative suggesting that prosperity is the enemy of man’s industry. If that were true, Americans who’ve known prosperity like no one else would have long ago returned to shirtsleeves. Quite the opposite.
Which means the truth about abundance is that it makes every human being lucky enough to be born into it exponentially more valuable. Machines and robots don’t render us unemployable, rather they free us to work quite a bit more productively exactly because we're doing what we do best. Consider the pin factory Adam Smith visited in the 18th century and automobile factories created by Henry Ford in the 20th. As opposed to sapping worker vitality, they resulted in a great deal more productivity per worker as each rapidly migrated to his specialty.
Quoting Will quoting Marx yet again, “Socialism will enable everyone to ‘become accomplished in any branch he wishes.’” Yes, precisely. But for one change. The profit motive will enable the workers’ paradise envisioned by Marx. Will has already described it with his surely arch description of socialist Hasan Piker, who pays the bills through his work as a “Twitch streamer.” Look it up, as it’s worth it.
Implied in Twitch streamer is exactly the world Marx yearned for, though the path to it has been paved by the very profit motive that he promised would lead to revolution. There will be a revolution alright, but it will be a celebratory one as the proliferation of machines and minds frees the young of the present and future to work not because they have to, but because they can’t not. As they’ve long said, it’s not work if it’s fun.
Fun awaits, all thanks to the profit motive that Marx said would produce gravediggers. Surely it will, along with billions of other “jobs” presently impossible to predict, but that will narrowly mirror the unique genius of every human.
