In the Future, When Robots do All Our Work, What of Capitalism?

In this view, Marx's critique is actually pretty simple. In your first economics class a good teacher probably dismantled any idea in your head that value is objective -- it's based on fiat and caprice; "everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it," and "banks in this sense really create money," and so on. If it was a really good teacher you should some days like awake at night wondering no, really, why the hell does the economic system work?! or so.

Marx isn't satisfied with the economist's sort of relativism; he wants to "get to the heart of the matter". Marx wants to anchor value in, first, usage -- food has value because it nourishes you. But he also settles on the work that went into the object, which is an objective fact of history (which leads to long German sentences where it almost sounds like labour is a substance inside the object).

Marx wants to distinguish artistic work (which we do purely for its own sake) from drudge work which we do to "make a living". He takes those words literally; he views drudge work as a form of slavery -- perhaps wage slavery, but slavery nonetheless. He reasons that the whole system only works due to this generalized slavery. He thus reinterprets history as a set of slave revolts, where things get better only because people reclaim rights from their ruling classes. (This also drives his criticism of religion, which is basically "religion makes you feel good which is admirable in a sense, but also troubling -- because it makes you less likely to revolt against the real causes of your pain.")

Today, he says, people are able to produce more because they have robots at their disposal, so a few farmers can feed many people. In some respects robots also alienate you more, working with them feels more like drudge-work, less like art. But he envisions a day when robots will take over all of the drudge; you will just design an object and some 3D printer will take care of actually producing that object for you.

In this system, he says, the classical ideas of money and exchange and capital itself no longer fundamentally make sense; robot slaves will take care of all of your mundane needs (think of Maslow's hierarchy here), which means that when you wake up you won't need to worry about where you will live or what you will eat. Robot slaves do the drudge work, humans are left to be artistic beings. We don't need money -- a medium of exchange -- precisely because the robot slaves will take care of the actual nuts-and-bolts of exchanging, so that we are simply sharing.

This also opens the way for new criticisms of Marx like "what if we all just vegetate in front of TVs and the Internet and society at this point stagnates?" and so forth. It also explains why the Marxists want to say that the Soviet Union wasn't communism: the gulags were human slaves, not robot slaves.

I'm not saying Marx is right, I'm just saying that we're finally reaching the point where the pop culture is beginning to engage with his issues. His solutions are going to be naturally limited because he was writing 200 years before robots could be an everyday thing, and even today it's not clear that robots can someday solve all of our problems; good pattern recognition is still a huge obstacle for example.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

In the end, I'd like to live in Iain Banks' Culture, but I'm too cynical to believe that could ever happen.