Agreed on your second point. Attack the inequality, not the automation.
Yep agreed, but there's a key difference. Unlike most other jobs, your labor continues to provide the company profits even after you leave. I think that's why software engineers are typically paid a lot and are often paid with a stock option component.
> Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.
I think we could already do this. Obviously many workers would still be required, but they could be much more fairly compensated. Someone else mentioned Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, we're already inventing jobs just to keep people busy and spending. As Adam Curtis said[1], "your real job is shopping".
That's certainly the engineer's sales pitch, but let me introduce you to the engineer's fine print, tech debt.
Maybe in terms of pure job function, but anyone who's ever solved a problem at their job in a way that is still used when they leave has continued to provide the company profits.
F U L L Y is Star Trek years away, not next Wednesday.
Leninism (and it's descendants) have a totalitarian state system (socialist, including non-Leninist Marxist Communist, critics tend to call it “state capitalism”) that replaces private capitalism as a hack to avoid the requirement of developing proletarian class identity in a developed capitalist system present in OG Marxism.
That this turns into a dystopian nightmare that mirrors and even exaggerates the horrors of private capitalism and fails to actually bypass private capitalism is a surprise to no one but Leninists, least of all non-Leninist Communists.
With automation though I think that obsoletes a lot of those ideas. Now there's less and less connection between labor input and productivity output.
We need some new ideas for distributing the fruits of automation - that take into account the productivity improvements thanks to machines, computers and efficiency improvement in general. While at the same time keeping some incentives to make things even more efficient.
I think that can be done within our current system with taxes, socialising things like healthcare and access to food and healthcare (and perhaps something like UBI). No need to completely overhaul the political system, although we could be heading towards that too if things don't change.
He explicitly argued that this was what he believed would make communism possible.
So whatever else one thinks about Marx it's clear he did not think in terms of a fixed ratio.
The comparison of Lenin and Marx is also flawed - Marx argued for the dismantling of the state, not a highly centralised state.
In Critique of the Gotha Programme he even pointed to the US as a better model for education (arguing that government-set standards but devolution of control over the actual provision of education was something to aim for) than the SPDs proposed state run education because he disapproved of giving the state control over even that, arguing that it was rather the state which needed to be educated by the public.
And in his work on the Paris Commune he lamented that one of the biggest errors he believed the commune made was to not go further and smash the rest of the state. The focus on centralised planning in the Soviet Union was Stalinist, not even Leninist, and certainly has nothing to do with Marx.
[1] E.g.: "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?"
Marx still believed in some sort of state-level synchronisation or command and control - otherwise he knew that you would just have lots of little communes / barracks-communists inefficiently working at cross purposes, e.g. with resource utilisation. But he never spelled out in detail how the central planning function should work - it was in effect an implementation detail. It was in this space of undefined behaviour that Lenin, Stalin and Mao created the totalitarian states that they did.
I think a lot of people forget that there was no actual collaboration between Marx and Lenin and the others. Lenin was only 13 years old when Marx died, ill and in a city on the other side of Europe.
Although there is a mass of academic detail in Marx's works, the communist manifesto itself is very thin in terms of the remedies to the problems it identifies. The 'call to action' part of the manifesto is essentially ten short bullet points, one of which is 'etc etc'.
The core distinction between Marxists and many forms of Anarchists, as early as during the dispute in the First International between Bukharin and Marx, was their view not on the long term dismantling of the state - where they agreed - but the role of the state in the transition from capitalism to socialism, where the anarchists wanted the state dismantled immediately, while Marx argued the state could serve a role in a transition, itself becoming a tool to execute the changes necessary to change society.
In his works on the Paris Commune he explicitly criticised the Communards for failing to take the next step and destroy the bourgeois state. While that could certainly have been replaced with a proposed federation, a key distinction was that he celebrated the bottom up delegation of authority, which is hardly compatible with "command and control" if any part can withdraw.
As such, libertarian Marxism directly opposed to the very existence of a state became a thing, based in large part on his writings on the Paris Commune.
Well, I mean, people “forget” because equating Leninism with Marxism served the purposes of both Leninists and Western opponents of Marxism, so it became a common element of propaganda of both the USSR and other authoritarian communist regimes and the capitalist west.
_Lenin_ called it "state capitalism." That was the official policy of the USSR under Lenin. State capitalism.
Lenin called a transitional phase that was intended to take 6 months to establish and another 6 months to phase out into socialism “state capitalism” (it may be the case that “war communism" of 1918-1921 was officially recognized as something of an extension of that phase necessitated by emergency), but state capitalism was never officially the long-term policy or the self-description of the state of the economy past that point; the criticism from non-Leninist Marxists is that what the steady state of what the USSR became was state capitalism, not socialism.
(Did he really say just 6 months?? That doesn't sound right. But anyway it would have only been a prediction -- which failed.)
"Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP in 1928 with the Great Break."
That's not what wikipedia says. I can't argue as I am no expert in such matters myself having read almost none of the primary material (but I did read "The Tax In Kind"... which I was assuming outlined the theory of the NEP).
Wikipedia on NEP:
Lenin considered the NEP as a strategic retreat from socialism. He believed it was capitalism, but justified it by insisting that it was a different type of capitalism, "state capitalism", the last stage of capitalism before socialism evolved.[15]
At first I thought you were bringing these up to point out that the robots create other jobs, because robots don't just spring from the earth fully formed and ready to run forever. They require an army of engineers to build/operate/maintain them.
> We're always focused on the some day maybe robots, but automation has been changing society and (I'd argue) increasing inequality for decades
Inequality is a political problem. I'd rather we tackled that for what it is: bring on the fully automated luxury communism and free us from our mindless toil that can be trivially performed by mindless robots. We have nothing to lose but our drudgery.