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Marx never sat in a self-driving car

Marx, like every other person alive when he was, probably never thought about a self-driving car because regular-ass cars hadn’t been invented yet.

But you know what Marx thought (and wrote) about a lot? Technology. In the first volume of Capital, he outlines how the very technologies we develop are part of the superstructure and reflect the needs of the current mode of production. In his excellent podcast series Reading Capital With Comrades, Derek Ford uses the white noise machine as an example. The capitalist economy doesn’t really care about noise pollution any more than it cares about air and water pollution so workers are forced to just deal with it. We also have a premium on sleep because we all get worked to death and capitalism loves to take ever increasing amounts of our waking hours. So along comes the white noise machine. Something that, instead of solving the problems of noise and letting workers get more sleep, just allows them to cope with the situation and get to work.

So in that sense, the self-driving car is absolutely an innovation of capitalism. It doesn’t solve the problem of us destroying ever more land so everyone above a certain income level can have a quarter-acre of land and a “house” made of particle board and oil-based products. It doesn’t put automation to uses that allow for more productivity in the service of human flourishing. Nope. In fact, I guarantee you once self-driving cars become ubiquitous white collar workers will be expected to work the same number of hours in the office AND in the car to and from the office on top of that; and blue collar workers will have to watch ads or something. They’re not actually going to improve the quality of life, they will actually make things worse but more profitable for capital as they will be able to take over even more of our waking hours.

Marx saw that under socialism (and only under socialism), technology and automation could be unleashed to enhance our lives by making us more productive and thus allowing us to work less. Hell, even Keynes figured we’d have 20 hour work weeks by now. But what Keynes didn’t understand and Marx did is that only if the workers control the advancement of tech, can it be used to make our lives better.

If you gave people the choice of either working 5 hours and taking a bus, or working 10 hours but getting a heckin’ cool Muskmobile death trap, who would choose the latter other than the most bazinga-brained labor aristocrats who would rather die than sit next to a worker on public transportation?