A recent Reddit post asks: “So, AI takes over, everyone has lost their job and only 10 trillionaires own everything. Now what?” The author goes on: “Meta, Open AI, and Amazon own everything, cool beans! No one can work; therefore, no one has money to buy any of the horse shit temu slop they prime on Amazon now. Won’t everything just implode from there?” The post gives voice to the anxiety and despair that has greeted recent advances in artificial intelligence. Many foresee a future in which America becomes a hellscape of unemployment and penury, in which data centers and ghost towns prevail outside of the fortified coastal retreats where tech oligarchs live.
Does it have to be that way? Sixty years ago, a discussion of computer automation took place that was the opposite in tone and tenor. In 1964, Michael Harrington, Robert Theobald, Robert Heilbroner, and a host of other leading progressive figures of the era issued a memorandum entitled “The Triple Revolution,” in which they predicted that the “cybernetic revolution” would result in “potentially unlimited output ... that will require little cooperation from human beings.” Such utopian speculations were common at the time. Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, predicted automation would encourage “imaginative participation in society.”
Needless to say, these dreams of post-industrial abundance didn’t come to pass. But a less well-remembered document of the same period, while affected by the same blithe optimism, laid out a framework for understanding technological change that could help us understand the challenges we face today. In 1969, a small circulation journal, Radical America, published a long essay by the historian Martin J. Sklar entitled, “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political Economy.” Basing his analysis on a neo-Marxist framework that may be relevant today, particularly with the emergence of artificial intelligence, Sklar offered a theory of what he called the “disaccumulation of capital” that provides a window through which to view the liberatory promise, as well as the looming peril, of automation. It is a difficult read—Sklar said it was written for “militant readers”—but it helps explain what is happening to the American economy today.
Sklar took his cue from Karl Marx’s theory of capital accumulation. For Marx, the central engine of growth is the accumulation of capital, which he regards as equivalent to the accumulation of labor time. According to the labor theory of value—which was embraced by Adam Smith and David Ricardo as well as Marx—the exchange value of consumer goods and of capital goods (plant, equipment, raw materials) is measured in the labor time it takes to produce them. There have been numerous byzantine attempts to create a formula that would convert exchange values into prices, but the usefulness of Marx’s theory doesn’t rest on that. The labor theory is a way of describing the labor process and division of labor that takes place in capitalist production.
The accumulation of capital, achieved when the profit from sales is invested, consists of the accumulation of labor time. Thus, during the period of rapid industrialization from the Civil War to the 1920s, there was not just an accumulation of goods and factories, but also of work-hours and of workers. From 1900 to 1920, for instance, the number of manufacturing workers doubled from five to ten million. As Marx stated in Capital, “Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat.” America looked at the time as if it were going to become a giant factory with a labor force divided between a sprawling working class and small capitalist class. This vision of the future informed the socialism of Eugene Debs as well as the progressivism of Herbert Croly and Thorstein Veblen. This accumulation of capital entailed a Protestant ethic of deferred consumption. The business class cited the deferral of consumption for investment and saving as the justification for its existence and also as the justification for reducing wages or resisting demands to increase wages or to limit the work week. Work, thrift, saving, and efficiency were the moral and economic guideposts to capital accumulation.
But according to Sklar—and he had copious data to prove it—during the 1920s, the output of goods soared but the hours spent producing them, and the number of workers engaged in producing them, stopped increasing. What he called the “disaccumulation of capital” began. He didn’t think disaccumulation would immediately replace accumulation, but that it was becoming a persistent tendency within capitalism. It would replace accumulation only under socialism.