Futurism and the End of Capitalism (Keith) by Keith

The Financial Times has published a number of commentaries on Ray Kurzweil and the “singularity”. The FT columnist takes a standard conservative view of radical change but it is interesting that the FT is covering these developments with such regularity. This relatively intense coverage is because Kurzweil research is a part of the central contradiction of capitalism: rising productivity of labor manifests in a falling rate of profit. In other words the systems development brings about its demise. At a moment of intense crisis like now, the need to dramatically increase the productive power of labor is felt along with the danger of that increase.

For a very long time socialists, radicals, and Marxists asserted that the main contradiction of capitalism is between private ownership and socialized production. The idea here is that workers work together to produce the wealth of the whole society but ownership of the means of production and therefore the power to appropriate that wealth lies with a private few. The problem with this old view is that there is nothing specific to capitalism about this contradiction (so it isn’t a part of capitalism’s essence), slavery and feudalism also had private appropriation of socialized production.
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The central contradiction of capitalism is expressed in the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. The contradiction was expressed by Marx this way: “The rising productivity of labor is manifest in a falling rate of profit.” That is why Marx says the only insurmountable barrier to capital accumulation is capital itself.

In Marx’s mature work the falling rate of profit is the essence of his crisis theory. The falling rate of profit is an expression of labor’s productive power outstripping capitalist social relations and a falling rate of profit crisis can only be solved through socialist revolution or destruction on a mass scale (like world war), in other words the falling rate of profit expresses the limits to capital. There is no solution to this kind of crisis within the exiting social relationships.

So on the one hand rising labor productivity undermines capitalist social relationships and on the other hand rising labor productivity is the essence of capitalist social development, capitalist compete with each other and at the heart of that competition is technological and organizational innovations that increase the productive power of labor (more social wealth –use values—are produced with less human labor), but paradoxically this results in the long run in a falling rate of profit.

Kurzweil’s new university will function within capitalist social relationships and for a time any successes towards dramatic technological innovations can be utilized by capitals to increase their competitive advantages. But in the long run these social relationships will become increasingly felt as fetters to further development and the barrier of these social relationships will compel more and more people to the camp of revolutionary democracy. One of our mid term tasks is to develop the our understanding of this contradiction and our ability to popularize it so that people working in other fields (like Kurweil himself) can understand it.