The 200th anniversary of Karl Marx鈥檚 birth falls on 5 May 2018. Two centuries have passed under the shadow of one of our most inescapably powerful thinkers about economics, technology and power. May is also the 50th anniversary of a near-revolutionary uprising in Paris. Marx鈥檚 mark was all over the 茅惫茅苍别尘别苍迟蝉 of 1968, when an alliance of students and workers came close to overthrowing the government of Charles de Gaulle.
Those of you who tried to sit out 2017鈥檚 centennial commemoration of the Russian revolution will have no chance next year.聽The old, bearded patriarch鈥檚 face will be everywhere, particularly if the UK鈥檚 current shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, decides to pipe up again .
There are few 19th-century thinkers with as much insight into the transforming, disruptive power of science and technology as Marx. As business models and social norms rise, fall and mutate in the face of radical tech innovations, it can seem as if we鈥檝e hardly moved on from the Marxist fundamentals.聽Yet something in me rebels. Can鈥檛 we do better than always point to the old man鈥檚 famous contradictions, when we seek to explain our contemporary upheavals?
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Take Marx鈥檚 famous distinction between the 鈥渇orces鈥� of production and the 鈥渞elations鈥� of production. The former is the way machines and humans fit together to make things 鈥� say 鈥渋ndustrialism鈥�. The latter is the way that fit is socially regulated, shaped and enforced 鈥� say 鈥渃apitalism鈥� (or, for that matter, 鈥渟ocialism鈥�).
It seems as if so much modern existence is shaped by this distinction and its tensions. I spent chunks of this year reading big-picture volumes like Yuval Noah Harari鈥檚 Homo Deus and Jeremy Lent鈥檚 The Patterning Instinct. They pointed to 鈥渇orces of production鈥� 鈥� AI and robotics, neuroscience and bioscience 鈥� that promise abundance and productivity beyond our current measures.聽Yet our 鈥渞elations of production鈥� seem crabbed and perverse in response. Flatlining wages, insecure working conditions and overwork for most of the population 鈥� and riches beyond the dreams of avarice for a tiny minority, reaping the benefits of their platforms and protocols.
Luxury communism
Marx鈥檚 political response would be straightforward, simple and fearsome: communism. And June 2018 sees the publication of Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani 鈥� one of the Corbyn era鈥檚 bright young stars.
This catches the mood. One of the burgeoning policy ideas of this year, universal basic income (UBI), was driven partly by the sense that automation and robotisation are about to take a massive and permanent swathe out of existing human jobs, and that we can鈥檛 just abandon tens, maybe hundreds, of millions to economic irrelevance.
Yet even though UBI is promoted by Silicon Valley moguls like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as militants like Bastani and McDonnell, the concept implies a degree of political willpower and regulatory confidence which, to my mind, few in the debate have properly considered yet. And Marx鈥檚 C-word (though his pal Friedrich Engels often seemed satisfied with the S-word) is hardly the banner around which to gather modern, super-aware citizens who might want to make disruptive sci-tech benefit the majority.
Whenever I need a grand theory to frame the dynamisms of the age, I feel less and less inclined to lean on the crutch of Marx. The old revolutionary鈥檚 faith in the transformative powers of technology 鈥� making 鈥渁ll that is solid melt into air鈥�, as he put it in one of his manifestos 鈥� could start to make us a bit queasy. Particularly if the tech in question 鈥� CRISPR, neuro-enhancement and cellular rejuvenation 鈥� can transform our bodies, not just our societies.
Marx wanted his ideal society to serve what he called the 鈥渟pecies-being鈥� of human nature. But as Harari put it this year, what happens when the drives of our human nature become editable, programmable and predictable? Or when learning machines start to come up with solutions demonstrably more effective and precise than those provided by human cogitation?
Ditch hairy Western thinkers
In their volume , the left-wing thinkers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri try to conceptualise a deep entangling of human and machine 鈥� they call it an 鈥渁ssemblage鈥� 鈥� whose agency is beginning to have an impact. Yet to even begin to understand this kind of hybrid actor, we might have to abandon hirsute and great-coated 19th-century Western philosophers entirely, and drink instead at the well of traditions like Buddhism and Confucianism.
These non-dualist philosophies see human lives shaped more by patterns and forms that emerge from our mutual interaction with the world, and less by us exerting our sheer willpower over things, machines and others.
Every time one of DeepMind鈥檚 Alpha machines brushes another human games-player off their pedestal, I have felt that an accommodation between human consciousness and machine intelligence is really not that far away. For this, the science-fiction works of Iain M. Banks 鈥� mapping out a joint 鈥淐ulture鈥� between artificially intelligent 鈥淢inds鈥� and humans 鈥� may be of more use than a thousand Marxist interpretations.
And as our climate crisis shows even more clearly, we can hardly turn to the classic Marx, with all his excitement at industry鈥檚 massive appetite for transforming nature into value. The entities we will need to 鈥渃ommune鈥� with to save ourselves may be ones unimagined by even this great and radical intellect.
