In today's nearly unprecedented economic crisis, even the right-wing pundits are recognizing the objectivity of Marx's analysis of the logic of capitalism--see Ross Douthat's (New York Times op-ed columist) piece in last Sunday's edition (February 24, 2013): 

-world-without-work.html?smid=pl-share

Publication of The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978

See description

http://books.google.com/books?id=iBU4baBkFYwC&pg=PA135&lpg=PA135&dq=reviews+dunayevskaya+marcuse+fromm+correspondence&source=bl&ots=9qBpe2bH0L&sig=59FWXtes0xA4o_kbd9mDOfiWheA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zqwWUcriJO2D0QGy8IH4AQ&sqi=2&ved=0CFwQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=reviews%20dunayevskaya%20marcuse%20fromm%20correspondence&f=false

See reviews

http://www.amazon.com/Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm-Correspondence-1954-1978-Dialogues-Critical/dp/0739168355/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343615184&sr=1-1&keywords=dunayevskaya+marcuse+fromm+correspondence

Marxist-Humanist Dialectics: Marx's Capital, vol.3 and the January, 2013 AP ser...

Marxist-Humanist Dialectics: Marx's Capital, vol.3 and the January, 2013 AP ser...: The recent research on the new stage of automation and robotic production, just now reaching the mainstream press, is indeed stunning. Jus...

Marx's Capital, vol.3 and the January, 2013 AP series on automation, the Great Recession, and permanent job losses

The recent research on the new stage of automation and robotic production, just now reaching the mainstream press, is indeed stunning. Just in the past few days, we've seen a major series of 3 articles by the Associated Press, and a CBS 60 Minutes feature:

The Associated Press series on the Great Recession, Automation, and Job Losses

(1) Recession, Tech, Kill Middle Class Jobs

Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon, AP Business Writers

"Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing more efficiently tasks that humans have always done. For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived...

The numbers startleeven labor economists. In the United States, half the 7.5 million jobs lostduring the Great Recession were in industries that pay middle-class wages,ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. But only 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobsgained since the recession ended in June 2009 are in midpay industries. Nearly70 percent are in low-pay industries, 29 percent in industries that paywell."

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-jobs

(2) Practically Human, Can Smart Machines Do Your Job?

Paul Wiseman,  Bernard Condon, and Jonathan Fahey

"To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs and workers who are competing with smarter machines.

"The AP found that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. Jobs that form the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

"So far, public attention has focused on the potential threats to privacy as companies use technology to gather clues about their customers' buying habits and lifestyles.

'What is lessvisible,' says software entrepreneur Martin Ford, 'is that organizations arecollecting huge amounts of data about their internal operations and about whattheir employees are doing.' The computers can use that information to 'figureout how to do a great many jobs' that humans do now."

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/practically-human-can-smart-machines-do-your-job-2

(3) Will Smart Machines Create a World Without Work?

Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon

"They seem right out of a Hollywood fantasy, and they are: Cars that drive themselves have appeared in movies like "I, Robot" and the television show "Knight Rider."

Now, three years after Google invented one, automated cars could be on their way to a freeway near you. In the U.S., California and other states are rewriting the rules of the road to make way for driverless cars. Just one problem: What happens to the millions of people who make a living driving cars and trucks - jobs that always have seemed sheltered from the onslaught of technology?

"All those jobs are going to disappear in the next 25 years," predicts Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Driving by people will look quaint; it will look like a horse and buggy.

"If automation can unseat bus drivers, urban deliverymen, long-haul truckers, even cabbies, is any job safe?

Vardi poses an equallyscary question: 'Are we prepared for an economy in which 50 percent of peoplearen't working?'"

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_THE_GREAT_RESET_FUTURE_OF_WORK?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

The CBS 60 Minutes interviewwith MIT economists Brynjolfsson and McAfee, co-authors of last year's Race Against theMachine,  who are making a serious attempt to interestpeople in the the notion that automation, especially its acceleration over thepast decade, explains more about the current economic crisis than cyclicalityand stagnation:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50138922

In light of what is going on today, it is indeed interesting to read Marx's section on "Internal Contradictions" in the Capital Volume 3 chapter, "The Law of the Falling Tendency of the Rate of Profit":

"A development of the productive forces which would diminish the absolute number of laborers, that is, which would enable the entire nation to accomplish its total reproduction in a shorter time, would cause a revolution, because it would put the majority of the population upon the shelf...The absolute spare time gained by society does not concern Capitalism. The development of the productive powers concerns it only to the extent that it increases the surplus labor time of the working class, not to the extent that it decreases the labor time for material production in general. Thus capitalist production moves in contradictions...We have seen that the growing accumulation of capital implies its growing concentration. Thus the power of capital, the personification of the conditions of social production in the capitalist, grows over the heads of the real producers. Capital shows itself more and more as a social power, whose agent the capitalist is, and which stands no longer in any possible relation to the things which the labor of any single individual can create. Capital becomes a strange, independent, social power, which stands opposed to society as a thing, and as the power of capitalists by means of this thing. The contradiction between capital as a general social power and as a power of private capitalists over the social conditions of production develops into an ever more irreconcilable clash, which implies the dissolution of these relations and elaboration of the conditions of production into universal, common, social conditions."

Dialogue on the recent work by MIT economistsBrynjolfsson and McAfee

http://workinprogress.oowsection.org/2012/10/08/a-luddite-an-economist-and-a-marxist-walk-into-a-modern-factory/#comments

Marxist-Humanist Dialectics: Marx and Race Against the Machine

Marxist-Humanist Dialectics: Marx and Race Against the Machine: Has anyone looked at the Race Against the Machine , which was published last year, authored by MIT Business Management professors, Erik Br...

Marxist-Humanist Dialectics: Dialectics of new stage of automation, need for de...

Marxist-Humanist Dialectics: Dialectics of new stage of automation, need for de...: Today's New York Times Sunday, 11/25,/2012, John Markoff “Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how th...

Dialectics of new stage of automation, need for deepening concepts of post-capitalist society

Today's New York Times Sunday, 11/25,/2012, John Markoff

“Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns,technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs. The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks likedriving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html?smid=pl-share

The article goes on to acknowledge that “misplaced enthusiasm” followed by “equally striking declines” have been regular occurrences over the past few decades (“In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the “A.I. [artificial intelligence] winter.”)

But what researchers have called “deep learning” has reached a new stage characterized by growing speed and accuracy of so-called “neural nets” for their “resemblance to the neural connections in the brain”.

These developments are coming on the heels of animportant body of work by economists, which demonstrate that in a deviationfrom earlier post-World War II trends, an outcome of the 3 recent recessionssince the 1990s (and their aftermath) has been automation and thus eliminationof middle-class jobs. See for example: Henry Siu, Nir Jaimovich, 6November 2012, Vox:

“Structural change in the labour market is clearly manifesting itself in the business cycle. The long-term decline in routine occupations is occurring in spurts - employment in these jobs is lost during recessions. The reach of job polarisation is wide. Automation and the adoption of computing technology is leading to the decline of middle-wage jobs of many stripes, both blue-collar jobs in production and maintenance occupations and white-collar jobs in office and administrative support. It is affecting both male- and female-dominated professions and it is happening broadly across industries –manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, financial services, and even public administration.”

http://www.voxeu.org/article/jobless-recoveries-and-disappearance-routine-occupations#.UKpx0S8oRL8.email

Recent discussions on this list have included the relevance of Keynesian theories and polices in the current economy, such as full-employment goals.

Perhaps, given the historical data that has been coming to light, these goals have become utopian. In contrast, a reexamination of Marx’s “mature critical theory” (Postone) may be more relevant, in which, “Free time -- which is leisure time as well as time for higher activity -- transforms its possessor into a different subject  and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject” (Grundrisse).

See also

http://marxist-humanistdialectics.blogspot.com/2010/07/marcuse-on-marxs-capital-and-on-post.html

Marx and Race Against the Machine

Has anyone looked at the Race Against the Machine, which was published last year, authored by MIT Business Management professors, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee? They are making a serious attempt to interest people in the notion that automation, especially its acceleration over the past decade, explains more about the current economic crisis than cyclicality and stagnation. 

Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that theirs is a view that “remains on the fringes”, citing as a reason low unemployment levels in the U.S. throughout the 1980s, ‘90s, and first seven years of the millennium. They cite IMF papers, as well as a 2010 Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond report on a long-term rise in unemployment which, “does not contain the words, computer, hardware, software, or technology in its text.”

I began to have questions about the currentsignificance of automation in today’s economic crisis recently while working onthe volume of correspondence between Raya Dunayevskaya, the Marxist humanisttheoretician, and two prominent members of the Frankfurt School, HerbertMarcuse and Erich Fromm.

Among the topics in the correspondence that provoked the most fireworks between Dunayevskaya and Marcuse especially were the social implications of automated production. Automation was taking hold particularly in heavy industries, such as coal mines and automobile plants, racing ahead from the 1940s to the mid-1960s. Though it continued until 1978, the bulk of the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence took place between 1954 and 1965, years in which Dunayevskaya published Marxism and Freedom, and Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man (as well as Eros and Civilization and Soviet Marxism). 

Dunayevskaya and Marcuse agreed that technology and automated production were of the utmost importance to understand both the current social conditions and the contemporary relevance (or lack of such) of Hegel’s philosophy and Marx’s theory. Marx’s Grundrisse was an especially important text here, having fairly recently been published in a more accessible edition, though still not in English translation. In a nutshell, while Marcuse tended to argue that “complete automation” could end the long night of alienated labor, essentially abolishing the “realm of necessity”, finally allowing the “realm of freedom” to prevail, Dunayevskaya argued that the potentials of automated production did raise the question of what kind of labor people should do, but could never abolish the realm of necessity. As Marx wrote in Capital, Volume 3, “The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond [the realm of necessity], though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.”

Especially important for Brynjolfsson and Mcfee’s argument are 3 graphs:

The first graph shows that, beginning in the 1950s, productivity has increased in every decade, including 2000-2009. In fact, while the 1960s showed the greatest growth in productivity (2.7%), the decade with the second greatest growth in productivity after the 1960s, was 2000-2009 (2.5%).

The second graph shows that the last decade is the first since figures have been compiled to show a decline in real median household income.

The third graph shows job growth to have been in the 20% to 30%+ range in every decade from the 1940s through the 1990s. However, in the decade 2000 to 2010 job growth actually declined 1.1%.

Brynjofsson and Mcfee write:

“This reflects a pattern that was noticeable in the ‘jobless recovery’ of the early 1990s, but has worsened after each of the two recessions since then…The historically strong relationship between changes in GDP and changes in employment have appeared to weaken as digital technology has become more pervasive and more powerful.”

Marcuse tended to argue that even in a society in which increasing automation was the major “centrifugal force” threatening social stability, as long as the “administered population” had the “goods delivered” (employment, rising standard of living), not many realistic prospects for social change appeared on the horizon. But now that we have just completed the first decade in more than half a century in which productivity has continued to soar, but income and job growth have plummeted, where to now for theory and practice?