(Before I begin, let me specify that what I’m considering is two approaches to labour under communism. Assume all sides agree that the exploitation of labour for profit is a bad thing; what this specific post is discussing is two approaches to non-exploitative labour. Secondly, I’ll mostly stick to laying out my own thoughts rather than using a tonne of references, though all this has been discussed in books. Thirdly, I’m trying to explore threads of thought here rather than argue for some conclusion.)

It’s a truism that productivity increases over time, as labour-saving technologies and techniques are developed. An hour of labour now apparently produces what 4.4 hours of labour produced in 1950.

This increase in productivity has been significant since the invention of the steam engine and everything since. It could become quite extreme in the 21st century, with lights-out manufacturing, fully robotic warehouses, self-driving vehicles, aeroponic plant labs, etc. (Again, assume all this automation is happening under communism; a different set of issues are raised if it happens under private ownership.)

There are two things an economic planner could do when productivity increases: 1) keep labour hours the same but increase the amount of goods produced, 2) reduce labour hours, creating the same amount of goods with more holiday-time, 3) some combination of these two

Increasing production

Suppose that one man, working for one day, can produce enough food for ten men to eat for a year. Food will be very very cheap (by the labour-theory of value). That makes everybody more food-secure and is something to be celebrated. The challenge it brings is that we can’t employ a large amount of our workforce in agriculture.

I chose food as an example deliberately because the demand isn’t very elastic. We can’t quintuple the amount of food produced to increase wage-labour (because I’m already stuffed man no thanks).

Similarly, construction demands can’t be elastically increased. If everyone has an apartment, then what? Ok, so we can give them a bigger apartment, and build some nice opera houses and community halls, but that can maybe increase the amount of construction by 100%. The amount of construction can’t be increased by 10,000% – you’d just have empty buildings. And technology will decrease the labour-time per unit of building by a greater factor: here’s China building a 10-storey building in under 29 hours: https://invidious.namazso.eu/watch?v=you-BV35B9Y

In short: if demand can’t be increased elastically, neither can supply. Demand for goods puts a limit on this method of job-creation.

The elasticity of demand is different in different industries. The planner could respond to this abundance by increasing production quotas of:

• luxury goods

• Things never before seen, e.g. by space colonisation, or by employing large sectors of the workforce in research&development. There’ll be a limit here too, as not everyone has the aptitude for R&D.

Stimulating supply is necessary if you have a position of pro-work communism. It preserves Marx’s principle-of-equivalence, that everyone should be rewarded for the work they do, e.g. get one labour-token per hour they work. If we must view unemployment as a problem, we must find work for people.

But hol’ up a minute. Even if we can increase consumption, do we want to? It’s anti-efficiency. Capitalism conspires to increase consumption by doing things like Juicero and increasing private vehicle ownership. Do we want to do the same? Increasing production-consumption creates ecological harm under any economic system.

Economic planners should, in my opinion, increase consumption a bit, to the limits of human comfort, even human luxury. But it’s a bad system that needs to increase consumption in order to increase production in order to pay wages. I’d rather give free money to non-workers.

Reducing labour

There are two ways to reduce labour: a) reduce the number of hours worked, b) reduce the number of people working, i.e. increase the number of people unemployed

As regards a) reducing working hours: working hours have been falling under capitalism – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annual_working_time_in_OECD.svg – but it’s complex to disentangle the effects of technology, exploitation, and pressure from unions in causing this. Probably fair to say productivity-boosting technology is one contributing factor.

Reducing labour hours from 2200 per year to 1750 is fine. It brings no problems. Even bringing it down to around 1350 (the current average in Iceland) should be fine. As labour hours get very low (under 21st-century communism, remember), deskilling could become a problem. Could we reduce work to 800 hours a year, so every employed person is working what we would call a part-time job? Maybe not, because people like doctors wouldn’t get enough work experience to get enough skills to be effective.

As regards b) reducing the workforce: this obviously brings problems to be solved. So much politics is about “More Jobs!”, “The right to work!”. One response to this is to be a pro-work communist. The Soviet Union created full employment (while reducing working hours), though that may not apply the same way in the 21st century with more advanced automation.

How can an economic planner respond to technology-induced increases in the number of unemployed people? There are four available responses: i) welfare, ii) universal welfare, iii) stimulating demand to increase work, iv) make-work in non-producing sectors

i) if unemployed people are given welfare by the government, this creates a division in society. Workers will feel (from valid self-interest) that they are supporting idlers. This happens under social democratic capitalism (grumbling about “welfare queens”), but the criticism would be more valid under a non-exploitative system.

ii) basic income would solve the problem in i). If workers and non-workers get the same welfare payments, the workers have no complaint. The problem it runs into is arithmetic: where does the money come from? This depends on what monetary system prevails: maybe the money could simply be printed, maybe labour-tokens would have to be taxed.

iii) See previous section

iv) As robotic automation eats most jobs in the means of producing, caring professions (childcare, elder care, etc.) could perhaps expand. This would be a communist version of the jobs guarantee proposed by Pavlina Tcherneva), providing automation-resistant government-issued jobs to everyone who wants them. I suspect there is a limit to this, for similar reasons to those explored above: there’s a limit to the demand for care-professionals (though it’s not yet been reached in reality), so there must be a limit to supply too. Maybe the state could even start paying mothers/parents for the work they do in “producing” productive members of society (second-wave feminists advocated for this.) E.F. Schumacher said that we shouldn’t necessarily see work as a curse (as an economic ‘bad’). Perhaps the economic planner shouldn’t encourage fully automated plant labs. Instead he should plan community farms, which do require labour-input (and therefore make food more expensive, a bad thing to the labour-theory-of-value) but also have positive externalities of people working outdoors, preserving the soil, building community, laughing together, and the psychological benefits that come from being busy and productive. I’m talking about a situation where enough labour-saving technology is used to make it easy, decent work rather than a Dickensian grind.

The labour-theory-of-value says automate everything as much as possible to make everything as cheap/available as possible. That’s correct as far as it goes. It should be done. It’s the only way we can beat poverty. But when automation becomes extreme, you can’t keep labour-theory-of-value and principle-of-equivalence (i.e. paying according to labour-input). You can compromise on labour-theory-of-value and create a medium-labour society of handicrafts, small farms, and other pleasant, fulfilling jobs; this is a sort of pro-work communism. You can compromise on principle-of-equivalence, and give people free money with which to buy the fruits of the robots; this is a sort of anti-work communism.