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Why I think Marx's Communism will fail

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I'm making the claim that Marx's Communism will not work in today's world, for its heavy undertone of techno-determinism. If the impetus of social political improvement is based on the rise of productivity brought by technological advancement, then it follows that technological advancement will necessarily increase the productivity in that sense. As Marx put it, the new technology would lead to new productivity and subsequently new needs among the masses.
It might be true before and at his time, when technological inventions were made at the grassroots production level to reduce the intensity of manual work and increase output. Technology means completely different things now. It is controlled by big corporations, and instead of working in the direction to increase productivity, it is almost entirely focusing on the increase of need and desire. Thus, technology advancement will no longer be able to achieve what Marx believed it could achieve to bring along Communism: a production level that can satisfy the need of all people.

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Saqib said…
I think for this viewpoint to hold you would need to assume that such big corporations would exist under the communist system. You can't simply superimpose the communist model on today quasi-capitalist reality. I'm leaning towards the idea that Marx would view the corporate elites as a new form of bourgeois who hold exclusive monopoly on the means of production. In the proposed communist model, their control will be relinquished and the focus will remain on technological progress for ever-increasing productivity. In theory, at least.

Another point to consider is that the current model of corporate driven economic growth with reduced material productivity has a large part to due with the shift in the 1970s from a industrial complex to a financial market economy. Financial markets don't actually produce goods in the real world, workers do.
January 17, 2010 at 9:48 AM
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