Keynes's grandchildren and Marx's gig workers: Why human labour still matters

Published date01 December 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12146
Date01 December 2019
International Labour Review, Vol. 158 (2019), No. 4
Copyright © The authors 2019
Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2019
* Indiana University Bloomington, email: hekbia@indiana.edu. ** University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine, email: nardi@ics.uci.edu.
Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors,
and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.
Keynes’s grandchildren
and Marx’s gig workers:
Why human labour still matters
Hamid R. EKBIA* and Bonnie A. NARDI**
Abstract. The current anxiety around the globe regarding automation and “the
future of work”, the irrelevance of human labour and the superuity of humans
is based on recurring ideas about technology, work and economic value. Not quite
novel, the debate on these ideas dates back to prominent thinkers, such as Karl
Marx and John Maynard Keynes. To grasp the present moment, therefore, the au-
thors revisit this debate within the broader history of capitalism. With a focus on
labour and technology, they bring attention to the hidden forms of value creation
in the current economy and to the blind spots of the historical debate, and envi-
sion various possible scenarios for the future.
We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains
of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one eco-
nomic period and another. The increase of technical efciency has been taking
place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption; the improve-
ment in the standard of life has been a little too quick; the banking and monetary
system of the world has been preventing the rate of interest from falling as fast as
equilibrium requires (Keynes, 1931, p. 321).
These are the words with which the British economist John Maynard
Keynes presented his diagnosis of “a bad attack of economic pessimism”
(1931, p. 321) that was taking hold in the early 1930s, at the height of the Great
Depression. “My purpose in this essay,” he wrote, “is not to examine the pres-
ent or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take
wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic
life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our
grandchildren?” (op. cit., p. 322).
The grandchildren that Keynes had in mind were us, and it was mostly
with us in mind that he warned of “technological unemployment” – that is,
International Labour Review654
“unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of la-
bour outrunning the pace at which we can nd new uses for labour” (p. 326).
But it was also to us that he promised a life of leisure and abundance:
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will
need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for our-
selves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and
tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin
on the butter – to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared
as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fteen-hour week may put off the problem for
a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in
most of us! (p. 328).
A 15-hour work week was Keynes’s solution to the problem of techno-
logical unemployment.
More than half a century before Keynes, Karl Marx – also studying the
British working class – presented a different forecast about technology and
the future of human labour. Writing about the reversal in the roles of humans
and machines, he warned as follows:
[O]nce adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes
through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather,
an automatic system of machinery … set in motion by an automaton, a moving
power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and
intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious
linkages. … It is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the
worker … The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is de-
termined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not
the opposite (Marx, 1857–58, pp. 692 –693, emphasis in original).
Despite this reversal, however, Marx believed that capitalism does not
promote automation in order to relieve humans of the burden of work. Rather,
“[m]achinery inserts itself to replace labour only where there is an overow of
labour powers. … It enters not in order to replace labour power where this is
lacking, but rather in order to reduce massively available labour power to its
necessary measure. Machinery enters only where labour capacity is on hand in
masses” (op. cit., p. 702). Furthermore, the development of technology “forces
the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the
simplest, crudest tools” (p. 709, emphasis in original). This apparent contradiction
is inherent to the working of capital. The desire of capitalism to increase product-
ivity through automation, on the one hand, and its dependence on massively
available labour, on the other, gives rise to a paradoxical situation where capital,
“despite itself, [becomes] instrumental in creating the means of social disposable
time … and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development” (p. 708).
It is this contradiction that, according to Marx, drives capital towards “its own
dissolution as the form dominating production” (p. 700), ultimately preparing
the conditions for the emancipation of labour from capitalism.
For better or for worse, both forecasts, as we know, have failed to ma-
terialize thus far, but to different degrees and for different reasons. Despite
Keynes’s prediction, those of us who are lucky to have a full-time job still
work 40, 50, or even 60 hours a week without compensation for extra hours;

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