I could imagine some sort of communist-style system forming at a point when technology is sufficiently advanced that we've become post-scarcity, if post-scarcity is actually possible. I suspect that a thousand years from now there'll still be people living in the gutter with others in high towers lording over them. By the way I recommend this buke:
A weapon for the movement
Comrades in London are beginning their collective study of Marx's Capital. Jack Conrad introduces what is still an unequalled work
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: in their shadow
Lenin called Karl Marx’s Capital “the greatest work of political economy of our age”. However, it strikes me that in Capital we actually have the greatest work of political economy ever written, full stop - I really cannot think of any other work that is comparable to it, from any other “age”.
Marx worked on this project for 40 years - over half his life - and it ought to be said, as with many other projects, it was actually Friedrich Engels who prompted him. Engels wrote a critique of political economy - it was a very modest work, but nevertheless it was a beginning. Previous to that both Marx and Engels had been concentrating on exposing the shortcomings of Young Hegelian philosophising, of Ludwig Feuerbach’s passive materialism, of French utopian socialism, etc. Engels was working for his family concern, as a capitalist, in Manchester, and had become acquainted with not only the Chartist movement, but also bourgeois political economy. After Engels wrote his ‘Outlines of a critique of political economy’ (1843) for the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx began to immerse himself in the subject - and he critiqued what was a stupendous body of intellectual achievement. Thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo had managed to put political economy on to a genuinely scientific basis.
What we also need to understand about classical bourgeois political economy, such as Adam Smith’s rightly celebrated The wealth of nations (1776), is that it was as much an advocacy of capitalism as it was an analysis of capitalism. The wealth of nations not only attacked feudal laziness and waste: it militantly recommended the virtues of capitalist progress. However, it did so not in the dismal way found in today’s Adam Smith Institute (eg, there is no alternative). Smith saw capitalism as the road to universal human freedom. What was good for the capitalists was also going to bring enlightenment, wealth and happiness to everyone.
The first public results of Marx’s studies in this field was his 1859 A critique of political economy. You can see from their correspondence that what surprised and bitterly disappointed Marx and Engels at the time was the lack of response. There were no glowing reviews, no shocked outrage in respectable society, no rash of sympathetic study circles formed. Indeed, very few copies were sold. Nevertheless, between 1861 and 1863 Marx completed his Theories of surplus value, of which there are three substantial volumes. It was subsequently called the fourth volume of Capital.
Volume 1 of Capital came out in 1867 and it is worth noting that, unlike A critique of political economy, it did get widely noticed. It was eagerly read and had a real impact: before the Edward Aveling translation into English there were editions not only in German, but in Russian and French too. For example, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation, Henry Hyndman, read it while sailing from America on board an ocean liner. Once he returned to Britain this former Tory declared himself to be a Marxist. In Russia, even before the formation of a working class party, Capital exerted a considerable influence amongst intellectuals. ...
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