This decade will be the worst for pay since the invention of Watt’s steam engine

 Yes I agree but I think this kind of meme – "Fully Automated Luxury Communusm" – is very useful indeed as a way of undercutting and negating the kind of objections that are routunely raised against communism/socialism – like the "lazy person" argument  or the "who is going to do the dirty work?" argument.  Well, automation renders such objections irrelevant.  Not only that, it also calls – or rather appears to call – into question the continued viability of capitalism itself.  If there are no more jobs left how are workers going to buy back the products of industry, goes the argument. To be clear , I am not saying I agree with the argument.  I dont think capitalism can, or ever will, automate wage labour out of existence.  But I am looking at the side effects such a line of thinking might have in the minds of the objectors .  It has a kind of "shock and awe" effect, to quote that Gulf War phrase.  It is deeply disturbing and disruptive in its psychological impact on the case against socialism and I have noticed in the past few years a significant and steady increase in the number of articles talking about the job cutting potential of new technology, especially robotics.  A sign of the times perhaps This is why I think socialists should take up this meme and run with it – but not unconditionally,  The approach we could use is to say that while we technically could automate a huge chunk of work in socialism we might chose only to automate some of it, thereby putting a positive spin on the nature of work as creative activity a la William Morris  and co.

 The point I am making is that in socialism we have a choice about what work we wish to automate and the degree to which we want to automate. In capitalism we dont.  Market competition settles the matter for us. Capitalist businesses are obliged by market competition to each increase their own market share  (which necessarily means at the expense of their comercial rivals).  To that end, they try to undercut their rivals pricewise by reducing unit costs through increased labour productivity or mechanisation,  So some technological innovation might be introduced by a particular business which temporarily gives it an edge in the commercial rat race and obliges other businesses to follow suit.  Since only living labour produces surplus value (profit) – not machines – the gradual displacement of workers by machines results in what Marx called the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.  However, he also suggested that there are counteracting tendencies at work.  An example of such a counteracting tendency is that as techological unemployment grows, it tends to push down wage levels.  What that means is that it then becomes more commercially attractive for employers to take  on more workers and this has the effect of slowing down the pace of technological innovation or mechanisation It is the combined of overall effect of all these differnent tendencies, some working in a direction opposite to that of others, that determines the  level of automation in general.  The specific nature of the work itself is also a factor.  The services or tertiary sector of the economy has traditionally been more labour intensive for all sorts of reasons and this is why you have seen have seen the spectacular  growth of the services sector in employment terms compared with manufacturing and the extractive or primary sector.  However that is changing with the spread of computerisation and this is effecting the capacity of the service sector to soak up displaced labour from the manufacturing and extractive industries. Personally  I think the development of technology is making the need for socialism more and more transperent.  It is ironic that you are worrying about the drying up of work in a socialist society. This totally undermines the argument usually made against socialism that people are inherently laxy and wont work unless they are economically forced to  via the wages system  – a bogus argument anyway since even under capitalism most work – about 55% according to UN figures – is actually carried on outside the money economy

  I totally agree but for that we need a society in which human beings can consciosuly determine what this balance should be according to  their own needs. It is just not possible to do this in a market based system in which blind market forces, over which we have no control, determine the outcome

that is the dream i guess

mmkay

Perhaps it's a problem is that socialist have a coherent and isolated world-view and not an ad-hoc flexible and fluid interpretation of society?If what you're trying doesn't work and you're doing everything you think is right.  Then try doing something wrong to see if you assumptions were incorrect.