 Y context to'r tôn o'r eich dysgu is obviously that we look around and we can see and hear about so much promise in terms of the plethora of technologies and innovation here about things like 3d printing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, driverless cars and an internet of things but then the reality of what we actually experience is somewhat different obviously from this promise. yw'r pyrwyr, yw'r gwir, yw'r sgwlad, yw'r gwir, yw'r gwir, a'r ysgologau. A mynd i'n mynd i'n meddwl ond o'r teimloedd ac i gwych ar hynny i'r ysgologau a'r lleiw sydd wedi ymddangos, a'i gydag yma o'r tynnu i gydag yma o'r cyffredin iaith ac i gydag, yw'r cyffredin iaith. Ond yna rhan o gyfael iddynt sefydlu'r cyfael i'r cyfael i'r cyffieith iawn, ac mae'r cyffieith iawn wedi'r cyffael i'r cyffieith iawn yn y cyffraith iawn i'r cyffraith iawn i'r cyffraith hi yn y gyffraithiaid Ond rhan i'r cyffraith i ddechau, hefyd, yn y USA y dyny ym mwyng gwleddiaeth rwylaentafol yn y weld We have productivity growth for that decade on average of 2.5% per year and yet real wage growth of 1.5% per year. So you see that although there's all this new technology, new productivity doesn't equal a similar and equivalent standard in terms of the rising of wages and living standards. The result is that basically labour, i.e. the working class is receiving a much decreased share of the total wealth in society and this is a case in all countries. You see the statistics of the share of GDP going to labour, to wages and it's actually declining in all countries in the USA, UK and Germany, but also in the more emerging economies like in Mexico and China. That means that the actual share going to profits is increasing and therefore what we're really seeing is that all this new technology, this increased productivity is not going to rising living standards but is actually going to increase profits. Rather than raising our wages or reducing the hours of the working week, what we see is this contradiction really of technology being used to create mass unemployment on the one hand as workers are replaced by machines but on the other hand obviously those who are in work are working harder for less pay. And the question we have to ask ourselves is why? How have we really got ourselves into this situation as a society? And it all goes really back to the fact that capitalism is a system of production for profit based on private ownership and this relationship between wage labour on the one hand, the working class and capital, the capitalist class. And all the value as we've explained in other sessions this weekend, all value in society is ultimately created by labour and the surplus value you see is basically the unpaid labour of the working class. That value above and beyond what is needed to maintain the working class as a whole. And that surplus value in turn is the source of profits, of interest and of rent. In other words the money flowing to the financiers, the capitalists and the bosses and so forth. Now the capitalists have as their task individually to try and increase their surplus value and they do this by Marx explains in capital, they do this in two ways primarily. One is to increase what you call the absolute surplus value. In other words just increasing the hours of the working day just so that you're working longer but for the same pay ultimately and increasing the amount of surplus value that's produced. The other way Marx talked about was to increase what you call the relative surplus value, the rate of exploitation, the ratio of surplus value to wages. And this primarily Marx explained came from increasing productivity, increasing the quantity of use values, the quantity of wealth that could be produced for a given quantity of labour time. And this is really the role of technology under capitalism. It's to increase this relative surplus value, to increase the ratio of surplus relative to wages. Now this ratio, this rate of exploitation is an average across society and over time the average is increased by a kind of dialectical process under capitalism where it's an anarchic process ultimately that arrived at through the pursuit of individual aims. Capitalism is based on private production with no planning between the different capitalists although there's an immense level of planning within the firm, within businesses, between businesses, it's anarchic. It's all down to the individual capitalists pursuing their own individual aims. So each individual capitalist is aiming to lower his or her costs of production below the social average, the socially necessary labour time as Marx called it. Basically trying to out-compete the arrivals by producing for less than this average and therefore gaining super profits or being able to then lower their prices below that of the competitors, push other people out of the market and gain access to an even greater market share. Now the result of each individual capitalist doing this and pursuing their own individual aims is that over time a new socially necessary average labour time is arrived at. Each individual capitalist is basically pursuing their own aims trying to invest in technology and automation and so forth replacing workers with machines lowering their costs but over time obviously that new technology becomes generalized. Each capitalist has to kind of follow their other competitors and install the same kind of technology in order to keep up or obviously they fall back and they're out of the race and so eventually over time the super profits from new technologies disappear and a new ratio of surplus value to wages, this new rate of exploitation on the basis of a new level of productivity in the economy is established across the whole of society. And it's this kind of drive under capitalism that Marx actually highlighted gave capitalism such a revolutionary and progressive character in its heyday. The fact that you had this competition that forced the capitalist to invest in new machinery and new technology, that was what drove capitalism forwards in its heyday to invent new technologies to develop science and industry and technique and so forth and try and basically it was the drive for profits that actually took society forwards. And ultimately it came down to the nature of capitalism, this wage labour capital relationship because what you have under capitalism unlike previous class societies is now that you have a working class that's paid a wage in exchange for the only thing it has to sell which is its labour power. In other words it's ability to work. What the capitalist buys is not the worker themselves but rather their ability to work for a set period of time whether it's an hour, a day, a week or a year. And this is different from previous modes of production and the slavery, the slave themselves was the tool if you like. They were bought themselves, the capitalist or rather the slave owner rather bought the slave as a tool just like a piece of cattle basically and they would work that slave to the bone and once they were spent either they were dead or beyond their years they would be cast aside and new slaves would be bought in their place. So there was no real incentive under that kind of mode of production to actually invest in more productivity. You just worked your slaves harder and bought more slaves. Under feudalism you had a situation where the serfs were working on the land and basically the feudal lords were appropriating a certain proportion of the produce but they were just basically consuming it themselves. They were exchanged, it wasn't being sold for a market and therefore again there was no real incentive to try and get more labour out of the serfs. You just tried to get more land. The land was the primary factor in that mode of production. But what makes capitalism so revolutionary is now you're buying the time of the worker, you're buying the labour time and the labour power rather and the ability to work. And it's up to the capitalist then to try and squeeze as much use value, as much wealth out of the worker within that time as possible and they do that by raising productivity, by putting more machinery behind the elbow of the worker so that they can produce more goods in the same amount of time. And that's what makes capitalism so revolutionary. But looking at capitalism and comparing it to these other class societies you also see how what Marks always explained which is that technology is not some sort of manner from heaven, it doesn't just fall from the sky but it requires a certain material conditions in order to develop. Technology isn't just as we discussed in the science session yesterday, it's not just down to individual geniuses inventing these things, it requires certain material conditions to actually pave the way, ultimately certain social relations. Because you know it's as we see it took the wage labour capital relationship that social relation to be established in order to drive technology forwards. You see an enormous increase in productivity exponentially from the beginning of capitalism and for centuries before productivity is relatively stagnant and growth is relatively stagnant. But suddenly capitalism comes along with this new social relations that gives an actual material conditions that drives technology forwards and that's what propelled forwards to the industrial revolution and all these sorts of things. It wasn't just the great individual geniuses, people like James Watt inventing the steam engine but rather the whole mode of production that paved the way and demanded increases in technology. And you can see this actually quite clearly, this example of the steam engine and James Watt is a good example because actually the steam engine was originally developed by a figure called Hero of Alexandria back in slave society and back in ancient times. But it was a toy, the steam engine that he invented was a toy basically for the ruling class to play with because it didn't have any real use to be that they couldn't put it to use within the conditions of slave society. It didn't benefit to actually raise the productivity of slaves and so it's only later on under capitalism that you have figures like James Watt kind of reinventing the steam engine if you like and able to introduce it into production and it played a role there of basically liberating industry from being tied down to the water sources which was originally where industry got its power from. It was water power and water turbines basically were powering industry and the mills and so forth before then and it was under with the steam engine it suddenly liberates the industry and allows it to move elsewhere and primarily you see industries ending up moving to the sources of the coal that's powering these steam engines. And so it really shows you again this phrase we often use, the idea that necessity expresses itself through accident. The needs of industry, the needs of science are what really drive society forwards and these individual figures, these individual so-called geniuses like James Watt and other pioneers of the industrial revolution. If you like they're the accidental figures who happen to actually invent those technologies but it's really the driving forces is the needs of society to develop the productive forces. That's ultimately what Marx explained in his materialist conception of history. Now the thing under capitalism however is that this motor force of history, this motor force of capitalism are the private ownership, the production for profit, the competition that drives society forwards in the capitalism's heyday. What Marx explained obviously is that this eventually this motor force turns into its opposite and it becomes an enormous barrier actually to the development of science and technology. And again this is something we touched on in yesterday's session how actually science today is actually being degraded because of private ownership, because of competition and because of production for profit. You see how there's actually a scarcity of funding and a scarcity of resources and therefore although a lot of scientific research is conducted under nominally public bodies, public institutions like the universities. You find these universities are increasingly refusing to collaborate with one another because they want to keep that data, make sure that they publish first, make sure they get the credit, therefore that they get the funding and therefore those academics can keep the job. So you see how even in the public sphere just because the public sphere is within the general system of private ownership and production for profit you end up with this kind of competitive nature creeping into the public sphere and actually the laws of competition, the laws of the market infiltrate even into this domain. We also see obviously intellectual property rights and how these have become an enormous barrier to the development of science and technology and how basically you've got firms like Google and Samsung and so forth that instead of investing and collaborating together to develop the best phone possible. Instead they obviously all have their own departments competing to get market share and so forth and you have a ludicrous situation where these firms are constantly suing each other over the tiniest of things. I think there was a court case once where Apple was suing Samsung because they had tried to use rounded corners or a double tap or something like that. Basic designs and basic methods that should be just shared to create the best phone possible but you see really rather than collaborating together so that whole of society benefits, the only people who really benefit are the lawyers who make enormous fees out of all of these court cases. And at the same time you have the saturation of markets, you have over production, this crisis of over production on a world scale, this enormous excess capacity in the system and what does that mean? It means that there's no more investment, investment actually now is at an all time low and particularly actually what you see today is how productivity is actually stagnating. There's a very good front cover of the economist from a couple of years ago now and it's got Rodan's thinker on the front sitting on a toilet saying, will we ever invent anything this useful again? Basically saying there was a period where capitalism where productivity was rising massively but basically that period is long gone and now productivity is stagnating. And all the big inventions in the past like plumbing, like electricity, like the telephone and so on were actually much more gave much more of a boost to productivity than the kind of technologies we see today. And actually how capitalism has created this situation where there actually isn't investment in machinery and technology anymore. Instead the downward pressure on wages basically because of various factors has led to basically people using cheap labour rather than machines. And so there isn't investment in machinery but rather just a super exploitation of the working class. And so really we see how capitalism has got to its limits really in terms of its ability to take society forward. And in fact gone beyond its limits in the sense of using credit and so forth to keep the system going despite reaching all of these contradictions that we see around us. And yes, Marx explained in his preface to a contribution to a critique on political economy. Marx was never very good with titles to his pamphlets, bit of a mouthful. But he says how all of history really sees this general development of the forces of production. That's a general tendency we see throughout history. A general development where today is better than yesterday, tomorrow is better than today. But there are periods in society in history where the forces of production come up against the mode of production. In other words, where our ability to produce our development of science and technology and so forth comes up against the social relations. And primarily he means the legal relations, really property relations that prevent us actually utilizing the science and the technology and the means of production, the forces of production throughout our disposal. And that's really what we see today, the fact that private property has become an enormous barrier now to the development of science and technology and to innovation. But what Marx pointed out was that in such periods where you get this collision between the productive forces and the social relations, that he says opens up the period of social revolution where the productive forces rebel against the mode of production. And people feel, they can feel that society isn't going forwards anymore, in fact that it's going backwards. You can see this as I said at the beginning, this abundance of technology around us and yet the rising inequality and the increasing stress and so forth. And how really we're not being liberated by machinery, but we're being enslaved by it instead. Now, as I said, it's fundamentally under capitalism, it's this anarchic and unplanned way in which production develops that is at the root of the problem. You have this invisible hand of the market as the capitalist of calling it. And there is obviously a general development of science and technology now even in this period of capitalist crisis. But the point is that it develops in this very anarchic and chaotic and kind of contradictory way actually. And the capitalists themselves even have a phrase for this. They call it creative destruction was the phrase by Joseph Schumpeter. And basically what he meant was that capitalism, basically admitting it, that capitalism can't develop in a kind of smooth gradual way. It can't build up the science technology and innovate in a nice smooth plan way that benefits the whole of society. But rather it develops in this chaotic and destructive way where swathes of industry have to be closed down basically in order to free up the capital and free up the resources for the next wave of technology to be implemented. And we see that very clearly today. We can see that kind of contradictory process of development where new technologies are being brought in, but ultimately not to raise our living standards but simply to replace labour and to lower labour costs. And that's what creates this enormous contradiction that even the bourgeois are commenting increasingly on now what they call technological unemployment, which is basically the idea of mass unemployment alongside overwork. And in fact the two condition one another where basically as workers are replaced by machines that puts a downward pressure on wages and it forces those who are in work to work harder for fear of losing their jobs. And then obviously the harder they're working the more that means other people will be laid off. And it's this pressure of the reserve army of labour really that Mark's talked about that puts this downward pressure on wages. And it's what causes workers to kind of sense that automation isn't benefiting us, that technology isn't benefiting us, that machinery is not improving their lives. But as I say they're not being liberated by it but being enslaved by it. And that's why throughout history you've actually seen these quite militant movements of workers against technology and machinery originating with the luddites, which now has become a term that means basically people who are unwilling to kind of support new technologies and people who are stuck in the past and a conservative. But actually the real luddites, the actual movement of the luddites was a very militant movement that went around smashing up the machines because they thought that these machines and they could see that these machines were replacing them and their labour and they didn't have the kind of political consciousness if you like to see a way out, a socialist way out and therefore they rebelled against this machinery by smashing it up. But we see similar kind of symptoms today where obviously a very good example is the debate around Trident at the moment where the unions actually support Trident, support this enormous waste of money that's never going to get used basically because it keeps jobs in the military industry, in the ship building industry and so forth. And instead of posing a socialist alternative which says okay well let's get rid of Trident but use the technology and the education that we have to plan and to move workers into new sectors like into green energy or into healthcare machinery using often the same kind of technology and skills actually. There's even clear examples of this in the past, you had an arms factory in Britain called Lucas Aerospace in the 70s where actually the workers themselves could see that the things they were producing weren't socially necessary but they came up with a whole list of technologies, very progressive technologies given the decade they were in things like green energy, like healthcare machinery that they could build with the same skills and the same machinery they had in the factory and it shows how actually again workers have much more kind of consciousness on these questions than often the leaders of the labour movement who are much more conservative because those workers were basically saying if they had control of the factory they could employ their skills and put them to much better use and I think we see the same problem today with Trident where the union leaders are stuck in this idea that they must keep the jobs rather than saying well what we need is to be able to actually plan the economy in a rational way and give the working class that control over where production is going and instead of spending money on these enormous weapons of mass destruction to use it to actually use these technologies and skills to benefit the whole of society. Now the problem that capitalists face however with this technological unemployment is that really they're killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Because at the end of the day as I say it's workers that are really the source of all new value in society and the source ultimately of all the profits of the capitalist. Machines, Marx explained, can only transfer the value from themselves to the final product and therefore as you increase automation in society, in industry and in production and so forth what you're actually doing is increasing what Marx called the organic composition of capital, the ratio of constant capital, the capital from the machinery from the raw materials the ratio of that to the wages to the amount of labour power that's going into production and the result of that is a general tendency through increasing automation, through increasing technological development for the rate of profit in society to actually gradually decrease over time and at the same time you also see it play into the crisis of overproduction, the fact that these machines ultimately that are replacing workers cannot buy the goods that the machines are producing and it brings to mind a very good story that illustrates this point. I believe it was Henry Ford, the owner of the big multinational car company who when he was still alive was being shown round one of his factories by some workers and he pointed to the machines that were coming into production, creating this new mass production and he said to the trade union leader, look how are these machines going to pay your union dues, how are they going to support your trade union and the trade union leader turned around quick as a flash and said yes but how are they going to buy your cars and I think that aptly demonstrates the contradiction that capitalism faces here where basically the technology it's using to replace workers basically exacerbates the crisis of overproduction that we see in society and helps create it and really what it shows is all of this is the contradictory nature of capitalism but where it's you've got a system where individually each capitalist is doing something that's very rational from their own personal point of view they're investing in new technology, lowering the cost of production, increasing their profits but the result is that when every capitalist does this when it becomes generalized across the whole economy it creates a situation that's completely irrational for the system as a whole and it reflects what Engels pointed out in his pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and Scientific where he says fundamentally the contradiction under capitalism is this contradiction between private ownership on the one hand but a social mode of production, the fact that we're all interconnected we're all producing for this general world market but yet the actual pieces of this productive process are privately owned and this is reflected again in the idea of the immense planning that actually exists within the firm, the fact that within these multinational giant corporations you have planning from the farms and the factories through to the shops and the supermarkets an immense level of planning in order to improve efficiency in lower costs but obviously just to increase profits that enormous planning that goes on inside the firm but yet this immense anarchy on a social level between the firms and ultimately it's a damning indictment really against those who tell you that a planned economy doesn't work well the point is there is a planned economy but it's happening within these giant firms and all we want to do is abolish that contradiction between the planning in the firms in the big businesses and the anarchy of the market as a whole and have planning across society in a democratic and rational way and it's these kind of contradictions that you see that lead to the kind of like I say the contradictions in capitalism lead to these contradictions we see in the whole of society where there's this kind of dystopian vision now where a lot of people are saying there's too much automation you know the title of this talk the race against the machine is actually a book written by a couple of MIT economists who basically hypothesized that actually they call it a race against the machine in other words we're no longer using technology together with our skills to take society forwards but rather humanity finds itself in a race against the very machines that we've invented it's almost like there's too much automation and so you see on the one hand there's this idea that there's too much automation they're all in this race against the machine that we're being laid off by the machines and it's creating unemployment but on the other hand you get this innovation pessimism they call it so there's another strand of bourgeois economists like those who are mentioned in this article about will we ever invent anything useful again there's a whole swath of economists saying well actually you know productivity's stagnating but it doesn't seem to make any sense you know that on the one hand we're told there's too little productivity growth but on the other hand we're told there's too much automation it seems like a complete contradiction and as I said it's highlighted by the kind of symptoms we see in the world around us today Paul Mason quite a famous left wing economist here in Britain he actually highlights this in his book Post Capitalism where he says how previous waves of technology were kind of driven forwards by basically the working class getting organized in the face of attacks and cuts and resisting the downward pressure on wages and basically machinery then was brought in as a kind of cheaper alternative if the working class was strong it was able to drive wages upwards or at least keep them where they were and therefore capitalist would bring in machinery because it would be relatively cheaper than employing workers but what Paul Mason highlights is the latest kind of epoch that we face we don't see this kind of development happening where actually the whole process is stalled now and where because of globalization and the competition between workers on a world scale because of automation and because of a general political attack through you know thatcherism and Reaganism the attacks on the trade unions on the working class all of these pressures collectively have pushed down wages to such a level that it's actually cheaper to as I say exploit workers than to invest in new machinery and he highlights a very good example of this where he says in the past you would drive your car into an automated car washing machine and you see these things where you know you drive it in and and all the brushes will round and the soaps spurting out and so on now you don't do that anymore those don't exist and instead you just have teams of probably highly exploited immigrant labor coming in and washing your car much cheaper than that machine could do it we've gone backwards in terms of the technologies that are being used and there's other key examples you can see in similar ways where basically off-shoring work places where it's cheaper to produce in Bangladesh and China and so forth much cheaper to produce out there than just to employ machinery to do it here in Britain or America and so forth and all of this again is highlighted by the so-called disruptive technologies that we see around us today there's a lot of talk these days about the sharing economy or the gig economy as it's often called and really these these two different kind of areas you know of apps like Airbnb and Uber and so forth it's you know they highlight actually the how technology has kind of gone backwards in many respects how society's use of technology has gone backwards because we're not really sharing anything in this sharing economy at all it's actually renting on a mass scale you know Airbnb is not acting as an app to help develop technology and to develop the forces of production rather it's taking advantage of scarcity to turn personal property into a source of profits for the capitalist so in other words you know what what happens in Airbnb what you've got is a it's a business that arises not to develop housing and to create more housing but rather it takes advantage of the fact there's a general lack of accommodation a lack of places for people to stay and offers people the chance to make a bit of money by renting out a spare room and so forth but actually all of that ultimately is a source of profits then for Airbnb which is a giant big business itself it's turned the personal property of all these individuals into a source of profits for this big business Airbnb and it doesn't fundamentally resolve the scarcity that's there the problem in the first place and in fact it's actually exacerbated the scarcity in many cases where you see for example a lot of European cities I know in Lisbon for example I've heard there's a lot of people who will just you know rent out whole flats to tourists rather than to actually to people locals who need it and in fact studies on Airbnb owners show that most of them actually are people who rent out whole flats it's not even people with a spare room you know efficiently allocating that resource to people who need a spare room it's people who bought a whole house and then renting it out through Airbnb in a you know in a profiteering way so it shows how actually it's exacerbating the scarcity rather than solving it and the gig economy these things like Uber and Deliveroo and so forth they're fundamentally again not based on developing the productive forces and you know giving people new tools and new education and so forth but rather it's based on the precariousness of employment and the precarious of modern jobs and the lack of jobs in society forcing people to have to find these extra gigs as they call it in their spare time to make up for the lack of wages that they have in their other jobs and ultimately these models these new kind of supposedly advanced technologies that the capitalists are always praising in magazines and in the media and so forth and ultimately these models aren't reinvesting the profits that they create the Airbnb and Uber they're not reinvesting the profits into new public transport into new housing and so forth and or using it to the profits to retrain people into new skills and so forth so rather than you know developing the productive forces they're actually profiting from the very crisis that's led to these problems in the first place on the other hand these technologies clearly show in many respects the possibility of what a socialist society could achieve the fact that you have people able to log in to an app and find work that needs to be done on an hour by hour basis shows you that you could under a socialist society get to that situation that Mark's talked about where you are a fisherman in the morning and a hunter in the afternoon and a philosopher in the evening you know that's the kind of situation you could find yourself in with these modern technologies you know with technologies like like that used by Airbnb and Uber we could you know integrate the whole public transport network the whole housing you know system to be able to guarantee cheap accommodation whether it's for residents or tourists or whatever and cheap and free efficient public transport for all it shows that there's a potential to allocate resources very efficiently and democratically but obviously we're unable to do that as long as these technologies remain within private hands and what it really shows I think is that there's no such thing as a benevolent technology often people you hear someone left talking about good technologies and bad technologies but what we've got to understand is Marxist that the technology itself is not either good or bad the question is a class question of who owns and controls that technology in whose interests that is fundamentally the question we have to ask ourselves it's a class question and we can see that there's plenty of technologies actually that eventually end up in society used for social benefits but only having previously been invented for war and for military uses and so on and we should ask ourselves well why can't we just skip out the middle man and just put them to use in society to help people rather than obviously to destroy actually in the first place and I think you see good examples of this like in the question of energy in the question of social media for example is a very good example of this where often you know people like to say oh Facebook is going to benefit the revolution because we can all network with each other and there's a lot of people who say oh no Facebook is a disaster because now we're all being spied on and it shows you how there's a contradiction within these technologies which arises out of basically who controls and owns them and for what purpose the reason we're worried about these technologies is because yes they are used to spying us because the big firms that own them obviously have certain links to the government and so forth and are ultimately trying to use the information they have to advertise and to sell us things that we don't need but obviously there's the potential there again with these same technologies to have a vast level of communication and organization and planning on a social scale on a societal level that we previously have never seen and so it really emphasizes the fact that as Mark said that under capitalism we have become the appendage of the machine that as I say that technology hasn't liberated us but it's enslaved us and it's even destroying the kind of so called middle class jobs in the past there was another economist recently where they had a front cover showing a tornado going through an office space destroying computers and desks and throwing white collar workers up into the air and it was basically saying how there's actually studies I think showing from Oxford I think there was a study showing they predicted something like 50% of jobs by 2030 could be automated and would be automated and in fact the jobs they were talking about weren't the blue collar ones because they've already been automated largely but it's the white collar jobs the so called educated middle class jobs in accounting and lawyers and even doctors now you have all these apps and I think the NHS as a thing where you can basically log on and find out what your illness is because of feeding in your symptoms and so forth and you can see all these technologies basically now actually threatening even to take away that kind of privilege layer in society and it shows the potential on the one hand but obviously how under capitalism all of these things have become a nightmare I think you know in the past they actually had science fiction writers a century ago who said that they thought the biggest problem facing mankind in the future would be bored all the time basically there'd be too much leisure time and we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves we'd have too much leisure time and obviously this hasn't happened we haven't got more leisure time we're working harder than ever but it shows how if you had a socialist plan of production a rational plan of production you could actually use these technologies to reduce the hours of the working week and allow everyone then to participate in the running of society it's this technology that capitalism's created but can no longer use in an efficient and an effective way it's these technologies that could actually pave the material way you know provide the material conditions for the kind of democracy that we need to see under a future socialist society it would actually create the time that would actually in turn allow us to everyone to participate in the running of society to educate ourselves to develop art and culture and so forth and yes to develop science too we'd be able to actually have lifelong learning and retraining and instead of as Mark's called it in capital the accumulation of misery at one pole and the accumulation of wealth at other we could raise living standards reduce the hours of the working week and actually go about planning how we use the resources in society for the benefit of everyone in society but obviously under capitalism we don't see this kind of utopian vision that science fiction writers have dreamt about in the past or that we can dream about today like in the session yesterday when we had talked about what will socialism look like this is what socialism could look like on the basis of all this technology but under capitalism obviously what we see is a dystopian vision the place against the machine the innovation pessimism that I talked about earlier the sense that something is fundamentally stalled in terms of progress in society and I would say that feeling that society and that technology is stalled this innovation pessimism that the capitalists talk about that we're not developing science and technology anymore that productivity isn't increasing anymore that kind of pessimism fundamentally reflects the impasse of the whole system it reflects the impasse of the system that these people are defending the inability for capitalism to take society forwards so there's an enormous potential is what we can see with technology we see a potential really not just to lower the hours of the working week and to make work easier but fundamentally to do away with work altogether that's what we want to do we don't want to get rid of class society we want to get rid of the need for work fundamentally altogether I think Trotsky even talked about a day where eventually you would press a button and the whole productive system the whole economy would just kind of work its way out and produce the things we needed and we could lie back and actually really discuss the kind of bigger questions in society rather than constantly just having to work out how we're going to next put food on the table and that sense it would pave the way for a plethora of art and culture and creativity and really it would be the beginning of real history the real history of humanity would start from that point it would as Engel said take us from the kingdom of the necessity to the kingdom of freedom and our task really is to make this dream a reality and that means fighting for revolutionary change in Britain and internationally I'll leave it there