NYT on the Future

You may find this editorial from the New York Times interesting.
It addresses Marxism, Gandhi, and forecasts of the future.

The Next Big Dialectic
New York Times Editorial
November 28, 1999

By KURT ANDERSEN

At this end of this century, as we bask happily and stupidly in the glow
of
our absolute capitalist triumph, no long-range historical forecasters
are
considered more insanely wrong-headed than Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels. Yet the death of Communism makes this moment a fine one to
consider the emergence of Marxism 150 years ago as a historical
phenomenon, economically determined, rather than as the social and
moral debacle it became. In fact, looking back, Marx and Engels seem
prescient about the capitalist transformation of life and work. Writing
about globalization in "Principles of Communism" in 1847, Engels sounds
very 1999.
   "A new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese
workers of their livelihood within a year's time," he wrote. "In this
way,
big industry has brought all the people of the earth into contact with
each
other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread
civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever
happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other
countries."
    In "Das Kapital," Marx also foretold the present cyber-age, in which

computers design toasters and skyscrapers, and software is designed by
other software: "Modern industry had therefore itself to take in hand
the
machine, its characteristic instrument of production, and to construct
machines by machines. . . . Machinery, simultaneously with the
increasing
use of it . . . appropriated, by degrees, the fabrication of machines
proper."
   Marx and Engels were right in the middle of the transformation. Just
before their births, during the final years of the 18th century, a
handful of
machinists and tinkerers -- John Wilkinson, Richard Arkwright, Eli
Whitney, a few others -- had ignited the Industrial Revolution with
their
amazing devices to cut screws, pump water, spin wool and gin cotton.
Those machines, hitched to James Watt's steam engine, begat factories
and steamships and railroads, which begat industrial capitalism on a
frenzied new global scale, which, just a half century after the first
revolutionary mechanical marvels, begat Marx.
   Now, during the final years of the 20th century, a handful of
scientists and
tinkerers -- William Shockley, Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce, Jim Clark,
Tim Berners-Lee, a few others -- have ignited the current technological
revolution with their amazing new devices: the transistor, the
integrated
circuit, the microcomputer, the World Wide Web. The PC and the
Internet begat a new fluidity of capital and information, which is
begetting
postindustrial capitalism on a frenzied new global scale, which will
surely
beget some radical and infectious critique of this radically new order.
    In other words, the 21st century will have its Marx. This next great

challenger of the governing ideological paradigm, this hypothetical
cyber-Marx, is one of our children or grandchildren or
great-grandchildren, and he or she could appear in Shandong Province
or Cairo or San Bernardino County. By 2100, give or take a couple of
decades, it's a good bet that free-market, private-property capitalism
will
be under siege once again, shaken as in 1848 and 1917 and the 1930's
by the tremors that the magnificent and ferocious system itself
unleashes.
History does not always repeat itself, but as Mark Twain may have said,
it rhymes.
   What will this next great "ism" look like?
The ascendant revolutionary ideology of 2100 won't be Luddite.
Theodore Kaczynski was the Ned Lud of this cycle, an angry, violent
lunatic of no real historical significance. Marx, for his part, was not
opposed to the new technology of the Industrial Revolution -- it was the

steam-powered weaving machines and railroads and all the rest that were
going to allow his collectivist utopia to emerge.
    In "Das Kapital," he wrote that "improved communications" had been
the
key to increased productivity and prosperity, that the "last 50 years
have
brought about a revolution in this field . . . the entire globe is being
girdled
by telegraph wires . . . the time of circulation of a shipment of
commodities to East Asia, at least 12 months in 1847, has now been
reduced to almost as many weeks . . . and the efficacy of the capital
involved in it has been more than doubled or trebled." It seems
improbable that the next great world-historical agitator will demonize
technology qua technology.
   The poor are always with us. The unequal distribution, among nations
and classes, of digital resources -- hardware, software, communications
bandwidth -- will help shape the early versions of the revolutionary
ideology. Today's self-justifying optimists in Redmond and Silicon
Valley
claim that the price of computers and telecommunications will continue
to
fall to the point that everyone on earth, rich and poor, will share in
the
millennial bounty. Maybe. Eventually. But for the next couple of decades

it's going to be ugly as the computer-rich get much richer and the
computer-poor even poorer.
     The present money moment won't last. As the digital age finally has
its
first and second (and third and fourth and fifth) financial busts over
the
next half-century, the particular magic spell of circa-2000
laissez-faire
hyper-capitalism will be broken. The computer revolution won't be
turned back, but the financial giddiness will subside.
    On this classic economic idea, late-20th-century Wall Street bears
and
19th-century communist pioneers agree. "Ever since the beginning of this

century," Engels wrote, "the condition of industry has constantly
fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly
every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with
the
greatest hardship for workers." After a few periods of serious
21st-century hardship, with I.R.A.'s and 401(k)'s reduced in value by
half overnight, alternative social and economic arrangements might not
seem so preposterous.
    The great new philosophical and political schism of the 21st century

will concern computers and their status as creatures rather than
machines. In my lifetime, the sentimental regard for computers' apparent

intelligence -- their dignity -- will resemble that now accorded
gorillas
and chimps. And it will not stop there. In his book, "The Age of
Spiritual
Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence," Ray Kurzweil,
the computer scientist, quite convincingly predicts that around 2030
computers will begin to seem sentient -- that they will "claim to be
conscious." And by the end of the century, he writes, there will no
longer
be "any clear distinction between humans and computers."
   I find his scenario altogether plausible. And as it unfolds, I am
certain that
this astonishing new circumstance -- machines that think, machines that
feel -- will provoke political and religious struggles at least as
profound
and ferocious as the earlier wars over Christianity, human rights and
abortion. A machine-liberationist movement will arise. And by 2100, the
21st century will have its Gandhi, too.

Kurt Andersen is the author of "Turn of the Century," a novel.