Notes on defining the working class (2)

Continuing on from yesterday's Notes on defining the working class.

I suppose the biggest threat to a Communist revolution is the loss of the social nature of work as automation increases. Workers will find themselves devoting more time to tending machines rather than interacting with other workers.

This interaction would have been about how to survive on the job. Now, it is not uncommon for a worker to get killed in a factory without anyone noticing that it has happened. There was even one case where a worker disappeared into a pool of water and no one noticed for several hours.

There is a contradiction in the increasing automation of the workplace. The development of the productive forces has to reach a certain level before a Communistic society becomes sustainable. Yet, the isolation of workers in the workplace means that the solidarity of workers is dissolved.

Yet, the proletariat is now garvitating to Department I. MacMillan seems to say that anyone else but the workers of Department II leading the revolution would deform it because they are not part of the productive process.

But the workers in Department I are developing the class consciousness about where they are in the economic process. Unfortunately, they are adhering to the petit bourgeiose view of the world.