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Technology and Unemployment: We Have Been Here Before 39 ship of dependence of labour on capital may be “bearable”. Unemployment might not increase and wages might even rise. However, in the more realistic case of capital growth being accompanied by the replacement of labour by machinery, things would be different. In this situa- tion, “The greater the social wealth … the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army … But the greater this reserve army relative in proportion to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the abso- lute general rule of capitalist accumulation . Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circum- stances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.” 17 In sum, for Marx, capital accumulation through mechanisation, unemployment (growth of an indus- trial reserve army) and impoverishment of workers were linked through a chain of causality. Machines themselves are not responsible for cutting “off the workmen from their means of subsistence”. How- ever, the same machines that represent “a victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces.” 18 17 Ibid ., Chapter XXV, section 4. 18 Ibid ., Chapter XV, section 6. 19 Keynes, John M. (1930), “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, Essays in Persuasion , New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963, pp. 358–373. 20 Ibid . 21 Ibid . 22 Ibid . 23 Ibid . Possibilities for our grandchildren In 1928, John Maynard Keynes gave several talks about the future which were revised and published in 1930 during the Great Depression as Economic Possi- bilities for our Grandchildren . 19 In this essay, Keynes sought to rid himself of the pessimism caused by the “prevailing world depression” and “take wings into the future”. 20 “What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?” he asked. “We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely technological unemployment . This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” 21 However, for Keynes, increased technical efficiency whose short-term consequence was unemploy- ment would signify in the long term “that mankind is solving its economic problem”, i.e. the problem of scarcity. 22 The author predicted that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today”. 23 Assuming a society that did not have insatiable desires and would be happy with a living standard eight times higher than in 1930, the nec- essary product could be obtained, sharing work as much as possible, if each person worked three hours per day, fifteen hours per week. “We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”