Excerpted from David Judd and Zakiya Khabir:

“Are “knowledge workers” actually doing something very different from traditional work–and, in fact, making the traditional working class obsolete?

Jeremy Rifkin argues in his 1995 book, The End of Work:

The information and communications technologies and global market forces are fast polarizing the world’s population into two irreconcilable and potentially warring forces–a new cosmopolitan elite of “symbolic analysts” who control the technologies and the forces of production, and the growing numbers of permanently displaced workers who have little hope and even fewer prospects for meaningful employment in the new high-tech global economy.

Actually, this is an old argument. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a utopian 15-hour workweek within a few generations. Less comfortingly, the revolutionary activist and author James Boggs wrote in 1963 that “automation and cybernation are shrinking rather than expanding the workforce…[and] work is becoming socially unnecessary.”

He concluded:

Today the creative work of production is being done by the research engineers, the program planners, the scientists, the electronic experts…What they are creating is a mode of production which, as long as the present system continues, excludes more and more people from playing any productive role in society.

Therefore, Boggs concluded, there were already living “millions [who] have never been and never can be absorbed into this society at all.”

Boggs’ book was in many ways prophetic, but not in its catastrophism. Total nonfarm employment in the U.S. was 56 million at the beginning of 1963. It was 121 million in January 1997, when Rifkin wrote. And it started out this year at 141 million.

Employment as a percentage of the population doesn’t show quite the same trend–it started 1963 at 55 percent, grew to 63 percent by the height of the 1990s boom in 1997, and started this year at 59 percent–higher than in 1963, but still a long ways from recovering from the dramatic drop of the Great Recession.

Nevertheless, technological advancement and growth have so far produced more jobs, not fewer. Even as automation has slashed employment in the U.S. auto industry and other mid-century heavyweights of the American economy, capitalism has drawn whole new segments of the population into the workforce: women in the U.S., hundreds of millions of peasants in China. This is out of the need for profit, not charity.

Under capitalism, the advance of technology has always thrown workers out of work. Even in the 19th century, Karl Marx could write:

– Modern industry never looks upon and treats the existing form of a process as final. The technical basis of that industry is therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative … [It] revolutionizes the division of labor within the society, and incessantly launches masses of capital and of workpeople from one branch of production to another…[This results in] incessant human sacrifices from among the working class, in the most reckless squandering of labor-power and in the devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a social calamity.

But what Marx was describing was a continuing series of calamities, without an inevitable end point. At the same time, capital also relies on living labor for its reproduction. Machines, even the most sophisticated, don’t add surplus value to the production process. Without exploiting human labor, capital cannot be turned into profit. And so profit-seeking capital finds new areas of investment, new markets and new industries, even as old ones are transformed by mechanization.

Even in the newest and most technologically advanced sectors of the economy, the working class, as we have defined it, remains not only a majority, but a majority with interests that conflict with those of its employers–and a majority with the power that comes from being necessary to the creation and realization of profits.”