Bucky talked a lot about a world where there was enough food to go around, people were educated, and many jobs were being automated. I assumed he was party inspired by the Green Revolution/Norman Borlaug. On top of this, Bucky lived through an education transformation, going from a society in the late 1800s which had a global illiteracy of 85% to a complete flip to 85% global literacy--in his lifetime. He talked about this a lot. He also saw that many jobs, even in his day, were being automated, i.e. that humans were no longer required to be "muscle-reflex" machines. A lot of these ideas inspired that quote.
In a world where our political, financial, and corporate infrastructure supports "doing what needs to be done", in terms of benefiting all of humanity, we can then apply the "earning a living" quote. But only when we have a system setup to support the last sentence in the quote.
If you are not one of the "one in ten thousand..." then you should be studying or preparing to develop your own breakthrough that benefited humanity and become a "one in ten thousand" in the process.
> Bucky talked a lot about a world where there was enough food to go around, people were educated, and many jobs were being automated. I assumed he was party inspired by the Green Revolution/Norman Borlaug.
That notion dates back to the 1840's at least - the industrial revolution triggered ideological developments out of a growing optimism over the ability of finally doing away with poverty.
The birth of socialism was basically rooted in this optimism. Marx made the point in The German Ideology (1845) that a sufficiently well developed capitalism to ensure a level of production that would allow redistribution to eliminate basic wants would be essential for a successful socialist revolution, or the old class struggles would be reignited (Soviet Union being a good demonstration of exactly this)
He saw the "endgame" of capitalism as being when production was so extensive and so automated that the automation would cause massive unemployment, while production capacity outpace what is needed to sustain everyone. Without redistribution, this would then cause increased poverty, and unrest, was his thinking.
This is the part in question, from part I (A) 5. (you can see the whole book here - it's not one of his most accessible works, though: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideo... ), with some inline comments (the quoted text is all one continuous section):
> This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development.
This is a recurring theme with Marx: Revolution is not a political goal, _per se_. Class struggle is not something to strive for, _per se_ - it, according to Marx becomes a necessity when (if, but Marx believes it will inevitably occur) the governments of the current system becomes an "intolerable power", and for this to happen under capitalism, it must not just cause poverty, but cause poverty in contrast with greatly increased wealth.
> And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced;
The above is the specific line I had in mind.
You'll note that Lenin spent quite literally years before he succeeded in convincing enough of the (then) Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party that there was sufficient reason to basically ignore this, and that it would be possible to "short-circuit" this process in Russia. In retrospect, of course, we can see just how wrong he was: It took just until the early 1920's until the Bolshevik's had picked up all the Czarist regimes oppressive tricks and started firmly establishing the Party as a new upper class in the face of the consequences of redistribution in a poor agrarian economy, and we've seen that pattern repeated over, and over.
Marx saw a well developed capitalism as both inevitable, and an absolutely necessary precondition for the development of socialism.
> and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established,
Global trade. Or to take it to its logical conclusion, globalisation:
> which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.
> Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
This is one of the parts of Marx that is most often "lost": While on one hand Marx had ideas about immediate political goals (his "Critique of the Gotha Programme" is one of the most accessible, short works on that - it was a letter written to tear to shreds a proposed new party programme for a German socialist party), he wrote very little about the "end goals", as he saw socialism and communism not as something to fight to achieve, but as something that will inevitably happen as a consequence of the development of capitalism.
In a world where our political, financial, and corporate infrastructure supports "doing what needs to be done", in terms of benefiting all of humanity, we can then apply the "earning a living" quote. But only when we have a system setup to support the last sentence in the quote.
If you are not one of the "one in ten thousand..." then you should be studying or preparing to develop your own breakthrough that benefited humanity and become a "one in ten thousand" in the process.