Would more advanced technology make creating a communist society easier?

[GreyMan78]

Would technology like molecular assemblers or replicators make creating a communist society easier?

Or is it more complicated than that?

What do you think?

[ckaihatsu]

It's an excellent perennial question, that of a hypothetical 'technological determinism', "versus" class struggle. (Here's a framework of social magnitude, by levels, in two variations.)


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

While revolutionaries consistently diss the concept of technological determinism as being anywhere near paramount and ultimately determining, the topic is still worth considering and revisiting, decade-by-decade, since technological developments -- like the Industrial Revolution as a whole -- can have profound effects on everyone, while the class antagonism grinds on.

In recent times, of course, digital computational power has become useful and available to just about everyone, so something like a basic Android smartphone (on the Internet) could be considered to be a 'technological revolution' (of the printed word, communications, and audio / video) in its own right, though still not ultimately societally deterministic since the relations of production (wage-labor) haven't been altered at all.

Your point of a common-use mastery over materials itself, as with 3D printing or nanotechnology, would be similar to the digital revolution, I think -- many would find more flexibility and a cheaper cost in producing useful tangible things like housing materials, but such customized productivity would still be unable to compete with conventional mass-scale corporate-industrial production techniques, since large businesses would obviously have access to whatever the individual consumer would, and more, and would also enjoy massive economies of scale as well, for profit-making (due to the class divide).

This is why any technological advancements *can't* substitute for a (proletarian) class revolution itself, since it really should be the *workers* who decide on how *all* social production is to be done, across-the-board, without exception, for the common good on mass scales of implementation.