I want to know if a communist world can result from widespread availability of automated systems and technology. In other words, suppose that anyone can manufacture anything for themselves using easily obtained robotic technology and automated manufacturing systems. Could this result in communism?
High levels of automation are highly problematic for Capitalism because it begin to break the relationship between wages as a source of income and the ability of workers to consume more goods. Automation increases the productivity of labour and so reduces the number of workers needed to produce the same number of goods. This works fine on the level of individuals and businesses but on a social level, more unemployment reduces the purchasing power in society. What you have is the contradiction between the increase in production and the limited purchasing power of the workers as the primary consumers of society and over time this results is the source of business cycles and in an "economic crisis of over-production" with recessions. economic crises are capitalism's way of adjusting to the anarchic growth phase which is overextended often on the basis of massive and unsustainable debt.
If you were to reach a position where society was entirely automated, you'd have made the "working class" largely redundent under Capitalism. Overall, thats alot of people to screw with and if they get organised they can overthrow the system. Capitalism doesn't collapse "automatically" as the result of economic processes however, so it is only the actions of the working class to overthrow the system to establish Communism that can do that. Automation does represent the near complete breakdown of wage labour as an economic relationship and certianly creates the conditions where it would be necessary to replace Capitalism with another socio-economic system.
Various proposals have been made for a "Universal Wage" in which everyone recieves a fixed amount of money from the government (there was a referundum in Switzerland on the idea last year). This is a reform that could certianly improve the situation but whether it can help Capitalism escape its contradictions is much more debatable.
What people want is not money, but the goods and services you can buy. So giving them more money could cause inflation and increase the government debt if its not paid for by taxation whilst offering only a temporary solution to the problem. The underlying economic contradiction in Capitalism between incrased production and limited purchasing power remains the same and so there are continued and worsening economic crisies because Capitalism cannot resolve it. Communism eliminates money as a medium of exchange and so can then plan production based on use and consciously distribute it by a form of "rationing".
In short, Automation does just about everything to make Communism possible and necessary
except having the Revolution itself. It creates the potential energy within society by stretching the institutional tolerances of Capitalism- like stretching an elastic band as far as it can go- which can then be released by a worker's revolution.
