What will Communism do in regards to technology?
Labor ennobles, as I've heard before, but technology improves our quality of life and is a natural occurrence. As technology grows, fewer and fewer people need to work.
As such, we lose the need to work for our sustenance; the machines produce everything just about, meaning we can all live on the dole. Labor can no longer ennoble apart from charity work, and charity work is probably squeezed out by a) the dole, and b) machines filling everything.
Do Communists face a dilemma here? Either they must restrict technology's march, or they must allow it to run free, possibly turning us all into couch potatoes.
That assumes that the only productive endeavour in which you humans may engage is routine drudgery, which isn't at all the case- it is simply the sort that pre-dominates in our world, and is being pushed back by the advance of technology. There are many forms of labour apart from this, and many of them are better simply for being performed by a living, breathing human- teaching, for instance, or a barista in a coffee shop. Perhaps the march of technology is not a dilemma, but an opportunity- something which allow us to free ourselves from material drudgery, and focus on the greater ends of helping each other, and of attaining self-fulfilment.
Besides, there's still around five billion people who engage in back-breaking Victorian labour, so I would suggest that we'll be spending a good while elevating them to a decent standard of living before we begin to worry about the rise of the plumber-bot.
This gives birth to another question - many mansions are very beautiful due to the wealth sustaining them(the rich like to impress, after all). If they are turned into collective housing, what will keep them beautiful?
Perhaps it would be wiser to turn them into museums or some such, but that gives the question of who will still maintain them - some sort of government agency perhaps?
The left generally appreciate cultural wealth as much as the monetary wealth, so what will be done to protect large estates, which often are cultural masterpieces?
Well, in Britain, at least, many of the "Grand Estates" are already under partial public management through the National Trust- unlike in the US, possession of a sprawling mansion is merely indicative of aristocratic status, not of contemporary income- and I believe that this model could be quite easily replicated elsewhere. They could also be partially re-purposed as hostels, retirement homes, or what have you, and that would be decided on an individual basis.
The McMansions of the noveua riche, though, can burn to the ground for all I care. Ghastly things.
I've remained capitalist for the time being after asking the same question due to the fact/idea that people can indeed move themselves up, thus justifying inequalities... for now.
I suppose that might owe something to our respective backgrounds- in Britain, the "self-made man" narrative is far weaker, especially in the rather dishevelled post-industrial towns of the North and Scotland (from whence I hail), owing in part to the greater social stratification of British society, particularly the aristocratic pretensions of the British bourgeoisie. (There seems to be an odd belief among the British political class that handing our knighthoods and Lordships to wealthy businessman makes the whole farcical business somehow more inclusive, rather than simply reaffirming existing class divisions!
)
Well, Communism and Socialism, from my experience, seem to focus primarily on manual labor(hammer and sickle, anyone?) rather than such things as say, retail clerks. Which makes sense; farmers harvest food and factory workers are one of the early steps in the chain of production, whereas cashiers and whatnot are just selling finished products; they aren't really producing anything.
Unlike a factory worker, hence the argument that the factory worker deserves an equal share of the production.
That's simply because the bulk of labour performed in this world is manual (internationally speaking today, but, historically, in ever nation). The principles of socialism apply to an accountant or a programmer as much as to a welder or a joiner. Production, after all, doesn't mean the crafting of material goods, but the entire process by which those goods are delivered to an end consumer. Working at a store is productive in that it allows the end consumer to obtain those goods, and so it is only fair that the cashier derives a part of the wealth which the consumer invests in the goods.
Now, I will admit, there is something of an over-attachment to industry in modern Far Leftism, but that's because, in my understanding, this is the environment in which it is most established, while in the white collar work and in the service industry, people often believe that Trade Unions and the like are simply "not for them"- the former because middle class pomposity encourages them to believe themselves to be above the need for collective bargaining, the latter because the workers, rather tragically, often do not believe that they
deserve it. Those are both things which we must endeavour to change.
The factory worker already receives a proportional share based on the work he did.
They receive what the industrialist is willing to give them, an altogether different thing.
If an industrialist designs a new type of ultra-strong ultra-light steel, is he not entitled to a greater share of the profit? It was his invention - it required his ingenuity. No prole could do that.
When did an industrialist ever design
anything? That is the work of an engineer or a scientist, who are similarly robbed of their economic autonomy by the industrialist- or, in this day and age, by a cabal of executives, and on behalf of an impersonal array of investors.
The trouble is communists seem to think manual labor is the only real type of labor. This is a petty distinction when the matter at hand ought to be focusing on removing our selfish impositions.
No, we don't. Liebknecht was a lawyer, Maclean a schoolteacher and De Leon a journalist, and I doubt that either they or any other Socialist have ever seen such work as anything other than "real".
We can be like Jack Reed and Louise Bryant in 
