Thomas More's Island of Utopia, 1518 Frontispiece. Woodcut. Wikicommons/ Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection. Some rights reserved.“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”
The society that Marx theorised as a fulfilment of history paradoxically resembles the one imagined by the more visionary entrepreneurs, on the edge of launching a new industrial revolution that was promising to free us all from the very idea of labour as an instrument of production and income redistribution.
Both utopias could, however, turn to nightmare, if we just imagine using the dramatic increase in productivity brought about by smart technologies, to turn citizens of such an evolved society into the lazy recipients of prosperity for the asking.
