I see there's lot of support, especially in leftist spaces, and in younger generation, for idea of completely abolishing the work in favour of automation. By my post I want to show you that it's, in my opinion, very bad idea. Why?
First of all, our value as a class in the system of production and for capitalists came from our ability to work and produce goods. Capitalists need us – and they need us educated, healthy, productive, long living; both as consumers and producers: because the difference between what we produce as a class and what we consume as a class is then accumulated as capital. That's why in modern capitalist societies, in centres of qualified labour, living standards for the proletariat are high: to effectively produce value, worker needs to have as well good internal motivation and creativity to work effectively, as there's need to be constantly increasing market demand for produced goods.
On the other hand, people who are somehow unable to effectively produce a value – disabled, uneducated, addicted or declassed to position of lumpenproletariat and living mostly or entirely outside the legal system, are only an obstacle. If these people are on social benefits or get products of labour in any other means than buying them for exchange of their labour, their whole existence is only a handicap from perspective of capitalists.
People who only consume and don't produce anything have zero negotiation power, everything they have that could impact system of capitalist production for their gain is to make others unable to work; for example by destroying infrastructure, organizing crime, etc., generally by solely destructive and antisocial activity.
If, for example, automation will abolish 90% of work positions, then all these people become lumpenproletariat, who, from perspective of production, organized capital, and a state, the best what could do with their existence is to die. We don't let elderly or disabled people to die of starvation and sickness only because of moral standards of their working families, who care about them enough to prevent it from happening. At the same time care is more and more outsourced to external institutions because leaving them at home decreases productive power of working part of family.
But, if we'll have situation when whole societies, districts, etc., all generations, will be unemployable, unnecessary and unneeded, and their only one way to ensure their most basic rights and existence will be though making others impossible to work and earn money, so by developing crime and social pathology, then not only capitalists will not be interested in even keeping them healthy and alive anymore, but also remaining working proletariat elite will desire to separate themselves mentally and spacialy from this new class. Working people will leave lumpenproletarized districts and every services and consuming goods that matter for maintaining a production will be redistributed in places of living of the proletariat, being as unaccesible for the unemployed majority as possible.
The future of abolishing the work through full automation is then not characterized by bright luxury and equality but extreme isolation of last working technological elite and extreme poverty in other places of the world.