Robots and Communism

There have been a bunch of blog posts from the liberal bloggers I frequent recently about robots. Specifically, the apparently-growing trend toward replacing human workers with robots. Matt Yglesias, in particular, thinks that this is a good thing, that will allow society to shift human resources into other sectors like health care and education, where actually having people in the room matters, without losing material plenty. Kevin Drum, who started this particular debate, and Paul Krugman, who just added his two cents to it, focus more on the negative disruptive aspects. I'm going to focus on one particular little throw-away line at the end of Krugman's post, where he mentions that the capital/labor dimension of inequality has "echoes of old-fashion Marxism" as one reason why it hasn't gotten much attention from mainstream economists.