Francis Fukuyama famously said in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, that history had come to an end circa 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It announced the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Soviet Russia and, generally, of communism as an economic system, and, correlatively, the unopposed global spread of liberal democracy. One hundred and eighty years before Fukuyama, Hegel had said something similar when he saw Napoleon on horseback riding into the town of Jena in 1806. Napoleon was, for many in those early days, the symbol of the spread of freedom through Europe and against the tyranny of monarchy. There is today the suspicion coming from both Marxists and conservatives alike that the imminent transformation of the labour process, its complete automation through robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), will bring about the end of history.

Arithmetically, the problem is a combination of collapsing productivity and insufficient capital investment. On February 19, 2017, the New York Times ran a feature story on recent changes in the United States oil industry.2 The focus was on the recent "embrace" of technological innovation in the industry after the 2014 plunge in the global oil market. This was just one of a rash of such pieces in the popular press, relying, as is typical of such writing, on a smattering of skewed, decontextualized data, a healthy serving of the anecdotal, and a host of the worst tech journalism clichés ("a few icons on a computer screen," "a click of the mouse," video game marathons as job training, a compulsory reference to drones). Zeroing in on the effects of these changes on workers in west Texas, the article's upshot is unobjectionable enough: as oil prices recover, output rises, and production becomes more capital-intensive, many workers who lost jobs in the downturn will be replaced by machines. These workers, often Latino, are sure to be forced out of these semi-skilled, relatively well-paid jobs into other sectors of the labor market, where their skills and experience will serve little purpose. At first blush, the situation seems dire. We are told that some 30% of jobs in the industry were lost after the oil market crash of mid-2014, when employment in the industry was at its peak.