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Certainly they're not identical, no. But, this book was published pretty recently:
Sounds like transhumanism to me. Marx speaks positively of the outcomes of increased automation in The Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse, saying that it will lead to
Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism offers an interesting perspective on this, tracing the intellectual heritage of Marxism from ancient esoteric traditions that taught of the inherent divinity and perfectibility of mankind and the necessity for man to aspire to godhood, down through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and ultimately to Marx himself and his faith in humanity's power to radically reshape the "natural" order. I don't know how you can deny that a belief in progress and a belief in the capacity of man's reason to reshape the world and overcome social problems are central to leftism, and I don't know how you can deny the affinity between those same principles and transhumanism.
As I know you are already aware, there are people who are opposed to the whole idea of humans transcending their biological limits - forget whether it's possible, they don't even view it as desirable! To such people, the difference between orthodox Marxism and your preferred brand of transhumanism looks like merely an internal squabble over implementation details, and perhaps also over the scope of the project.
It's a sufficiently generic concept that anything I said about Marx's motivations for developing the concept would just be speculation, absent a more explicit source that discusses the matter.
Alienation for Marx is a result of capitalist social relations, not automation qua automation.
Yes, absolutely. Capitalism was always understood to be a necessary stage of development, and that it would furnish the tools of its own destruction, at which point those tools would be appropriated for allegedly more pro-social ends.
Every capitalist in the world would be more than happy to embrace socialism in a post-scarcity world. There's no practical difference between prince and pauper in a world like that. I'm aggressively right-wing and if we were actually in Paradise I would not care.
Ascending past all restraint and limitation isn't left or right-wing. Whether you imagine it as an angelic idle life in Heaven, or uploading yourself to the Great Machine, or being cared for by robots in your eternal nursing home, everyone yearns to be free of the human condition. It's one of the few dreams I'd call universal.
Well...
Certainly I acknowledge that the vast majority of people, of any political persuasion, if asked if they would like to live in Paradise (whatever we ultimately mean by that term), would answer "yes". The main historical debate has been over whether such a condition was possible, and that debate has been quite vociferous. The most forceful exposition of the view that mankind is inherently flawed and incapable of transcending his limitations is of course found in Christianity. Christians too dream of utopia, but of course since we know that the Kingdom of God is fiction, the Christian position is tantamount to the claim that utopia is impossible and not worth striving for in actuality.
Even still, it cannot be called a universal dream. Orwell's Can Socialists Be Happy? provides some hints in this direction:
I don't think Nietzsche would have wanted to live in Paradise either. Although, in his typical style, he approaches the issue only obliquely; it's more of an ethos that has to be absorbed from reading his entire corpus, rather than an issue he tackles directly in any one place.
This technically violates the rule against consensus-building--"we know" is too strong. More subtly, I know "Christians" (in the sense that they identify with Christianity while doubting the metaphysics of it) who see the Kingdom of God as unattainable but worth striving for as an ideal, so you need to be careful about making assertions regarding what "we" know, as well as what the "Christian position" is.
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