In many senses. Marx pointed to:
the economic limit on investment under an exploitative system, that machinery was only introduced where it was cheaper than the wages paid workers, those being representing only a portion of the time expended upon production (necessary labour time) rather than the whole. So with low wages, no incentive existed to introduce new technologies. Under a humanist system of production abbreviating labour time would be an exigency without this limit, since saving any part of the working day would be a gain.
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, reducing the incentive to invest.
Overall, as Marx put it, the capitalists, concerned with the reduction of working time only insofar as it coincided with the appropriation of more surplus value, were like those barbarians who would 'only drink from the skulls of the slain'.
In Britain today, the limits on production can be seen in the bizarre operation of the rail network, where trains today travel more slowly than they did in the steam driven 1950s.
> Such concerns
[as value expansion]
>will be
>meaningless under socialism.
Indeed. But that could only mean that a far greater value will be put upon human life, making its squandering in unrewarding routine labour all the more impermissible.
-- James Heartfield