- 30 Oct 2017 01:18
#14857395
Marx on the machine:
“The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product is limited by the requirement that less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery...the limit to his using a machine is therefore fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it.”
Marx, quite logically, reasoned that automation would be limited by the relative cost of wages versus machinery. Wages can always fall, reducing the attractiveness of replacing workers with machines. Where wages are high, the drive to machine replacement is the strongest.
“But machinery does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous. It is a power inimical to him, and capital proclaims this fact loudly and deliberately, as well as making use of it. It is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital...
...The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor to the worker himself.”
Here a uniquely prescient description of working conditions today:
“The division of labour develops this labour-power in a one-sided way, by reducing it to the highly particularised skill of handling a special tool. When it becomes the job of the machine to handle this tool, the use-value of the worker’s labour-power vanishes, and with it its exchange-value. The worker becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. The section of the working class thus rendered superfluous by machinery, i.e. converted into a part of the population no longer directly necessary for the self-valorisation of capital, either goes under in the unequal context between the old handicraft and manufacturing production and the new machine production, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and makes the prices of labour-power fall below its value...When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it produces chronic misery among the workers who compete with it. Where the transition is rapid, the effect is acute and is felt by great masses of people.”
Marx even explains the rise of Trumpism: the abadoned workers of the industrial midwest become vulnerable to radicalization.
"As soon as machinery has set free a part of the workers employed in a given branch of industry, the reserve men are also diverted into new channels of employment, and become absorbed in other branches; meanwhile the original victims, during the period transition, for the most part starve and perish.”
The end-game of automation is dictated by the revolutionary nature of capital. Eventually the necessity of labor is eliminated completely:
“Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical process and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionises the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another.”
When there is no productive role left for labor in production, then of necessity labor must be discarded - just as you would discard any no-longer useful tool. At the same time labor's function in supplying the demand for production disappears as well.
This involuntary contraction cannot be "solved" through any action of free markets. The inexorable march toward greater efficiency leads to a natural wage rate of zero, and a natural unemployment rate of 100% over time.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. -Antonio Gramsci