Why are we working longer hours for less pay, and greater insecurity than ever?
As an imaginative exercise, consider the following two photos:
Q:
What do these two images have in common?
A:
1) They are vast top-down command systems
2) They require massive infusions of capital to build
The first picture (Ford, 1913) is quite revealing. The workers are literally standing elbow-to-elbow. And this is not even the main auto assembly plant, just an ancillary wheel assembly unit. The requirement for a large 'army' of human hands to facilitate this enterprise is the central point. I use the word 'army' because these early industrial systems attacked production in the same way they prosecuted wars - i.e., on a massive scale with lots of labor.
The second picture is just as telling. You see one lone figure standing at the top left. The purpose of human workers in new automated factories is to provide monitoring and occasional intervention if something goes awry.
At this point you will always see the so-called lump of labor fallacy invoked (lol fallacy). The critique postulated by the "lump of labor fallacy" is that new technologies create new jobs to replace the ones they destroy - this critique is invariably accompanied by amused references to Luddites.
The counter to the "lump-of-labor fallacy" is the "lump-of-labor-fallacy fallacy". The original critique makes the unwarranted (and unstated) assumption that new technologies always create
more jobs than they destroy. New technologies DO create new jobs, but there is no guarantee concerning their number. Indeed, the principle defining feature of new technologies is their independence of human labor. By definition, labor-saving devices eliminate labor, nicht wahr?
Now, you will usually hear the following response (lol fallacy, part II), something along these lines: "Intellectual labor is required to design and maintain these systems, and therefore what's required is skill retraining." This is even more absurd. Are we really going to replace the armies of workers shown in the first photo, with the handful of technocrats required to maintain the new automated system?
Even the most conservative extrapolation from these trends is breathtaking.
Half of existing US jobs will be automated out of existence in two decades. There won't just be individual jobs eliminated - entire categories of human work will simply disappear.
Indeed, barring some total breakdown, the vector of human work being superseded by automation is now unalterable. The inevitable outcome is that the design, construction, and maintenance of automated systems will be done by machines (not to mention its raw material inputs and the distribution of its products).
So the question remains, "Why are we still hustling for the next paycheck?" TiG has already responded to this point: post-scarcity economics can't be implemented in a capitalist system. My response is that it can't be implemented in
any system.
Let's take the example suggested by the first photo above. It was taken in the US, but it could easily have been taken in the Soviet Union. In either case, you have a top-down command system controlled by an elite. At the bottom, the workers have zero say in the organization or purpose of their work environment.
What they did have was numbers, and with numbers comes a certain power, even if that power might be limited. Labor, suddenly being a critical component of production, can decide to interfere with the process. This makes capital vulnerable to labor. This vulnerability is what gave labor its new power at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Without this vulnerability, the New Deal would never have happened.
Today the balance of power has shifted back to capital in the most radical fashion imaginable - an unintentional byproduct of the Automation Revolution.
in my opinion, this is why we won't have another New Deal and why we have Trump instead of Sanders.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. -Antonio Gramsci
- By wat0n
- By Tainari88