If you would go out of your way to argue how easy it is for capital to automate away jobs when labor costs become too high, then you should probably know that you’re giving all kinds of credibility to those of us who advocate fully-automated luxury communism. I mean, think about it: you’re arguing that so much of human labor ISN’T NECESSARY because said jobs can be done by machines, and yet you STILL want the bulk of humanity to pointlessly scrape by laboring for the capitalist class, receiving meager wages to buy the shit they helped generate in the first place. The above billboard is a THREAT. Let’s not mince words – that billboard is bourgeois propaganda designed to turn the working class against each other and against the broader goals of resource democratization. “If you fight for a basic livable wage, just know that you’re easily replaceable, peon!”
This is what leftists mean when they say that capitalism is an economic system filled to the brim with tensions and contradictions; it’s also what they mean when they say that capitalism inevitably produces its own gravediggers. Automation is one of those gravediggers, and it’s a major one at that. As more and more jobs become automated in the coming decades, the working class will face widespread dispossession, ramping up revolutionary class consciousness in the process. At that point, capitalism will either focus on generating more superfluous jobs for people to work or set about instituting a universal basic income – regardless, the point is to keep enough scraps flowing downward so that people don’t call for a broader system change. In this way, capitalism’s ruling class can maintain control over the wealth-producing means of production and imperialist capital accumulation can continue unrestrained.
For these reasons, “more jobs” and universal basic incomes are not enough. We need to democratize the broader social infrastructure and eliminate the profit system. If you recognize how possible it is to automate away human labor, then you should defenestrate yourself out of the Overton Window and use some political imagination – cut out the unnecessary jobs, automate all the labor you can, produce for human need rather than elite profit, and you end up with drastically reduced working hours and bountiful leisure time. This is the essence of fully-automated luxury communism – the natural conclusion of the conditions that capitalism set in motion.
Be wary of automation in the present climate, but always trace it back to the class struggle. Robots taking our jobs SHOULD be cause for celebration; why should we treat these potential liberators as harbingers of dispossession? Technological advancements are pushing us exponentially towards a de facto post-scarcity world, where everyone’s needs can be comfortably met alongside their desires for community and leisure and entertainment, and yet we’re held back by Empire’s insistence on keeping the means of production hoarded under the command of a superfluous ruling class. As long as we are divided into capitalists and workers, humanity will never know full liberation.
TL;DR: automating jobs will eventually get rid of working for profit, cut down the class system, and give everybody time to focus on whatever they want to do.
Exactly, with automation will actually come more jobs and better paying jobs to manage those technologist. Technology always statistically creates more jobs than it destroys.
Okay but that’s also what we want to avoid. It’s not about resigning ourselves to HAVING to work a job just so we can access resources – it should be about determining what jobs are actually necessary for meeting people’s needs and for the maintenance of society, what jobs can be automated away, and how to properly transition towards a system that produces for need rather than for profit (and hopefully eventually reaching a point of abundant post-scarcity that money itself could be feasibly abolished from there), all accomplished by democratic control of the means of production and the infrastructure. I’m sick of this liberal discourse that keeps shifting all these radical developments in technology back towards the status quo, where the wealth-producing machines are still controlled by elites and where we have to just keep inventing new jobs for people to work so they can access resources. If feudalism couldn’t cope with the advancements in technology that eventually made feudal relations obsolete, then capitalism won’t be able to cope with the coming advancements in technology as well, try as it might – scarcity will have to be enforced (more so than it is now), more pointless jobs will be created, and politicians will opt for redistributive universal basic incomes in an attempt to stabilize the whole thing. We need to seize the opportunity to put the exponentially-increasing reach of technology to work for the benefit of humanity, not just for human benefit when it’s convenient to capitalists.
So this post reminded me of something from my childhood, and I couldn’t place what, until I remembered this joke from the Jetsons:
Now in the show this is obviously a statement about how easy Mr Jetson has it in the future’s workforce, but it more effectively highlights the absurdity of a capitalist system once technology has become able to automate entry-level labor: no one NEEDS Mr Jetson to do anything, but because his value in society is entirely based on income and thus employment, they need to FABRICATE a role for him to fill. In reality the only human necessary to keep the plant running is (maybe) Mr. Spacely, but goodness knows we can’t let EVERYONE enjoy an upper-middle class income in management, so they give him a bunch of useless peons to boss around all day.
The capitalist system the Jetsons live in finds THIS absurd future preferable to a system where everyone’s basic needs are met using the massive surplus generated by a fully automated workforce. The people who paid for the billboard in the original post above are even LESS sympathetic, as they’d apparently blame US for “making” them fire 90% of their employees in order to remain competitive. What a grand system, this capitalism.
also in regards to that post above about automation creating “better jobs”: automation today is not like the automation of the 20th century. it’s getting rid of more jobs much faster than it’s creating any. if an electronic cashier is putting human cashiers out of business, those people can’t just up and learn coding or IT. it’s not that simple.
at the end of the day though? I’m tired of talking about jobs. I’m tired of hearing politicians say “more jobs,” like pointless and inefficient positions that exist solely to give someone a job are anything to be proud of “creating.” I’m telling y’all it’s inevitable that luxury communism will come once we stop placing so much importance on the Almighty Job
this post helps me wake up in the morning
So, who maintains all the machines necessary for automation
A society with a highly automated and democratic economy would probably have curriculums that teach the essentials to students. The education system’s structural purpose is preparing students to take part in the economy. Early/long school days and hours of homework under capitalism serve the purpose of preparing students for the drudgery of wage labor – working extra hours or “taking work home with them”, as well as taking orders from bosses and “knowing their place”. An automated/democratic economy would have different structural needs, and would therefore have a different education system.
Of course work will always be necessary, but I don’t understand this self-defeating “gotcha” that tries to refute post-capitalism by implying some work would still need to be done. It’s like….yeah? So? It’s about cutting down the hours as much as possible and then letting people live.
Couldn’t agree w this more
Also like… there will still be people interested in… doing things?
Some folks would still want to tinker and fix machines. Some people would still want to landscape and make gardens. Some people would still like to cook and host and make meals for lots of folks. Some people would still like to teach and be caregivers to children. Some people would still want to do a lot of things we’d see as work because people still like doing things.
People think that without the boot heel of suffering and death everyone would stop doing everything and become caricatures of humanity. It’s not a choice between having a capitalist job system and absolutely nothing getting done (not even maintenance on the machines we’d be relying on somehow?). That’s just a false dichotomy.
There will always be work and there will still be people who can and will do the work, but there doesn’t need to be pointless busywork jobs just for the sake of them and certainly not under threat of pain and death.
A LOT OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD ACTUALLY WANT TO BE PRODUCTIVE! AND DO THINGS! WITH THEIR TIME! A lot of people are emotionally fulfilled by working!
All that shit about having a job you love making it so you’ll never work a day in your life could ACTUALLY BE TRUE FOR WAY MORE PEOPLE if huge swaths of the population weren’t forced to work jobs they hate for under livable wages just to fucking survive. Which, I realize this is what pom-seedss just said, but fucking please.
I’m like 99% sure that the only reason we believe that people would be “lazy” and would “never work if they didn’t have to” is because the job system as it is now is soul crushing. So many people love and cherish their time off, and openly hate their time on, because their time on is at best boring and at worst borderline torturous.
Far more people would happily engage in working if working wasn’t practically designed to crush their spirit for not enough money to even live on.
Always reblog and always read to remind myself
As an automation engineer, this warms my heart.
After my grandparents both retired, they took a bit of time to simply relax and enjoy life, but shortly afterwards, they started spending much more time doing other things: compiling and writing their history, learning to draw, making sure their grandkids had what they needed to be successful in life. That became their work. Nobody asked them to do it, but they started doing it because it’s what they wanted to do with their lives. People are motivated by having purpose in their lives, not just by threat of starvation. When people say “I wouldn’t work if I didn’t have to”, what they mean is “My job is unfufilling and I’ve become so accustomed to the idea of work as a chore that I can no longer comprehend the idea of working towards my own goals and self-actualization”, which, in my opinion, is a worse fate than the image of “spiritual death by convenience” that sci-fi movies like Wall-E have portrayed.
10 hours of my day gets sucked away by my job, 5 god damn days a week, when all I wanna do is write. I’d write 10 hours a day if I could, 12 hours, 15 hours. But I don’t have the energy at the end of the day. I don’t have the energy at the end of the week. We have to work to survive, but as we forgo our dreams to meet our needs, can we really call this living?
Water Witches 