|
Oberleutnant posted:You don't seem to be arguing the point you think you're arguing here. Some industries are threatened by automation. That's nothing new or exceptional. The industries are predominantly service based (as your post indicates) but this is just a product of western economies being service economies. To a certain extent you can see this as just an extension of Marx's economic theories, specifically the tendency to replace living labor with dead labor. But it has enormous implications for Marx's political theories because it moves the proletariat from being the source of all value, (and therefore possessing immense political power as a result of the ability to withhold their labor), to being surplus people who live and die at the whim of the bourgeoisie.
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 18:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 2, 2024 09:43 |
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Something that many people (even marxists) always, always forget is that the relationship between the costs of industrialisation vs mass human labour is not a fixed ratio but does and will vary constantly. Increased mechanisation and industrialisation devalues (through deskilling) human labour until it's so badly paid and menial that it's profitable again (this process also depowers the labouring class through temporary mass unemployment, leading to a race to the bottom for workers' rights as people accept worse and worse conditions in order to get any work at all). The reason this doesn't apply here is because it's never actually more profitable to hire a wage laborer than to use a self-driving car. You would literally have to pay them starvation wages, in the sense that you're not paying them enough to afford food and they eventually starve to death. It's true that everyone is going to see their wages plummet but there's also going to be a large proportion of people that are now permanently unemployed.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 19:04
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:You may as well say it's never profitable to hire a pinmaker (a job which, if I remember correctly marx analyses in detail in Capital) after inventing a machine that makes pins. It's a meaningless starement because of course some tasks get automated away. The fact that this time it might be your job is (im sorry to say) meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Your labour will be devalued and you'll have to find worse work doing something else. The pin factory example is actually Wealth of Nations, though maybe Marx references it. It's also total horseshit, whole cloth, but whatever. Anyway, you're mistaken, because there is a difference between producing more pins per labor input and excluding humans entirely from pin-making. You're right that capital will always try to exploit labor, but the fact remains that there will be less ways that labor can be exploited if most tasks are automated, and that less labor will be required for the economy to operate in toto. That said, you're of course right that not literally everything will be automated, but for example the Great Depression was just 25% unemployment. We're looking at much higher levels, upwards of 50%, maybe closer to 90%.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 19:21
|
|
|
Prior to capitalism, most people just scraped by as subsistence farmers. Once industrialization began, it became profitable to exploit their labor, so they were brought in to work in factories. Eventually automation expanded enough and better markets opened, so they were thrown out of the factories and sent to work in retail, or driving trucks, or whatever. Where exactly are the supposed to go when they're kicked out of the last, lowest-paid professions? Again, it is never going to be profitable to hire them for those old jobs, no matter how little you pay them. Where will they work?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 19:31
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:A cyclical temporary growth in unemployment while production recalibrates to increased automation is exactly what I just said would happen. There will probably be more manufacturing in the US, but with less people working in it than there are currently. You should look at the automation of industrial and service work as being like the automation of agriculture, where we once had most of the population working on farms and now we have almost none. Now imagine that happening to to like half of the economy. There is no law of economics that says a given sector needs to employ x people.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 19:53
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Not to be spiteful or anything but all i see in this discussion is a bunch of westerners (and i'm one too) who can't see past their own immediate futures abd interests, as if anything that threatens them is an unprecedented paradigm shift. That's a particularly asinine way to look at it.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 20:03
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Again, look beyond the borders of America at what happens elsewhere, working conditions are very different, and many people live without basic necessities. Global production could probably expand many times over (absorbing suplus workers) and still fail to meet even the necessities that westerners take for granted, let alone the luxuries. I look at this as an economic issue, not a moral one. But you'd be wrong to assume this is only going to to affect the West and that people in developing countries will be insulated from its effects. Weren't you just predicting that manufacturing was going to migrate out of China? What do you think that's going to do to the Chinese economy, and Chinese labor? How will farmers in Uttar Pradesh be affected by the falling price of crops? Yes, we can even automate agriculture, and have already started doing so. Thug Lessons has issued a correction as of 20:11 on Jun 6, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 20:09
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:I'm not predicting that they're insulated because the basis of my argument is that the current process of automation is a natural development of capitalism, and not out of the ordinary, and they are part of the global capitalist sytem. Other populations are in the process of being integrated into that system. You can't expand industries indefinitely because you get into overproduction. This applies both in terms of iterative growth and the creation of new industries. What you can do, however, is have societies where most people aren't wage laborers, and those societies have existed both historical and today.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 20:31
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Thehistoryofcapitalism.txt You've already made a great case for why this won't happen when you underlined that people will be making a lot less money if they're working at all. You can't sell people more things while you're simultaneously reducing their wages.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 20:40
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:No, i've implied (well explicitly stated) an expansion of productive capacity to capitalise on cheap labour and efficient distribution through automation of services. Those industries don't need to be completely or even mostly manual. This is the ideal for capital, but they won't be fully automated to the extent of total (or even majority) unemployment in any timescale that is relevant to a practical discussion because the demand for even basic necessities is not met in many places, and the provision of those commodities is a route to increased profit for capital. Capital doesn't care at all about whether basic necessities are met, and that's the root of the problem.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 20:49
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Workers are both producers and consumers, the price of commodities is affected by production costs. This is a fairly elementary point addressed in the book which this thread exists to discuss. No poo poo. Doesn't address my point at all.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 20:51
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Capital extracts surplus value from the production of commoditie. The definition of a commodity is given (iirc) on the first page of vol.1 as a thing which people are prepared to buy because it fulfils some need. If it's not necessary or desired people will not buy it. You seem fond of quoting Capital. Can you remind me what Marx said happens when the organic composition of capital rises too high and dead labor predominates over living labor? Thug Lessons has issued a correction as of 21:00 on Jun 6, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 20:58
|
|
|
Thug Lessons posted:You seem fond of quoting Capital. Can you remind me what Marx said happens when the organic composition of capital rises too high and dead labor predominates over living labor? Very relevant here: look at the labor participation rate in Saudi Arabia, where this is happening today. That's a possible future for us.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 21:07
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:You're fundamentally misrepresenting my argument. Or your own. Yes workers should always be ready to fight back in times of crisis, but the argument that is being put forward is that an upcoming crisis created by automation in the west represents an existential threat to capital that is different to any previous upheaval, and I don't believe that's the case. It is simply part of an ongoing process that won't reach the level of total collapse for many generations. I don't think it's the end of capitalism. It's just going to create a massive economic crisis, probably the biggest in modern history, and one that lays bear the folly of capitalism as explained by Marx: quote:Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 21:14
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:Yes, and that would be relevant if you could demonstrate that, globally speaking, Capital has reached (or is near to reaching) that point. It hasn't, and it isn't. Locally in certain economies it may be true (I would argue against it). Globally it's not even close. It doesn't have to be global. It just has to exceed capital's capacity to expand into new markets, which it will do in spades.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 21:15
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:But we've seen it all before - every collapse is worse than the last, but the system recovers. I hate to be a debbie downer but you have to demonstrate why this particular time it will be fundamentally different from the last 50 times. I've done that again and again. If you want to cling to the idea that contemporary labor participation rates are set in stone, despite the fact that it's demonstrably false by looking at both historical and contemporary societies, then don't let me stop you. But I feel pretty confident I've explained my point well enough you can understand it.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 21:53
|
|
|
This discussion really underlines the necessity of reading and understanding volumes 2-3.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2017 22:05
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:If you think that there's some killer argument hidden in vols 2 or 3 then by all means share it. But from my memory the only standout point of relevance would be in vol 2, which lumps services (distribution in particular) in as a necessary element of the production chain with only cosmetic differences (that is it's the production of a change of location for the commodity) from conventional production. There's nothing hidden, volume three just describes crisis theory. But the problem you're having is more fundamental in that it makes no sense. You're saying that everyone thrown off by automation is going to see their income depressed to third-world levels, (which, I have to add, is a claim at least as bold as saying they'll be unemployed), and when I confronted you about how this, you know, would torpedo the entire world economy due to the lost markets you brushed it off and mumbled something about prices of production. Even in your own scenario you're positing effects that will lead to the greatest economic depression in the history of capitalism, but somehow it's also no big deal and just first world problems. There's always been crises who cares about the biggest? I'm really at a loss, I can't really conclude anything here beyond a) you don't care about automation and b) you don't know what you're talking about.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2017 03:01
|
|
|
Oberleutnant posted:My argument is very simply that the automation of services will not be so complete either locally or globally to produce a total collapse in global capitalism. The problem is that the outcomes you're proposing imply that, and you're in denial about it because you think it's white people poo poo or something.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2017 03:23
|
|
|
IDK dude, maybe you're right, and after a decade or two of doing nothing to help the millions are made unemployed by automation they will eventually find the most menial of jobs making subsistence wages. That's a bold, very speculative prediction, but it's possible. But your underlying point that this is no big deal, it's just another crisis in an endless series, no one should care about this, and the only reason people care about it is because they're rich white narcissists, is so spectacularly wrong and frankly ignorant that there's not much else to say. I'm sorry you feel that way, maybe unfuck your poo poo. Anyway, sorry, I'll stop dragging this out. For real this time.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2017 03:50
|
|
|
Vermain posted:I mean, it's truly, staggeringly mind-boggling in a certain way that an economic system based entirely on the accrual of power by private, unaccountable individuals - where the vast majority of people labour under them with no recourse against their predations, save to beg for scraps from a different master - managed to pass itself off as a system of ultimate freedom for so long.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2017 11:04
|
|
|
asdf32 has been posting entry-level homespun objections to Marxism in these sorts of threads for years, and I would recommend not engaging with him at all.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2017 20:21
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 2, 2024 09:43 |
|
|
Ruzihm posted:Are there any critiques of UBI that analyze it from a marxist perspective? Jehu is basically the definition of a crank but his criticism isn't bad. The main criticisms seem pretty obvious to me, namely that it's a) a purely redistributive policy that preserves capital and b) disempowers workers by removing them from production. And on a more practical level I can't think of anyone pushing for a form on UBI a Marxist should actually support, including left-leaning proponents like e.g. Varoufakis
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2017 20:56
|
|