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ronya posted:(this was the same year Khruschchev would point at a washing machine and denounce it as a unnecessary gadget with no purpose) ronya posted:It's probably also not coincidental that the newfangled consumer appliances - that left-wing leaders were denouncing as materialist frippery distracting the working class from true liberation - were appliances that mainly reduced the kind of household labour performed by women It's a strange factor of the new modernity that the people who are now complaining about self-checkout at supermarkets taking away unskilled jobs will not on any level suggest taking up the mantle of Ned Ludd and bringing a hammer to their own automatic washing machine in the name of liberating the working woman. It suggests a dissonance where they know that automating jobs that suck is on one level good, because those jobs sucked, but on another level bad, because the profits of that go to the capital behind the appliance manufacturer rather than to the people that once did the work, but lack any mechanism to square that.
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Nov 23, 2020 09:38
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 05:42 |
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ronya posted:I don't think people (who are not already class-conscious, anyway) really care about who receives the profit inasmuch as they care that some of the residual labour not completely eliminated by automation - e.g., scanning and bagging - is now offloaded to you, the customer. There's still a checkout machine that does most of the busywork of ringing up purchases. It's just that the customer operates it instead in lieu of a cashier. Now, you might be right and what they really resent is having to do the thing themselves instead of standing there while someone else does, but I think it's interesting that they had to frame it in some sort of 'dignity of labour' rhetoric where it is the soul of the poor cashier that they are concerned for. If we take them at their word that this is the case, then you can immediately turn it to an argument of where the profits go, because in the case of the human doing the job, a portion goes to the company, and a portion goes to the human as a wage, which then generally gets spent in the local community. So that does make it easier to make a case for, as in Inventing the Future, saying "well why not do just that but with the machines doing all the work?"
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Nov 25, 2020 23:50
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