AUTOMATION: CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
COMMENTARY BY PATRICE GREANVILLE
Automation is inevitable, humanity’s drive to replace human (or animal) labor with machine labor is ancient, and unstoppable, like the scientific spirit itself. But with the greater productivity of machines—especially in the turbocharged era of computers—more and more humans are literally being rendered superfluous for the production of ever bigger national and global outputs. Under fair and logical conditions of human cooperation and brotherhood, and scrupulous egalitarianism in the distribution of the gains (socialism) this would be a boon for humanity: most people would see ever higher incomes with fewer hours of toil a week, a life of leisure that could be devoted to personal growth, the furthering knowledge, the arts, hobbies and enjoyment, and the scientific advances needed to make the planet a true paradise.
But none of that is possible under capitalism—the system which controls America and which by controlling America strangles most of the world. Under capitalism, what seems like a ridiculous, illogical issue, arises as an impossible dilemma: humanity is able to produce ever larger quantities of products and services, but this only creates bigger fortunes for the already super rich, a tiny minority (8 people, six of them Americans, own already as much as half of all humanity), while throwing tens of millions every year into the trashcan of permanent poverty and unemployment. Can you see what the problem is?
Although CBS David Pogue bravely tries to approach the crux of the issue, the clash between capitalism’s stingy ways of distributing income to the masses while producing mountains of goods and services, I have the feeling that, as usual, the invisible editors preferred loyalty to their paymasters rather than much needed truth, so the segment does not even mention the words capitalism or socialism, inherent in a discussion of this sort. This is dishonest but entirely expected. In fact, throughout the segment the false suggestion is made on several occasions that automation will not render most of humanity unemployed and destitute in an ocean of potential affluence. To this end, a bourgeois (pro-capitalist) MIT academic is trotted out to mumble something about the “fact” that every technological advance has been accompanied in the past with cries of desperation, but employment eventually opened in new areas. He is obviously trying to convince us that the crisis of automation under capitalism is manageable, even curable, and not a threat to the livelihood of untold millions. His arguments, weak and essentially false when examined against the historical record (especially when factoring the constant growth in human population, precisely as a result of capitalist-created and enforced poverty around the globe) leave out some critical assumptions. Consider:
Most of the technological advances of the past (as the examples shown of substituting teams of horses in agriculture for a tractor or backhoes for ditch diggers) were examples of mechanization, not really modern automation. What makes this round of automation so serious and different is that it rides atop the computer revolution, which turbocharges human intelligence in an incalculable and dazzling manner. This is a tool that did not exist for most of human history.
Second, the computer revolution itself is so young that its capabilities are just beginning to be tapped. If at this rudimentary stage, so to speak, we already see automation invading most fields, including decimating the service sector (a poorly paid “refuge” sector in the past), and thereby cancelling hundreds of millions of jobs and rendering much of human conventional labor obsolete, can anyone honestly expect that this will not become a far more acute, irresolvable crisis as time goes by, indeed in the very near future, precisely because of capitalism’s perversely lopsided ways of distributing the fruit of society’s labor?
It’s clear that this is not so much an economic question as a political one; a matter of relative power between the two old antagonist: the haves and the have-nots, the “owning classes”, currently comprising a new global royalty of billionaires, and the increasingly desperate workers, who even in the once solid middle class are seeing their economic security eroded by ever greedier and ruthless capitalist takebacks and exploitation under the guise of necessary “austerity” and corporate restructuring.
Funny that people who live in obnoxious opulence should be the ones constantly preaching with a straight face that the relatively poor should do with less.
With our economy becoming more and more dependent upon machines, what will that mean for the future of employment? David Pogue of Yahoo Finance looks at the increasing use of autonomous vehicles and robots, and talks with Martin Ford, author of the book “Rise of the Robots.”
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