Automation and the End of Capitalism (Jim) by der Augenblick

I wanted to write a quick addendum to Rob's post on Marshall Brain's talk about robotics and employment.

At the end of his talk Brain says the only logical plan of action given the inevitability of the massive unemployment (50 million people) and concentration of wealth that will result from full automation of labor in the next decade is to "restructure the economy" or "redesign society". Brain summarizes the way we should redesign society in four points:

• Spread the benefits of productivity increases to everyone



• Break the concentration of wealth



• Increase pay



• Reduce the work week

Brain doesn't provide a lot of details for what these actions would involve, though of the last one, reducing the work week, he says we should reduce it from 40 hrs to 30 hrs to three days to two days—until we are all "perpetually on vacation".

To put the point bluntly, Brain describes communism. Notwithstanding some of the particularities given by various thinkers—Marx even remarks at one point that we will enjoy work under communism—communism has always involved two things: (1) the distribution of labor and the distribution of the product of labor is planned and not determined by the market, and (2) we are freed of the compulsory aspect of labor. The struggle against capitalism is a struggle against the imposition of labor. It is in most cases a struggle to get more use-values for less exchange-value or to get use-values without any exchange-value attached to them.

Same thing without the jargon: communism means everyone gets as much as possible by working as little as possible.

Clearly this was impossible under conditions of scarcity. Yet technologists, engineers, scientists, and inventors all seem to agree that we are fast approaching the point where scarcity will end—if we're not there already. The question is whether the scarcity we experience now and will experience in the future is the result of nature or whether it is the result of the unplanned system we live in. Brain argues that if we continue down the current path—letting market forces stand in for conscious decisions—this technology will hurt humanity, not benefit it. But if we make conscious, rational choices about how society as a whole ought to proceed with the implementation of this technology, it can benefit everyone. In fact, it is the only way it can benefit everyone and not hurt them. That is the first way in which Brain's solution negates the fundamentals of capitalism: he says we ought to bypass the market and make conscious, direct choices about the distribution of labor and the distribution of the fruits of labor in our society.

What he does not mention—and what I would emphasize—is that the ubiquity and growth of social networking technologies lays the foundation for total, conscious, decentralized, and democratic planning of the production process and the democratic distribution of the surplus-product. Communist planning in a technologically advanced world will neither resemble "administered", Soviet-style economies, nor will it reflect market forces. The current trajectory of the development of the productive forces makes this both possible and necessary.

The second way in which he bypasses capitalism is by raising the demand that we be "perpetually on vacation". He claims the only solution to the looming crisis—a crisis which we see now only in miniature—is to demand an end to the condition of forced labor. While it may appear as though capitalism is a system in which workers individually and voluntarily contract out their labor in exchange for a wage, the fact of the matter is that the working class as a whole is enslaved by the capitalist class as a whole. Every product of labor takes the commodity form. Unlike past civilizations, we do not even keep the means of subsistence. Therefore, in order to acquire access to the means of subsistence, we must work in exchange for a wage, and we exchange that wage for the means of subsistence. Money stands as the barrier between us and what we create. It is an indirect, abstract form of slavery, but it is a form of slavery nevertheless. We are not enslaved to any one particular individual; however, we are enslaved to the value-form itself. We cannot live except by working for another person, and our share of the product of labor is determined by unconscious, unplanned market forces.

But the demand for communism is the demand that we workers as a whole, rather than having to access the product of our labor only to the extent that the non-workers want us to, instead collectively have direct control over the product of our labor. This means that, as a society, we give of ourselves what we consent to give, and we take what it is reasonable to take. Given the inevitable conditions of superabundance of products approaching, the extent to which we can take approaches infinity. Given the inevitable, exponential rise in the productivity of labor, the amount of our labor we can consent to give approaches a value of zero.

We are fast approaching the point where if we do not meet anti-capitalist demands, the vast part of humanity will sink into misery. Brain demonstrates this in his talk. Yet we are approaching a point—just behind the first point—where the conditions that make capitalism possible will no longer exist. Moreover, we are creating the point where access to social wealth is necessarily decoupled from exertion. We are making necessary a transition from a liberal democratic society to a revolutionary democratic one.