Main
themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of
Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of
unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to
ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have
addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption
that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.gaNile6R.dpuf
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.gaNile6R.dpuf
Main
themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of
Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of
unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to
ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have
addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption
that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.gaNile6R.dpuf
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.gaNile6R.dpuf
Main
themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of
Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of
unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to
ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have
addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption
that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.Jp2qmIMP.dpuf
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.Jp2qmIMP.dpuf
Main
themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of
Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of
unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to
ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have
addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption
that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.Jp2qmIMP.dpuf
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.Jp2qmIMP.dpuf
Main
themes from the liberal Labour Party Fabian project on the Future of
Work. Automation will replace living labour and leave a mass of
unemployed and casualised underemployed. Solutions focus on the UBI to
ensure that income equity is not dependent on employment. I have
addressed the UBI as utopian in another blog. But what of the assumption
that automation will displace work?
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.Jp2qmIMP.dpuf
The impact of automation was predicted by Karl Marx around the time Aotearoa was being invaded by people with horses and carts. He argued that machines would never do away with human labour power because it is necessary to invent, apply and use machines to increase labour productivity in order to maintain the rate of exploitation (appropriation of surplus labour) to extract profits. However, a long time before the mass of workers were displaced by machines, they would rise up and overthrow the owners of machines and use them to build socialism.
Marx arrived at this prediction because he explained that capitalism was forced by its own laws of development to go do down the road of destroying its sources of wealth, both social labour and human ecology. This proves that capitalism must ultimately exhaust its historic use-by date and be replaced by socialism before it could destroy the pre-conditions for socialism. Not the “state socialism” and Stalinist/Maoist “communism” hate memes pushed by corporate media and post-modern discourse for decades, but the real thing where labour is directly social and the social surplus is allocated collectively on the basis of need.
Under capitalism, the exploitation of wage labour means that the division of labour becomes polarised between those highly exploited “technical” workers, underpaid “service” workers and a large and growing reserve army of unemployed. There is no way that capitalism can reverse this destructive trend. No significant reforms are possible because they raise costs when capital is facing a structural crisis of falling profits. Growing inequality is but a surface symptom of capitalism’s historic impending demise.
As capitalism goes further into decline with all of its destructive symptoms, it will be necessary to mobilise mass opposition to these symptoms by attacking the basic cause – capital’s drive for profits by making wage labour slave labour.
For example we know that corporates evade tax. They do this by hiding their profits. Our demand must be to open the books. If they refuse then we don’t merely boycott them but strike for a living wage and secure work. Refusal must be met by occupations, workers control of production, and the coordination of cooperatives locally, nationally and internationally.
Corporate states spend trillions of workers’ taxes on wars and military occupations of poor countries. They also militarise their “homelands” against political opposition. We must not merely protest spending on arms and demand taxes fund social welfare, we have also to strike to stop foreign wars, build international brigades as in Spain in the 1930s, and form defence squads that protect strikes and occupations.
The bosses want to turn us all into individual zero hours slaves. OK there is a positive side to this. We reject employment on such terms with strikes and occupations of all firms that attack labour’s living standards. We defend occupations and build collectives. When the banks ban cash or inflation makes it worthless we go back to barter. All of this serves to bring us closer to workers control over our working lives and living standards. Our powerlessness and alienation under capitalism is transformed into workers collective control over the conditions of production.
So while it is true that capitalism displaces living labour with machines, socialism uses those same advances machines to reduce the socially necessary labour time we have to work by sharing all work with those who want to work: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
The solution to the destruction of capitalist work must be to expropriate capital (as accumulated stolen labour time of generations of workers) and to distribute the productive output on the basis of democratic planning.
Factored into the equations in determining the economic, social and political priorities will be the impact of climate change which threatens any form of social organisation, capitalist or socialist with human extinction.
- See more at: http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/04/29/guest-blog-comrade-dave-brownz-no-future-for-capitalist-work/#sthash.Jp2qmIMP.dpuf
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment