Showing posts with label UBI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UBI. Show all posts
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Sunday, June 19, 2016
No future for Capitalist work
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
Monday, March 28, 2016
UBI - magical thinking in the age of capitalism
As the New Zealand Labour Party ponders the 'Future of Work', the discussion focuses on the Universal Basic Income (UBI) to "guarantee income security and dignity". This is another attempt to rewrite Labour's historic mission to convince workers that it knows best what workers want under capitalism. This is another con.
Not until bosses give back their profits to the generations of workers they stole them from will any redistribution of income be more than a subsidy to the bosses. Notice how all the discussion around the fashionable UBI is limited to what the bosses can afford to pay. This is magical thinking. No way will capitalist corporations and banks agree to pay for full employment and a living wage let alone a UBI. Both have to be sacrificed in the impending global crash to restore the rate of profit.
This magical thinking has always been the fatal flaw of social democracy – the illusion that there is a peaceful, gradual road to socialism by means of bosses agreeing to 'fair shares' in the distribution of income. To question this assumption is to risk exposing the real truth of capitalism; that all income originates from the labour power of productive workers.
If that truth was our starting point the question would be: why does capital have the right to exist and define the terms of debate around how wages are determined when it lives off the expropriation of surplus-value?
In this light it’s easy to see that the UBI is another big con to divert the class struggle away from fighting for control of jobs and a living wage in the workplace and into the dead end of parliament.
If unions are too weak to win a living wage now they won’t be able to force a living UBI out of the parliamentary talkshop. Parliamentary reforms that benefit workers are concessions won from the bosses only when they fear being over-run by militant labour.
The reason the UBI has been dragged off the top shelf as a ‘reasonable’ demand by academic liberals, social democrats and union bosses is because the bosses are scared a global economic crash will spark rising worker opposition to paying for the bosses crisis and threaten the fragile hold the ruling class has over the ‘dangerous’ class – the international proletariat.
The parties of the ‘center-left’ (Labour, Greens and Mana) are all run by a clique of pro-capitalist bureaucrats whose pay rests on the legal fiction that they represent the interests of the working class. This means that these parties are internally divided between a worker base and the bureaucratic leadership. The internal class divisions widen as such parties are torn between two class programs – to serve the top 10% and their lackeys, or the bottom 90% expected to pay for the crisis with their lives and livelihoods.
A new mass workers party is needed arising out of a split between the working class supporters of these parties and their union affiliates and the rotten labour bureaucracy that act to tie their worker organisations to the bosses state machine.
Strong fighting, democratic unions that throw out their pro-capitalist leaders are the only way to begin the claw back of the surplus expropriated from workers and build a power base capable of taking on the ruling class and implementing a Transitional Program (TP) that takes workers all the way to socialism.
The TP puts up immediate economic demands that all workers need and are willing and able to fight for such as: Jobs for all! A living wage! Solve unemployment by sharing work hours without loss of pay! These are immediate demands but they are also ‘transitional’ because they cannot be won without workers control of work.
So rather than waiting passively for a Government cargo cult that will drop a living UBI from the sky even while an economic crash looms and global warming escalates exponentially, fighting democratic unions will defend every job with strikes and occupations against their employers. Because such struggles threaten the bosses’ control of work they will be met with inevitable state repression which will in turn force workers to develop new organisations and tactics to advance the defence of our class.
Inevitably employers backed by the state will try to deny workers defence of economic rights to work and a living wage by using the state forces to close down on freedom of expression, assembly, strike etc. When bosses use the labor laws to call in the cops the workers response is to break the law with occupations defended by picket lines.
Furthermore, strike action to win in any worksite has to be generalised to involve all militant workers in struggle in every sector of the economy. In that way workplace committees, strike committees and workers defence guards, become coordinated locally, nationally and internationally.
Building unity around these demands and the organisations they throw up empowers workers to take another big step and organise a political general strike aimed at defeating the employers and their state machine and imposing workers ownership and control of the means of production.
Thus the Transitional Program begins with immediate economic and political demands and leads necessarily to workers empowering themselves to the point where they can overthrow of the capitalist state and create a Workers’ Government able to implement a planned socialist economy - where the myth of the capitalist UBI is a dim memory for those whose social equity is based on the principle:
"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need".
Monday, December 08, 2014
Labour Party Split Re-activated?
Reactions to Andrew Little’s election as Labour Party leader tend to reflect what the Right, Left and Centre, want him to be. They are all partially correct since the classic position of Labour leaders is to be ‘centrists’ who stand in the middle and alternately face both left and right to suppress class conflict and reconcile Labour and Capital. Little personifies Labourite social democracy as a former union boss, now parliamentary wing boss. As a former trade union bureaucrat he is perfectly placed to sit astride the class divide and speak out of both sides of his mouth. Yet, however hard Andrew Little tries to suppress the class divide, given the unstable crisis-ridden nature of global capital, he will inevitably fail. He cannot de-activate the class contradiction and prevent the petty bourgeois and working class wings of the Party from tearing it apart. Read on for our full analysis.
The election for the new Labour leader and his performance so far proves one thing; that the Labour Party has failed to suppress the class contradiction between its working class base and its capitalist program. The unions, and Mahuta’s second and third preferences in caucus and party, pushed Little over the line to defeat Robertson the career politician oriented to the middle class, and Parker the petty bourgeois businessman turned politician.
So the triumph of the petty bourgeoisie caucus majority that destroyed Cunliffe is incomplete. The left was defeated when Cunliffe stood down from the Primary leaving two centrist right candidates preaching platitudes about Labour ‘values’, but the election of the ex-union bureaucrat keeps the class contradiction inside the Labour Party alive, if not kicking. We will explain why.
By regrouping around Little and Mahuta, the left lives to fight another day. Little as the former Secretary General of NZ's largest union, the Engineers, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU), represents the bureaucratic caste that has dominated the organised labour movement since the unions created the Labour Party in 1916 as a moderate alternative to the radical ‘Red Fed’. As EPMU leader he was complicit in CTU boss’ Ken Douglas’ policy of the "social partnership”, or class compromise, with business in sharing the ‘labour value’ created by workers. Such 'compromises' of course are always on the bosses' terms.
Little won (thanks to Mahuta’s second and third preferences) and that signifies that Labour will stick to its historical origins as the product of the labour movement, despite the role of the labour bureaucracy that put profits ahead of wages. Unlike a victory for the right, Little as the candidate of the unions is also accountable to the working class he claims to represent, and this will keep the class contradiction between the mass of the working class and the labour bureaucracy in the unions alive and kicking in parliament.
Not only that, Little has inherited the hopes of the Labour Party left somewhat reactivated in the last few years. When Cunliffe endorsed Little he was signalling that he saw Little as standing for honouring the history of Labour as a party of the working class and a break with neo-liberalism. Then Cunliffe supporter Nanaia Mahuta joined the race late and performed very well in the Primary as a potential leader of the left. She carries with her the interests of Labour’s core constituency of the low paid, Maori and Pacifica, as well as Pakeha workers, many of whom are disenfranchised and non-voters.
So no matter how far Little is pulled to the right to satisfy the profits of global capitalism in crisis, he will also be pulled to the left by the labour movement, and the left wing and low paid working class factions in the Party. Such a contradiction cannot be permanently suppressed. Sooner or later the Party must split. The only question is what will replace it on the left?
Left outside
Already the prominent ‘leftists’ Bomber and Minto have written off Labour under Little as yet again, National Lite. This sort of resigned pessimism is what happens when you are frustrated in building a leftist workers party while the majority of workers reject you and stay with Labour. Because ‘lefts’ who criticise Labour from the outside refuse to activate the contradiction from within, they seperate themselves from the majority of workers still hamstrung by illusions in the parliamentary Labour Party. Ironically it is revolutionaries who have no illusions in parliament as the solution to capitalism’s problems that see the need to put Labour Parties in Government to split the party and gain mass support for a genuine working class party.
Elsewhere, we see parliaments being transformed by the exposure of social democratic parties as pro-austerity and anti-worker, and the rise of new parties expressing the will of the dispossessed and disenfranchised. Syriza in Greece and Podermos in Spain are two examples. Both are the result of the masses rejecting the years of betrayal by the ruling social-democratic parties that have historically embraced neo-liberalism.
What characterises these parties is their rejection of traditional union bureaucracies and elitist 'socialist' politicians who claim to represent the political will of the mass of the working population. Rather than defining workers as the traditional blue collar manual workers plus service workers, the working class is now understood to include all those who work to live, including large sections of the self-employed, the unemployed and unpaid workers. On top of this, it is increasingly clear that identity politics does not trump class politics, but masks the common oppression that most special interest groups face in the casualised, precarious labour market as super-exploited workers.
Who are the workers?
Labour is also going down this road of rediscovering the working class in all of its manifestations. As the global slump we are entering kicks in, expect the dispossessed, disenfranchised and oppressed in NZ to rise up too. Andrew Little seems to understand that the working class must be defined to include the self-employed and unpaid workers. His recognition that the Universal Basic Income needs to be debated reflects this reality. No doubt he thinks that a modern Labour Party can somehow be reformed to force capital to meet the basic needs of labour. But given the international forces in play Labour will prove incapable of reconciling the needs of then new working class with the demands of global capitalism.
But having this debate will make people aware that the divisions in the wider working class can be overcome. Many self-employed on hourly contracts have a common class interest with wage workers who are increasingly facing individual hourly contracts. Both are heading at a rapid rate towards zero hour contracts to join the unemployed reserve army of labour. As this common interest become a consciousness of class, the Labour Party will be pulled left and split along the class line to form a new mass left party of all working people.
These new mass working class political formations coming into existence do not yet represent a fundamental break with capitalism. But their programs for popular democracy, mass activism, social equality, internationalism, environmentalism, and so on, are impossible for capitalism in crisis to meet. They can only be the basis for a permanent mass radicalisation which takes the class war out of the talk show of parliament to contest power on the streets. Now is surely the time for historical optimism as capitalism reveals itself as a threat to human survival, and the growing mass movements for change emerge on the streets. Meanwhile revolutionaries have to do whatever they can to speed up these splits in the old social democratic parties and the formation of mass workers parties based on a revolutionary program.
Fight for a workers’ program
Inside the Labour Party Andrew Little doesn’t make up the program, the Party does. And since he is now the leader voted in by the unions he must be held accountable to them. That means there must be an all out fight to dump the NACTs attack on labour laws (ECA mark 2) designed to bust the unions and casualise workers. Labour must walk on both parliamentary and industrial legs with steel capped boots. A union fightback will rub the NACTs noses in their free labour market and rebuild the unions as fighting, democratic organisations of workers power!
Make the bosses pay! Smash austerity! The CGT is a Speculator Tax! Dump GST! A Living wage! Jobs for All! Free education (like Germany)! Free Health! Massive state rental build! A living Universal Basic Income or Social Wage (UBI) to end precarite and reward unpaid labour! Stop benefit bashing! Dump Parker's Pension Plan! Retirement age at 60! Abolish the GCSB and the SIS! NZ out of ANZAC, ANZUS, TPPA, NSA and the UN!
Such immediate economic and democratic demands fought for by workers will be met with outright hostility by the ruling class. This would force workers to engage in strike action and occupations, and to form workers councils and self-defence militias.
When the imperialist monopolies send in the US Marines to enforce the TPPA and stop workers taking power we will need an organised peoples’ army to send them packing and elect a Workers Government to socialise the land, banks and corporations, and implement a plan for a socialist economy.
For a mass, revolutionary workers party and program!
For a Socialist Aotearoa in a Socialist Federation of the Pacific!
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