leftist-daily-reminders:leftist-daily-reminders:winterayars:leftist-daily-reminders:randomrants-obdm
leftist-daily-reminders:leftist-daily-reminders:winterayars:leftist-daily-reminders:randomrants-obdm:Never gets an order wrong, takes breaks, gets lazy, comes in late, ‘forgets’ to wash hands after restroom, gets frustrated, or gets paidOf course ancaps just view human labor as a cost to be minimized and a tool for the accumulation of capital. Of course the implication here is “beg for scraps from the capitalists or starve”. Under more ideal conditions, where the means of production wasn’t hoarded by elites and managed in top-down fashion, machines replacing menial jobs would be precisely what we want – that means shorter hours and more leisure time. Under the current system, people need to find any job (no matter how necessary) and earn wages in order to subsist, so of course we’ve been conditioned to view machines replacing labor as a threat. But why should it be? If so many jobs aren’t necessary because they don’t, well, build and maintain the necessities of society (and only serve the interests of capital and bureaucracy), and so many other jobs aren’t necessary because they can be replaced by machines, WHY do we put up with this bullshit?? If everyone divvied up the necessary jobs in a democratic post-capitalist society, they could be eased by tech and the shifts could be reduced to fractions of what they are now. Capitalism will not be able to cope with the automation it sets into motion. Socialism is nigh.Capitalism will not be able to cope with automation.A lot of current theories about labor, capital, and the like will not be able to cope with a world where 1 person’s labor can provide a reasonable life for 100.Exactly. A central capitalist contradiction will make itself known in the next couple decades: if businesses are going to want to compete, they’ll need to automate, which in turn means laying off workers by the millions; the unemployed masses will not be able to buy the products that the capitalists sell, and at some time then a tipping point will be reached where the only jobs presented to people will be building and maintaining the machines (of course a bit of an exaggeration, but it’ll still likely be close to the reality). Universal basic income proposals will crop up, and the elite will see it as an opportunity to keep capitalism alive and kicking. (In other words, UBIs in this context are meant to maintain capitalism’s tiered ownership over the means of production, land, and resources, but with redistributive taxation to provide a livable floor for people, all to mitigate revolutionary upheaval in the end.) Of course socialists would rather just ditch this convoluted process of UBIs and taxation as a sophisticated feeding tube for capitalism – just turn the economy over to the people for democratic/for-need management and utilize all that automation for the collective good. That means people benefitting en masse, thus shorter shifts, thus more time for leisure and creative self-actualization and socializing. In that potential post-capitalist democracy, in the many scenarios where one person’s labor could provide a reasonable life for a hundred, you just need to divvy up those jobs so that any burden that exists can be eased, alongside a community of people having daily shifts of, say, 2 to 4 hours (and even that’s very likely a conservative estimate). Technology and democratic management of the collective capacities have the potential to liberate people from so much toil, if only we were to think outside of the myopic box of mainstream political discourse presented to us by OP. This isn’t about minimum wages – this is about demanding a world that works for human beings by default, not only when it’s convenient for the gears of capital. This isn’t about “the people need more jobs” – we ultimately need less jobs, with a focus on the necessary ones divvied up among populations and the economy from there focused on literally meeting societal needs, all so that people can spend most of their lives pursuing their interests and building connections. The creation of art, culture, inventions, and entertainment would arise from self-actualized individuals who create because they want to or because they see value in enriching the lives of others. We can do so, so much better than the bland status quo discourse that insists we must choose between smaller scraps and machines stealing our ability to access resources. The scraps were made by us, as was the whole feast, and they only find their way down to us because a superfluous owner class accrues the majority of the feast based on their unnecessary top-down ownership; the machines should be creating a world where it’s easier for us to access resources, not representing the opposite as a threat to us.I just want to remind everybody that OP is an ancap and that this is the disgusting view capitalism-apologists have of workers in the service industry. -- source link