Dumbledore's Reserve Army of Labour

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This is a good response to that question, in case anyone wanted the q&a paired together. 15 would be the social average — some people might work more, some less, but that would be up to them. This is also presupposing a change in the way the economy effectively functions, in the sense that 15 hours would be the social average for necessary labor, and after that point you’d probably see tons of people participating in “unnecessary” labor out of interest. There’s an idea in socialist theory that basically says once you reach a point far enough along after capitalism you’d just start seeing a blurring of the lines between what’s defined as “work” (or as “a job”) and what’s defined as “a collective activity”, especially with regard to the arts, science, etc.

The 15-hour week presupposes a change in the economy first. Obviously capitalism requires long hours for people to survive, but in terms of pure stats it’s not necessary for society to be working that much. There’s enough resources for everyone, and so much work is pointless bullshit that only exists to line the pockets of the rich. The ecosocialist project demands a new way of looking at and distributing work. Get rid of the bullshit jobs, divvy up the necessary jobs, and we’d free up people’s time immensely to engage in pursuits they actually want to do to contribute to society.

This does not even include time spent commuting or getting ready for work.

What we see here is that technology has increased human productivity while median compensation for that productivity has been lagging behind.

In other words, somebody (a small minority) is making a bunch of money they weren’t making before.

Since 1978 human productivity has, thanks to technology, multiplied by 2.5x.

Standard of living has (calculated from spending and accounting for inflation) NOT CHANGED.

This means that we are not living more expensively, and in some areas, particularly housing, healthcare and education, we are now actually having it WORSE than they did 50 years ago.

So let’s do the math I was missing:

If we got rid of this paradoxical group that is making so much more money, we could have the same standard of living as in 1978 while working 2.5x less!

As the typical work week in 1978 was 40 hours, that corresponds to 16 hours (16 × 2.5 = 40).

And human productivity didn’t start increasing through technology in 1978! If we accounted for farther back than that we could cut it WAY more!

On top of that we have all of the previously mentioned factors, which get a lot more complicated to calculate, but it’s not even necessary!

The IWW was campaigning for a 16 hour work week in the 1910’s for crying out loud!

You really think we can’t do any less than 15 in 2018?

Also, let’s talk about how exactly capitalism makes this not work:

In capitalism, you have an employer who needs to profit from what you do.

This means that you create a certain amount of value for them. They pay you a wage in turn.

This wage is ALWAYS lower than what your work is worth.

If it was equal or higher, your employer would lose money from hiring you!

And this surplus value that your employer takes isn’t a little. It’s a lot.

Environmental Catastrophe is Coming. The Rich Will Be Just Fine.

They’ve got private protection from ever-more-frequent natural disasters. But who will pay the price?

by Maria Stoian

TheNib.com

@thenib

Globalisation and automation: these are the trends reshaping our world, or so we are told. According to the consultancy McKinsey, 80% of jobs could technically be automated by 2050. Globalisation will bring the Global South closer to the Global North. Together, they will create a world in which an ever greater number of human beings compete for a shrinking number of jobs.

But there’s a fatal flaw in this narrative: it doesn’t make any sense.

‘Globalisation’ can’t do anything – it is not an actor; it does not have agency. The same goes for ‘automation’ – whilst robots may one day become autonomous beings, as things stand they still have to be programmed by people. Hence the absurdity of claiming that ‘the robots are taking our jobs’. Robots don’t have the capacity to ‘take’ anything.

Capitalists, on the other hand, most certainly do.

Globalisation and automation are both examples of what linguists call ‘nominalisations’: nouns created from adjectives or verbs. For example, interference is a nominalisation of ‘interfere’. Whilst the verb ‘to interfere’ would have to be used with a subject (I interfere, you interfere, etc), the nominalisation does not. One can completely strip out the actor behind the change and rely instead on an abstract noun to do all the work.

This method of political discourse is powerful and highly ideological. Talking about ‘globalisation’ allows us to construct the idea of ‘globalisation’ as an inevitable, impersonal trend, driven by the agentless forces of history. The nominalisation completely obscures the fact that ‘to globalise’ is a verb – the same goes for ‘to automate’. ‘Automation’ doesn’t just happen – tasks are automated by people.

In fact, ‘nominalisation’ is itself a nominalisation – someone has to be doing the nominalising. Those who popularised the depoliticising of terms like ‘globalisation’ and ‘automation’ benefit from the processes they claim to describe but in fact obscure. And it is not hard to see how.

Popular use and acceptance of these terms represents a significant victory for the agents behind these changes. People talk easily of globalisation and automation, viewing them as abstract ‘facts of life’ to which we will all have to adapt, naturalising what are in fact contingent phenomena. This has served to obscure the role of those doing the globalising and the automating.

When it comes to globalisation, the wealthy have benefited massively from the dramatic increase in capital mobility since the 1980s. They are increasingly able to invest their money anywhere in the world, paying as much or as little tax as they would like to along the way. They would argue that this was an inevitable result of technological change, but legal, social and organisational changes were required too – from the removal of capital controls, to the massive deregulation of finance, to the creation of international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank.

By presenting these changes as natural and inevitable, elites have been able to claim they are also irreversible. Fashionable nominalisations like ‘globalisation’ have allowed elites to argue that high tax rates don’t work in a world where capital is free to move wherever it likes. You can’t tax the wealthy, so the argument goes, because if you try they’ll just leave. Don’t like it? Take it up with globalisation.

The same kind of analysis can be applied to the idea of automation. We are increasingly being flooded with doomsday scenarios about mass technological unemployment resulting from developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Rather than challenging these narratives, many on the left have succumbed to these apparently inevitable changes and developed policies that will ease the pain – from universal basic income to the three-day week.

But such a narrative totally fails to grasp how these changes are being driven, and in whose interests. Much of the technology behind automation has been developed either by huge transnational monopolies or highly militarised neoliberal states. More importantly, the way in which these technological changes work their way into the production process is determined almost entirely by giant corporations and their state sponsors.

These actors have a direct interest in driving labour out of the production process entirely.  This transformation would not only allow capitalists to dramatically increase their profits, but would also finally crush labour’s capacity to resist (whilst of course creating new contradictions to which this new mode of capitalism would have to adapt). Full automation under capitalism would represent the completion of a 40-year project to seize an ever greater share of national income for capital, at the expense of labour.

‘The robots’ aren’t coming for our jobs – but the capitalists who own the robots certainly are. And this is ultimately what the politics of automation comes down to – the ownership of capital. Unless ownership of that capital is dramatically broadened, the coming decades will witness ordinary people further stripped of power and control over their lives, with increasing numbers rendered surplus to an economy in which they have no role nor stake.

Resisting capitalist automation should be part of any socialist agenda, as the much-maligned Luddites were well aware. The movement towards a socialist mode of production may then allow us to achieve what might be termed ‘alter-automation’ – à la the ‘alter-globalisation’ movement – based on full automation, a universal basic income, and the full socialisation of wealth.