#theleftbehind

The less capitalism needs people to make a profit, the less people need capitalism.

In the future we will all be unnecessary. Even today the hours we work and many of the jobs we do are not needed. In a few years time almost all manual work and almost all white collar clerical work will be automated. But there will be even more profit for those at the top, which is why they keep pursuing it. The Bezos and Google  types who make their profit by eliminating inefficiency. Those they put out of work however will struggle to find jobs, and this can go several ways.

-The Roman way. This is where wealth concentrates at the top so heavily that gradually everyone but the few at the top are pushed into slavery or living on the poverty line. Society collapses because no one but the super rich have any stake in it, and barbarism looks like a better option.

-The band aid method. Where the super rich provide at least the basics people need to survive like food and shelter. It should be pointed out the Romans tried this and it didn’t work, because people need more than just subsistence to survive.

-Turning back the clock, or make work option. This is where the super rich make their businesses less efficient by employing more people, just to keep them happy. This might work as it gives people jobs, but people aren’t stupid and having pretend jobs for life helped destroy the soviet Union. Jobs are about purpose, not really about material benefit. People very easily twig when their jobs are just for show and disconnect from the system more.

-The Randian fuck you or the victory of Libertarianism. The most likely short term choice judging by today’s trends. Where no help or fucks are given. The ideology of libertarianism is popular amongst tech princes for a reason- because it justifies not having to give a shit. Tech disruption always causes social disruption and just as early industrialists didn’t give a thought to people suffering neither do our new industrialists  now. They still argue hard work is a virtue and blame the individual if everyone fails to be a millionaire. This method works until the Luddites and the chartists come knocking and the revolutions start. You either then go full fascist- and Silicon Valley could do very efficient death camps- or you have to start changing.

-The actual change method. Hyper profits redirected into public works projects. An ideological focus on the development of the individual rather than material acquisition. The sort of paradise 19th century romantic socialists talked about where everyone can focus on their own skills because there is no more need for drudgery. This is the future Marx envisaged because quite logically in a post scarcity society there is no need for exploitation and greed. Unfortunately to get there you have to burn out about three hundred years worth of capitalist ideology because the biggest barrier to a classless society is that people really like social classes. And the only way to end an ideology is to show how bankrupt it is, and that requires a lot of corpses- see WW2 or the great depression for details.

The most likely outcome, however, is somewhere between the Roman method and the utopian socialist one. It all depend on how pliant the ideology of the ruling class of silicon Valley Caesars is. If they refuse to adapt their Randian instincts and work instead towards full on fascism then there will either be civil war or slow collapse. However if they are able to recognise that in order to preserve their rule  they will have to give some of their power away then they might adapt. This is precisely the dilemma faced by the great industrialists of the late 19th century, especially in Europe. Whilst on the continent most countries chose the conservative route and choked off innovation in order to preserve the social order (see Austria, a country whose great potential was ruined by its ruling class, or Russia who never got out of the middle ages and imploded under the strain of its class conflicts and WW1). In the UK and western Europe there were grudging reforms, gradually making the lives of people better off and providing much of what earlier agitators had asked for. This didn’t happen in the USA because there was an ever expanding labour force, and there was always the escape from big cities to work on the land. It was only in the 1930’s when this expansion collapsed did the USA face the very real choice of either reform or total collapse. It was only through a change in ideology, one that prompted the New Deal, that saved the American system.

But it’s important to understand that the New Deal itself was a result of a change of heart, rather than the other way around. It showed that a majority of Americans had rejected the rugged individualism and the heartless capitalism of the preceding decades. For while industrialists like Ford might have talked about helping their workers, when it came down to it Ford would literally rather shoot his workers than allow them any real collective bargaining power. It was only with the election of FDR that the USA built a system that supported ordinary people. For sure it still enabled their exploitation and whilst the USA became an industrial  giant over the next decades there was still rampant poverty and racism. But until the ideology of Reaganism in the 1980’s it was taken as standard that the powerful had an obligation to look after the powerless. That obligation, of course, has now vanished. The Silicon valley caesars, like Ford did, will happily shower their workers in gifts, but they are very clear about where the power lies. Once they have made a quarter to fifty percent of the worlds workforce functionally  redundant then we will see whether they take any responsibility for those left behind.

I personally feel it will take a massive crisis to do this. There are already many signs of those left behind by technology in the USA – the mining towns, the rust belt, the de-incorporated towns with empty big box stores and rampant opioid addiction – are all testament to this happening. Indeed the debate about whether to re open coal mines just to get people having jobs again shows how this plays out. The promises of Trump to get manufacturing going in America again are so obviously hollow that the make work option is a non starter. The fact is that while the big businesses of the USA can make a big profit they will not care about the lives that are broken, because they will never see them. The silicon valley ceasars and the big city  business titans will never travel to the broken towns or the abandoned and ruined cities like Detroit. They will at most throw a few charity dollars their way, or leverage that charity as Zuckerburg has done in a way to make it serve his own business interests.

There is, however, a final option. One where the ordinary left behind and struggling Americans (and no doubt the other citizens of the world – the US as number one industrialised  country is merely the place where this happens first) get to decide things themselves. For whilst capitalism and automation have destroyed job they have done so because they can make things so cheaply. No one ever needs starve when you have a farming system so efficient it can already feed the world. Likewise the knowledge that once would have required college degree level study is available online for free, the software that makes us all redundant can also solve our problems – if we know how to use it.

Already communities left behind by de-industrialisation have begun taking back control of their lives. Abandoned big box stalls can easily be remade into community markets. People already can grow their own food like their forefathers did, they can use the technology that abandoned them to help them rebuild their lives. The only thing stopping them thus far has been ideology, or more accurately industrial ideology. Industrial ideology is something we have been inculcated with almost since birth and so we don’t notice it. Quite simply it is the perception that in order to be a success you need to have a nine to five job that pays you a salary, that salary is then used to buy what you need. The fact is that this is recent invention, before modern industrial capitalism most people lived as farmers, and the rhythm of farming life was very different. Most importantly people didn’t actually spend all their time farming. Whilst it was hard and back breaking there was also considerable amounts of time where fields did not need to be tended. Communities  worked differently, and for many who did not use cash as a means of exchange they were tied by different bonds with their communities. Capitalism destroyed this because it needed people to work shifts for cash that was then to be spent on the products made by the industrial system. It needed people not to work together in a non hierarchical structure, but rather to buy what they were told to buy and produce what they were told to produce. Almost every early industrialist recalls how hard it was to condition workers used to the rhythm of nature to factory life. Richard Arkwright had a series of physical punishments and fines for any workers who did not adapt to the shift system. Even Robert Owen, who was more sympathetic, struggled to create factories in the US because people refused to adapt to shift working.

But now with de industrialisation people will start to learn new rhythms, already the ‘gig economy’ forces people to be effectively self employed. Whilst this system is horribly flawed it does destroy traditional hierarchies. When people are abandoned first by the employer and then by the state they fall into depression. Trumpism is in part a response to this despair (but also to the loss of power by white males, ie racism) by people who feel dislocated by the change in technology that has taken their jobs. Whilst now they might try to blame foreigners and liberals in practical terms Trump is unable to give them anything more than catharsis. On a day to day basis people need to survive, and to do this communities will have to form from the ashes of the industrial system.

Indeed if ordinary people are abandoned and the silicon valley Caesars choose the Roman path then quite simply the great abandoned masses will disengage from the system. They will find new ways to live, and whilst I don’t expect to see barbarians overrunning Washington the plain truth is that for most ordinary people having barbarians in charge wasn’t any different from having a bunch of Roman landowners taking all the wealth. In fact once the empire lost control of a province the fact that you probably didn’t have to pay tax didn’t really provide an incentive to get the Romans back in charge. Likewise in the modern world barring any civil war / environmental based conflicts the best thing that might happen to a lot of people is that their betters do abandon them. Since the business class have always existed to exploit them being surplus to requirements  may be a blessing. It will force communities of people to find the ties that bind them together, and in the USA this is especially easy. The USA for all its faults has a very strong history of civic engagement, and while the government itself may become unwilling or unable to provide for people the fact is that for most people government is local and it is people. The structures and traditions of the USA predate its modern capitalist ethos.

The rugged individualist  beliefs  of settler mythology was almost certainly a lie, the original settlers prospered because they could work together in communities where they had very strong democratic structures. It is no coincidence that the first states that gave the vote to women where those who had faced the most hardship in terms of settlement, and required people to work together to survive.

Of course this isn’t the only possibility. The rise of Trump shows how easy it is to weaponise  those who have become surplus to the requirements of modern day capitalism. And any country where there is a large disaffected mass of people can become an easy weapon to wield. There is nothing to stop the development of an American ISIS, bent on destroying a system they feel is not only godless but destructive to the soul of the American people. There is already a very strong religious and racist right in the US, the rise of militia movements and survivalists (much beloved by Silicon valley caesers  who look forward to the end of the world – possibly because they have watched too much apocalyptic SF) mean that the possibilities of open conflict are high. If we add into this resource control then the possibility of conflict along the lines seen in central Africa. This is an unlikely scenario, but if those at the top of US society feel threatened they are always more than willing to use Fascist methods to keep people in their place. An urban USA pushing back against aggressive capitalism could easily find itself up against not the police forces of the USA but instead the armed and racist militias of white supremacists and religious fundamentalists. This is not to say they would be victorious, after all despite their noise the militia movement is small, and they are not always so easy to manipulate as some might assume. The fact that Clivon Bundy has now come and criticised trump suggests that not all militia movements in the US are the same.