Theories about the "onslaught" of robots that will take our
jobs, flood the media. A new form of "Futuristic Communism",
however, comes to overturn what we have learned about automation.
A humorous
video that has been released recently by Boston Dynamics, showing a
robot that turns things upside down by trying to put a box on a
shelf, has fueled dozens of almost identical newspaper headlines
around the world: "Robots will not get our jobs ... yet."
Humanity seemed to break out with relief as some of the most
nightmare scenarios for the end of human labor took a short delay.
Among other
dark (though often controversial) predictions, in recent years we
have read that: 47% of US jobs will be covered by robots in the next
20 years, 60% of all jobs on the planet can be automated by at least
30%, and, works that are currently cost $15 trillion will soon be
carried out by robots.
Science
fiction writer Peter Frase, in his book Four Futures, puts forward
the "robo-revelation" scenario a step further by
introducing the idea of 'exterminism': in the not too distant future,
the waves of the unemployed who have lost the latest tools of labor
demands, such as strikes, would be a direct threat to the survival of
the rich who will control the robots.
Then, the
owners of the new means of production will consider the mass
extermination of the unemployed by techniques that will refer to
Hitler's holocaust.
As is often
the case in similar situations, moderate supporters of the capitalist
system, or moderate detractors of it (depending on whether you see
the glass half-filled or half-reformist), respond to these
nightmarish scenarios with equally nightmarish simplistic solutions.
The
Socialist, former candidate for the French presidential election,
Benoit Hamon, has proposed the introduction of a special tax on
robots, through which the state will achieve redistribution of income
for the weaker economic layers. This is the same line of thinking
that previously gave us the Tobin tax on the taxation of financial
transactions - another moderate attempt for a capitalism with ... a
human face.
Fortunately,
much more optimistic messages are coming in recent years from the
so-called "luxury communism" movement, which found shelter
in organizations such as FALC (Fully Automated Luxury Communism).
Through
repeating a vision, expressed with different phraseology for at least
half a millennium, FALC members speak of an automated "post-work"
society with a 10-hour working week, guaranteed minimum income, free
health, education, housing, etc. "Take Uber", Aaron
Bastani told to Guardian. Bastani is co-founder of Novara Media,
which is associated with the movement: "Its idea is that by
2030 it will have this huge global network of driverless cars. That
doesn't need to be performed by a private company. Why would you have
that? Why couldn't we have something like Uber with driverless cars
provided at a municipal level without a profit motive?",
Bastani wonders.
The Plan C
group, also evangelizing "luxury communism," states that it
derives its ideas from Marx's "Capital" and "Foundations
of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse)," in which,
however, the group is adding ideas from the science fiction trilogy
"The Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson. In this novel, a
socialist society is being created on planet Mars.
So, against
the terrifying predictions that "robots will get our jobs,"
the supporters of FALC and Plan C respond: "let them come ...
and soon."
Of course,
what all sides seem to forget, is that the absolute automation of
work does not only threaten workers, but in some cases also the
owners of the means of production, who lose the basic means of
profitability - the misappropriation of workers' surplus value.
For that
reason, in several production sectors, owners prefer not to use
robots, but large numbers of low-paid and consumable workers. So the
economic system itself can cancel, or postpone, the evolution of
technology in order to preserve the old forms of exploitation, in a
peculiar Luddism from the above.
Besides, as
the American economist, Dean Baker, explained, the theories about the
onslaught of robots, simply come to hide other major factors that
increase unemployment which are not related to the automation of
production.
If there is
a serious problem, Baker explains, it is not that robots take the
jobs of the workers, but that in the existing economic system they
act as tools for the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of
a few. While they should be cheap and help people increase their
productivity, due to the patent regime and the monopolies controlling
copyrights, their production remains very expensive and continue to
be controlled by a small group of people.
Therefore,
the solution is obvious - though not at all easy to be applied: Give
work to all robots, socializing all stages of production and
eliminating profit, in order to allow man to live creatively, free
from all forms of alienated work.
Article
by Aris Chatzistefanou, translated from the original source:
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