As a young boy, I had been given a large wooden apple crate filled
with building blocks of assorted shapes and sizes. This was a gift
from a friend of my folks who had taken a fancy to me. I spent many a
quiet Saturday afternoon building castles and forts and towers. I
decided to see if I could use every block in that box, building the
tallest and narrowest tower possible. After a couple of missteps, I
figured out how to place the blocks in a manner that allowed me to
make the structure with only one block for the base. Carefully I set
one block upon another. Taller and taller my single cell tower rose.
I pulled a chair over and set the remaining blocks on the seat and
carefully pulled myself up on the chair, as gentle as a butterfly, so
I would not disturb my glorious tower. I had three blocks left in my
hands. I reached up and carefully began lowering the next block onto
the stack. Without warning the weight of that block caused the entire
tower to shudder and then splatter to the four corners of the room.
Just like me and my little block tower, the Corporate CEO's are
carefully stacking up building blocks, one on top of the other, that
will eventually build for them a Worker Free production and
manufacturing Utopia. As they carefully plan and build toward their
perfect world, they eliminate one road block after another until they
are ready to set in place their last building block, the elimination
of the last human worker. And as they set that block in place, the
entire system comes crashing down around their ears.
It appears that their Greed covered eyes had overlooked the fact that
they needed those workers, far more than they needed the robots.
Without human workers and their paychecks...as paltry as many of them
were, the great Capitalist System came grinding to a halt.
And it came to be that the working class citizens tore down the walls
of the Tyrants, and found to their surprise that the Ruling Class had
actually been replaced by robots. And then the People understood why
they had been treated so badly. And they took welding torches and
pneumatic drills and old fashioned pick axes and went smashing their
way from one end of Utopia to the other.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/3/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2017/8133/813306.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 33 September 11, 2017
(front page)
Bosses seek to boost profits with robots, slash size of working class
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
The business press and liberal dailies have been featuring articles
arguing that robots are increasingly replacing workers in the U.S. They
hope that this will be a way to squeeze out more profits. And a sizable
section of the capitalists’ machinery of rule — the meritocratic
middle-class layers that staff the rulers’ nonprofits, nongovernment
organizations, college faculties, and government regulatory agencies —
fervently hope robots will entirely eliminate the working class, who
they consider reactionary, backward beings responsible for the election
of Donald Trump to the presidency.
“Robots Could Take Over 38% of U.S. Jobs Within About 15 years,”
headlined a Los Angeles Times article. While Harvard economics professor
Richard Freeman wrote in an article titled “Who Owns the Robots Rules
the World,” predicting, “In the not-so-distant future: your job may no
longer be performed by a human. The software will be in charge.”
However, the idea that robotization can replace human labor or solve the
crisis of capitalism is “a reactionary fantasy,” explains a resolution
adopted by the 1988 Socialist Workers Party convention reprinted in New
International no. 10.
“Large-scale ‘robotization’ of industry under capitalism could only
occur as a product of a devastating onslaught by the employers on the
conditions of the working class,” the resolution states. “It would serve
not to lessen the overwork of the toilers but to intensify exploitation
to the greatest possible degree. Living labor alone creates the mass of
surplus value from which profits are derived, and the capitalists seek
to use every advance in science and technology to extract more and more
labor time from the brain and muscle of the producers.
“Moreover, there is an irresolvable contradiction between enormous
chronic unemployment and devastated living standards of the working
population that must inevitably accompany ‘robotization’ under
capitalism,” it says, “and the exploiters’ inability to realize profits
unless they can find buyers for the massively expanded quantities of
commodities that automated production would entail.”
And the cost of robots and their maintenance increases the bosses’
spending on constant capital, which, “without an increase in productive
capacity and, above all, without the hiring of more workers to produce
more surplus value — ends up reinforcing the falling rate of profit.”
“Productivity-enhancing machines will not enhance productivity if they
are not given to workers to use,” the Financial Times wrote recently.
As capitalist production, trade and employment have been falling for
years during today’s ongoing capitalist crisis, the boss class is
stepping up attempts to stanch their crisis through deepening attacks on
wages and social benefits won by working people. Part of this has been
increased use of robots.
But profit rates continue to decline, as they’ve been doing for decades.
And the ruling capitalist families have held back from investing in new
factories and capacity-expanding equipment to increase employment.
Instead, they’ve turned their profit-seeking investments into
speculation on stocks, bonds, derivatives and a massive array of other
forms of commercial paper in search of higher returns.
At the same time the capitalists are driving hard against those employed
in industry. Manufacturing employment has declined by 5 million since
2000 — 30 percent of the workforce — while the capitalists have
accomplished a doubling of output per worker through speedup and
disregard for safety. Real wages for production workers haven’t risen in
over 40 years.
Still, productive stagnation has meant millions of workers have dropped
out of the labor market. The active working class has shrunk.
The working class faces a disaster from the bosses’ crisis and resulting
attacks. Life expectancy is down, marriages and birth rates are down,
and opioid addiction — and resulting overdoses and deaths — are
spiraling up.
The large meritocratic liberal layer in bourgeois society despises the
working class. To them robotization along with accompanying social ills
rooted in the crisis of capitalism that shrinks the numbers of workers
is progress. They dream of a day when all transportation is driverless,
factories and restaurants robotified. But for these layers, it’s taking
too long. They fear the workers responding to the deepening crisis with
deepening class struggle, posing a deadly danger for the ruling class
and its educated elite.
But this pipedream of eliminating the working class through robots is
also a reactionary fantasy. There is widespread discussion among working
people about the causes of the capitalist crisis and the indifference of
Democrats and Republicans alike to the carnage it wreaks. And the
Socialist Workers Party is getting the best response on workers’
doorsteps in decades.
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