stegosaurus posted:What if we automate the cranes offloading electronics from China. Then "nobody" has to work at all, and things are practically free.
Lol but does this mean proletarian democracy is not what we are aiming for in the first world?
Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word “austerity”. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up.
Capitalism is third worldist?????
NoFreeWill posted:actually there's going to be a continual state of semi-crisis or crisis, mass migration due to drought and resource wars, until we get to neo-feudalism, total collapse, or human extinction.
or, god forbid, you stop posting
Capitalism: "no you are"
RedMaistre posted:The problem isn't that people are stupid-rather the problem is that fixed capital, instead of being a man made cornucopia, is congealed dead labor time in a state of constant depreciation that requires massive inputs of natural resources to be made and more still to maintain. And to top it all off, much of it is not built to last long in the first place.
Relevant:
Our research indicates, despite the headlines, companies that have installed industrial robots are actually increasingly employing more people whilst at the same time adding more robots.....
The biggest surprise, given the volumes of articles claiming robots have taken jobs in the motor sector, is seven auto manufacturers who have increased their number of employees by more than 132,000 people between 2009 and the end of 2014 whilst also adding tens of thousands of new robots to their factory floors.
Luxury car manufacturers Audi, BMW Group and Daimler (manufactures of Mercedes Benz) have seen significant increases in the total number of employees between 2009 and the end of 2014, despite the global recession and claims installations of robots were causing companies to cut back on the number of people employed.
http://robotenomics.com/2015/09/16/study-robots-are-not-taking-jobs/
The reason being that for every one robot you need several human beings to guide and maintain them. The more complex the artificial systems are, the more they are in need of external human correction:
Audi’s Annual Report of 2014 states:
The point of (Industrial robots) is not a factory devoid of people, but rather to provide the employees optimal support as they go about their work. In the future, robots will do the jobs that people don’t want to do because they are strenuous, monotonous or unergonomic, such as installation work in the vehicle interior or overhead work. Employees would then perform more challenging tasks. Machine monitoring, programming, and plant repair and maintenance are already becoming increasingly significant fields of activity at factories today.
So not only does automation rely on intensified extraction of natural resources through the exploitation of material labor in the periphery, it also requires greater inputs of mental labor as well.