2019-12-15

Automation and the Future of Work—1 and Automation and the Future of Work—2 | Aaron Benanav provides a summary of his magisterial ambitions in this two part series in the New Left Review (paywall for the second article):

In Part One of this essay, I identified a new automation discourse, propounded by liberal, right-wing and left analysts alike. These automation theorists claim that mass technological unemployment will need to be managed by the provision of universal basic income (ubi), since large sections of the population will lose access to wage labour. I argued that the resurgence of this feverish discourse is a response to a real trend unfolding across the world: a chronic under-demand for labour. However, the explanation the automation theorists offer—runaway technological change destroying jobs—is false. The real cause of the persistently low demand for labour is the progressive slowdown of economic growth since the 1970s, as industrial overcapacity spread around the world, and no alternative growth engine materialized—a development originally analysed by Robert Brenner, and belatedly and obliquely recognized by mainstream economists under the name of ‘secular stagnation’ or ‘Japanification’. As economic growth decelerates, job creation slows, and it is this, not technology-induced job destruction, which is depressing the global demand for labour.
In Part Two, I demonstrate that employment outcomes have differed in important respects from the automation theorists’ predictions. I analyse the contemporary dynamics of the global labour market and consider the solutions automation theorists have proposed, notably UBI, before going on to consider, as a thought experiment, an alternative approach to achieving a post-scarcity future. First, however, I will argue that it is crucial that we reconceive of the present situation as marked not by the imminent arrival of mass unemployment, as automation theorists suggest, but by continuously rising under-employment. A survey of worldwide vistas of insecure work shows that this new reality has already been accepted by wealthy elites. Turning the tide towards a more humane future will therefore depend on masses of working people refusing to accept a persistent decline in the demand for their labour, and the rising economic inequality it entails. Struggles against these outcomes are already unfolding across the globe. If they fail, maybe the best we will get is a slightly higher social wage in the form of UBI. However, we should not be fighting for this goal, but rather to inaugurate a post-scarcity planet.

So the problem isn’t being driven by automation, but by global deindustrialization caused by decline in demand and industrial over-capacity, which in turn sparked greater degrees of precarity. However, Benanay grudgingly concedes that even though the automation theorists are 'wrong' about what has led us here, increased automation in the face of deindustrialization and output decline can still now lead to enormously increased joblessness.

The only hope?

Major shifts in the forms of government intervention in the economy are adopted only under massive social pressure, such as, in the course of the 20th century, the threat of communism or of civilizational collapse. Today, policy reforms could emerge in response to pressure coming from a new mass movement, aiming to change the basic makeup of the social order.

And soon.

[x] wfd

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Four Futures | Peter Frase tees up four scenarios of the future, all premised on the assertion:

One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end.

Although he quotes Slavoj Žižek who offered up this kickoff for Occupy Wall Street:

It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.