[OccupyCU] Fw: [socialistdiscussion] Rise of the Robots?

[David Johnson]

Interesting economic article and comments.

David J.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Tim Heffernan 
To: socialistdiscussion at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2013 4:36 PM
Subject: Re: [socialistdiscussion] Rise of the Robots?


  
Now this is more the type of post I'm interested in. Thanks Julian



Tim


On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Julian Silverman <jsilverman at btinternet.com> wrote:

    

  A BARNET CONVERSATION sparked off by Paul Krugman

  FROM BARRY

  FYI, notably its final conclusions for Capitas' control and what we may soon need to contest. How? 

  http://truth-out.org/news/item/13993-a-new-industrial-revolution-the-rise-of-the-robots#.UPk_4kEqYYs.email 


  MY REPLY

  Thanks for this interesting article, by a world expert economist. 

  Here is his crucial sentence. With this remark he both [sort of] makes and also [sort of] misses the point: 

  ".....Smart machines may make higher G.D.P. possible, but they will also reduce the demand for people....." 

  To put it crudely, this has already happened. In the past people were needed to be part of the production process. What is the use of a factory and all the raw materials you could wish for and all the marketing cheats and ploys if you haven't got workers?  Once you've got a labour force you can attract investors. What gives investors the returns - the surplus - they need is the result of the work put in and nothing else. 

  As industry becomes less labour-intensive people are less needed as workers. A worker's value - earning power - is diminished. [Unlike during periods when GDP was growing rapidly, nowadays growth is slow or non-existent and whole families have to work.] The share of GDP going to wages has dropped hugely and the share going to profits correspondingly risen. 

  But profits have grown so enormously not from investment in production but increasingly from financial deals, takeovers and private equity scams, futures speculation etc. 
  In so far as profits come from production they come from forcing a reduction in the price of raw materials [colonialism, oil wars etc.] forcing a reduction in the price of labour [austerity measures, unemployment, cuts, overseas outsourcing etc.] a huge upsurge in advertising and marketing gimmicks [through TV, newspapers, internet, supermarkets etc.]  and from forcing more and more people to buy, buy, buy themselves into perpetually rising debt 

  People are no longer in demand as part of production any more. One more human in this system has become just one more mouth to feed. [This could be sign that the system is coming to an end. That has happened before to previous civilisations at a similar point]. 

  But people are very much needed as consumers. Production must go on or the system collapses. Investment has to come back, but profits need to be extracted from somewhere. Somebody has to buy the stuff that has got to be produced in order to keep the system going. So - to go back to what Paul Krugman was saying in this article - we would have a curious anomaly: a need to produce more and more stuff at a profit but a lower rate of profit because of less labour being involved - a greater need for buyers although people can never collectively have enough money to buy the equivalent of what they have made and the more that is produced the more difficult to manage the situation becomes. 

  Marx could not have put it better. [Actually he did!]. 

  FROM RON 

  which reminded me an article i read in the NYT about a year ago, covering the Chinese venture into Africa. in that article, a Chinese manager complained ( I think it was in Gabon) that he can't forced the locals to work, since  all they have to do is to go to the nearest tree and pick a banana or mango or what ever and don't have to pay/work to it. 
  now, if commodities manufacturing is all being done automatically by robots and alike, without human intervention, then commodities will assume the value of bananas, because they will just be there, like the Gabonise banana. 
  Unfortunately, those bananas are hanging a bit too high for us to reach (as yet), but what we do have, with the current level of automation, is a sharp drop in the rate of profits from industry, which is being replaced by financial speculations and venturing of companies like crapita, ibm and bt into the public pocket. you shouldn't be an economic genius to understand that this has only a limited prospect for the revival of the economy. 



  MY REPLY

  Absolutely right, Ron.

  The present system needs everything to be part of the market - everything.
  Despite the terrible horrors and miseries, the market was in its time a very good system for getting things going and for filling the world with material goods.
  But by now it's done that job and can't cope with what it's produced. It was only ever capable of doing one thing: extract, produce and sell - it can't conserve. It can't look at the consequences for whole societies or future generations. It can't cope with people outside the operations of the market  [such as the old, the young, the sick...] It finds great difficulty in trying to cope with things or forces which don't lend themselves to easy 'commodification" - i.e. which can't easily be turned into trade-able commodities [such as renewable energy]. And it will only produce things if it is guaranteed a profit. If that process gets interrupted in any way and it can't sell the goods, it stops functioning. Real investment grinds to a halt and the whole system shudders into crisis. 

  It has proved so successful at producing that the market keeps on getting flooded. Its own success threatens to become its downfall.


  If this were to go on the way Paul Krugman describes and as you describe, Ron, then we could have a world where you could so-to-speak pick what you want "like bananas" [in real terms make what you want on 3D printers running off solar or fusion energy etc. etc.] and work no more than an hour or two a day at most and live free from marketing attacks and attacks by an enemy government. That would be a different system.

  In the past all civilisations have depended on one lot of people using the labour of others to benefit themselves. Masters have used slaves, lords have used serfs, employers have used workers. In the future this new 'system' - or absence of a system - would mean we could really "all be in this together," using IT and robots etc. Some of our rulers know what not all of us have figured out yet: that another way of running things is possible.  Nurses, teachers, carers, parents, librarians all know this. The legislators of most nations as well as the EU, the World Trade Organisation and others have made it clear that they are fully conscious of the fact that a better, more efficient system is possible. Everywhere they have been eager to enact laws prohibiting any kind of public ownership - not on the grounds that a publicly owned industry would be less effective, but on the grounds that its success would give it an unfair advantage over one run for private profit. 

  No ruler is going to give up his privilege without a fight. In order to prevent us from seeing a way to reach our goals, the present rulers are prepared to poison our food, pollute the air and the water, deplete the land, wage war on whole continents, and bring about the misery of whole populations...... This is what our little struggle in Barnet is all about.  






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