1st principle of a working-class local food movement: Mutual aid, self-help. Working poor people are full citizens, not "clients". Hunger is not a social work problem but a structural flaw of capitalism. Working poor people must manage our own food relief organizations, democratically.
2nd Principle: Stop using the saying that "cheap food isn't good; good food isn't cheap." That's like saying to your prospective market, "if you're cheap (and by necessity we need to be cheap), you're not good." The first rule of Community Organizing Club is, Don't Insult Your Community.
3rd principle: The struggle for nutritive, quality non-toxic non-lethal food is a class struggle. Poor folks need high-quality and organic food every bit as much as middle-class folks do.
4th principle: Solidarity. As long as I've been involved with small-scale farmers, most have been workers off the farm too. To survive, you have to work off-farm. Are there any purely "rural" or purely "urban" worker issues? I doubt it. People working on large-scale farms, in food processing plants, or in chain restaurants need to be able to unionize, every bit as much as workers in high-skill technical occupations.
5th Principle: Co-operation, not competition. If you look the Rochdale co-op principles, these have stood the test of time. One member/owner, one vote. The members own the business enterprise; it is not owned by an entrepreneur, a capitalist, nor a distant corporation. The same model can apply to ownership and operation of farms to feed low-income people..
6th principle: Job creation starts from the ground up. Your town likely has a "Community Development Agency" which is busy pursuing outmoded models of "creating jobs." You need to remind them, all wealth starts from the earth, and develops with applied labor: from farming, mining, logging, or fishing. Get your CDA to start a "value-added" producers' co-op to start generating jobs & wealth. If your town is waiting for big corporations to return and rescue it from recession, you may be waiting a long, long time.
7th principle: Public institutions impacting agriculture belong to YOU, not the corporations. Institutions like public land-grant universities and University Extensions (or “co-op extension”) are still largely publicly-funded despite the stealth privatization going on as corporate money corrupts these systems. Form a watchdog group, call Bullshit on the corporate bullshit, get nasty if you see Monsanto and other agri-business corporations like Bayer, du Pont, etc pushing their agendas in these institutions.
8th principle: Corporate foundation money belongs to YOU, the workers, NOT to the bourgeoisie who carefully dole it out to groups who will walk their corporate walk. Corporations extract ALL of their wealth by exploiting it from the working class, as well as by selling products/services to workers wearing their "consumer" hats, usually at a great profit. This is the source of all foundation wealth. Don't beg for it: demand it be deployed to feed people, not the bourgeois ego and craving for a legacy.
9th principle: All agriculture is “urban agriculture.” Can you think of any aspect of agriculture that is NOT controlled by, governed by, steered by, very wealthy men in corporations and corporate/government, operating from urban centers? You, the small “local” farmer, can identify your interests with a starving farmworker in a former rainforest village now turned to monoculture biomass energy production (e.g. Brasil). If you can make that connection you’re well on your way to forging alliances that will return the power where it belongs: to workers, worldwide.
10th principle Grassroots democracy. Participate, don’t be a spectator. Anyone involved in small-scale organics, local food, urban agriculture, is up against a class of powerful people running powerful corporations who wish for the small-scale farmer to disappear, lose their assets, and become one of the working poor who keep these corporations going. Trying to avoid confrontation just gives more power to the corporations. It’s going to be a fight to regain democratic control over institutions long ago corrupted. It’s not going to be easy, it will be nasty at times, but really, what choice is there but to fight for grassroots democracy and local control over your world?
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
One-way Solidarity in the Anti-Walker Movement; What is Victory?
I don't know if it's just me--I don't think it's just me, because I know a lot of people now living at the bottom of this heap we call the class system here in Wisconsin. But it seems as if a lot of the "solidarity" in the Anti-Walker Movement is a kind of one-way street. That is, a lot of unorganized labor put in a lot of protest face-time in the Capitol and on the streets to defend against "The Bomb" Gov. Walker dropped on organized labor back on Feb. 11, 2011. And a lot of precarious proletarians' time was spent getting those recall petitions signed.
I think of many of the younger folk I know here in Point, barely tethered at all to any employment of any sort, who went out and tabled and petitioned against Walker not so much out of a sense of defending their own self-interest (since these folks don't have any benefits in the first place for Walker to strip away) but more with a sense that this was somehow taking care of the future.
I always ridicule the position of conservatives who say "the unions are running the Recall Walker effort because they want to be back in charge in Wisconsin again." This is supposed to be a credible remark at a time when labor unions represent just 10% of workers in America? (Or, 14.2% in Wisc. [http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t05.htm]). No, the best the unions could hope for was a return to the former feeble bargaining strength . There is not much appetite for organizing the rag-tag labor force that remains outside traditional labor's bounds.
No, you don't see, really, a lot of solidarity coming back the other way. For example, where are the organizers out signing-up the BigBoxCo and ChinaMart workers in YOUR hometown, or picketing to help end their abuse? How about those folks picking sweatshop gear out of a matrix of storage bins to fill orders in the Lands' End Distribution Center, or at EastBay (SweatBay?) or "Figi's"? Is someone out there rounding up their union cards? How about agricultural workers in the giant CAFO barns? Tough battles to round up the rag-tag precarious labor force?
You don't see that. You just don't see that these days. Yes, liberals will pack a hearing about cutting BadgerCare, true, but you won't see many of these folks out protesting with the occupiers over the fact that the ruling class has literally nothing to offer the underclass these days: No Job, No House, No Pension, No Future (No Fear, either) as the Juventud Sin Futuro say out in Barcelona.
Now, the process of picking the new governor gets down and dirty. When I heard the other day that Wisc. State Employees Union and the Wisc. Education Association Council were getting down to "vetting" who might be the best candidate, I realized how this is going to work.
No one is going to come to your hometown and get the ragged underclass together and ask, "who would you like to see as your Governor? What should they be doing for you, oh desperate ones?" You just don't see that, these days. You can go to Democrat Party HQ in your area and perhaps catch Tammy Baldwin talking about her Senate race, or someone else with star power. You're not going to stumble into a class on "how to do real grass-roots organizing among the indignant ones" however.
You also aren't going to hear much discussion about the complete breakdown in capitalism as an economic system that could meet people's needs. That topic is strictly going to be taboo, in the Governor's race, in the 2012 presidential, or in any other race you can imagine in our imagination-free political system.
Yet that IS the issue, the whole of it, in this campaign or any other. The Issue Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken.
You can dish out immense amounts of statistics already about the complete failure of the Walkerites to "create jobs" as they had promised. Jack Norman has a report out, on Institute for Wisco's Future. The monthly business reports are starting to take note of the fact that Wisconsin is at the bottom tier when it comes to "creating" jobs.
However, when pressed, the Democrats are not going to give you a detailed plan for how their party, once restored to power in Wisconsin, will do this "job creation" thing that's vaguely promised in the Anti-Walker movement.
To actually reverse the rampant job-destruction process unleashed by global capitalism, you would somehow have to impose a planned economy that would reverse decades of these three processes, objective material processes baked-in to capitalism itself:
Outsourcing to rock-bottom low-wage and near-slavery regimes; China, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and now, Africa is coming next.
Degradation of labor inside the USA: Newt Gingrich's child-labor restoration programme is the tip of the iceberg, Republicans chomping at the bit to get that process underway. However, use of prisoner indentured servitude is on the rise--much of it to be privatized, I might add. The degrading of "perm" jobs to "temp" status, with stripping of all benefits, also is part of this.
Finally, and most important, hyper-rationalization as I call it. All recessions lead to "rationalization of productive process." However, the Great Recession, far from over, is just getting started. Hyper-rationalization eclipses old-school electromechanical automation, with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and such, with the leap to robotics and the further leap -- just in its dawning hours -- of machine-learning and artificial intelligence. These latter will plunge many former "professionals" into the ranks of the precariat, the underclass, the indignados, as well.
If you are able to scare up a study group to attend, dealing with these meta-issues, I'm going to take a wild guess that it's going to be taking on the topic of how can we rescue capitalism from itself and preserve the two-party system for another generation or two? You'll have your "green capitalism," your "small capitalism," "venture capitalism," "cool capitalism," "slow capitalism," "socially-conscious capitalism" "fair trade capitalism," "local food systems" and what have you. You are not going to be permitted to suggest things such as socialism, communism, syndicalism, the co-operative commonwealth.
You just don't see that much, these days.
This is why, when it comes to politics these days, I'm mostly sitting it out. Sure, I did some hours of petitioning against Walker. But I never lost track of the fact that in the bigger movement statewide, I'm one of the invisible ones. The ones who, you know, aren't invited to the table when they're vetting the next gubernatorial candidates. The ones who should never expect to be invited. It's time for us to shut up and go home, and wait til it's time to phone-bank for whoever gets vetted down there in Madison.
Meanwhile, in the underground, we'll be having our study groups with the anarchist-communist youth and studying our Marx, Lenin, Derrick Jensen and Bill McKibben. Maybe even weirder stuff like CrimeThinc.
Come the spring, come May Day, you'll see the return of Occupy Everywhere. This time, the Riot Cops will be ready. In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel is gearing up for the showdown of the century. He's going to make the original Mayor Daley look tame and wimpy, so we hear. And he's a Democrat. Best of the best among Obamites.
Cue up that song from the Decembrists:
"this is why...
this is why we fight..."
Anon00
Red 'n Black 'n Green in Point
I think of many of the younger folk I know here in Point, barely tethered at all to any employment of any sort, who went out and tabled and petitioned against Walker not so much out of a sense of defending their own self-interest (since these folks don't have any benefits in the first place for Walker to strip away) but more with a sense that this was somehow taking care of the future.
I always ridicule the position of conservatives who say "the unions are running the Recall Walker effort because they want to be back in charge in Wisconsin again." This is supposed to be a credible remark at a time when labor unions represent just 10% of workers in America? (Or, 14.2% in Wisc. [http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t05.htm]). No, the best the unions could hope for was a return to the former feeble bargaining strength . There is not much appetite for organizing the rag-tag labor force that remains outside traditional labor's bounds.
No, you don't see, really, a lot of solidarity coming back the other way. For example, where are the organizers out signing-up the BigBoxCo and ChinaMart workers in YOUR hometown, or picketing to help end their abuse? How about those folks picking sweatshop gear out of a matrix of storage bins to fill orders in the Lands' End Distribution Center, or at EastBay (SweatBay?) or "Figi's"? Is someone out there rounding up their union cards? How about agricultural workers in the giant CAFO barns? Tough battles to round up the rag-tag precarious labor force?
You don't see that. You just don't see that these days. Yes, liberals will pack a hearing about cutting BadgerCare, true, but you won't see many of these folks out protesting with the occupiers over the fact that the ruling class has literally nothing to offer the underclass these days: No Job, No House, No Pension, No Future (No Fear, either) as the Juventud Sin Futuro say out in Barcelona.
Now, the process of picking the new governor gets down and dirty. When I heard the other day that Wisc. State Employees Union and the Wisc. Education Association Council were getting down to "vetting" who might be the best candidate, I realized how this is going to work.
No one is going to come to your hometown and get the ragged underclass together and ask, "who would you like to see as your Governor? What should they be doing for you, oh desperate ones?" You just don't see that, these days. You can go to Democrat Party HQ in your area and perhaps catch Tammy Baldwin talking about her Senate race, or someone else with star power. You're not going to stumble into a class on "how to do real grass-roots organizing among the indignant ones" however.
You also aren't going to hear much discussion about the complete breakdown in capitalism as an economic system that could meet people's needs. That topic is strictly going to be taboo, in the Governor's race, in the 2012 presidential, or in any other race you can imagine in our imagination-free political system.
Yet that IS the issue, the whole of it, in this campaign or any other. The Issue Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken.
You can dish out immense amounts of statistics already about the complete failure of the Walkerites to "create jobs" as they had promised. Jack Norman has a report out, on Institute for Wisco's Future. The monthly business reports are starting to take note of the fact that Wisconsin is at the bottom tier when it comes to "creating" jobs.
However, when pressed, the Democrats are not going to give you a detailed plan for how their party, once restored to power in Wisconsin, will do this "job creation" thing that's vaguely promised in the Anti-Walker movement.
To actually reverse the rampant job-destruction process unleashed by global capitalism, you would somehow have to impose a planned economy that would reverse decades of these three processes, objective material processes baked-in to capitalism itself:
Outsourcing to rock-bottom low-wage and near-slavery regimes; China, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and now, Africa is coming next.
Degradation of labor inside the USA: Newt Gingrich's child-labor restoration programme is the tip of the iceberg, Republicans chomping at the bit to get that process underway. However, use of prisoner indentured servitude is on the rise--much of it to be privatized, I might add. The degrading of "perm" jobs to "temp" status, with stripping of all benefits, also is part of this.
Finally, and most important, hyper-rationalization as I call it. All recessions lead to "rationalization of productive process." However, the Great Recession, far from over, is just getting started. Hyper-rationalization eclipses old-school electromechanical automation, with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and such, with the leap to robotics and the further leap -- just in its dawning hours -- of machine-learning and artificial intelligence. These latter will plunge many former "professionals" into the ranks of the precariat, the underclass, the indignados, as well.
If you are able to scare up a study group to attend, dealing with these meta-issues, I'm going to take a wild guess that it's going to be taking on the topic of how can we rescue capitalism from itself and preserve the two-party system for another generation or two? You'll have your "green capitalism," your "small capitalism," "venture capitalism," "cool capitalism," "slow capitalism," "socially-conscious capitalism" "fair trade capitalism," "local food systems" and what have you. You are not going to be permitted to suggest things such as socialism, communism, syndicalism, the co-operative commonwealth.
You just don't see that much, these days.
This is why, when it comes to politics these days, I'm mostly sitting it out. Sure, I did some hours of petitioning against Walker. But I never lost track of the fact that in the bigger movement statewide, I'm one of the invisible ones. The ones who, you know, aren't invited to the table when they're vetting the next gubernatorial candidates. The ones who should never expect to be invited. It's time for us to shut up and go home, and wait til it's time to phone-bank for whoever gets vetted down there in Madison.
Meanwhile, in the underground, we'll be having our study groups with the anarchist-communist youth and studying our Marx, Lenin, Derrick Jensen and Bill McKibben. Maybe even weirder stuff like CrimeThinc.
Come the spring, come May Day, you'll see the return of Occupy Everywhere. This time, the Riot Cops will be ready. In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel is gearing up for the showdown of the century. He's going to make the original Mayor Daley look tame and wimpy, so we hear. And he's a Democrat. Best of the best among Obamites.
Cue up that song from the Decembrists:
"this is why...
this is why we fight..."
Anon00
Red 'n Black 'n Green in Point
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Who is the "new class" - Class 4 from League of Revolutionaries for a New America
Preface
by Anon00
This is material from a workers' school class from around 2005. At the time that the book "The Future is up to Us" was being written by Nelson Peery, he didn't have a name for this new emergent class. I would suggest that the term "the precariat" coined by UK Professor Guy Standing captures these concepts fairly well. He came out with his paper on this around the time that the "indignados" (indignant ones) and the "Juventud Sin Futuro" (youth without a future) movement in Spain were in high gear). Compare his paper linked here with what follows below the dashed line.
http://workerspartypac.blogspot.com/2011/12/who-is-new-dangerous-class.html
------------------------
CLASS 4: THE NEW CLASS
Readings:
Revolutionary Change in America (How We are Changing, pages 12-19
The New Class: A Definition (Rally, ComradesVol. 16, #1, December 2005)
Why is the New Class Revolutionary? (Rally, ComradesVol. 16, #2, February 2006)
Discussion points:
1. New means of production changed the game. Expanding sections of the working class are permanently unneeded. The new mode of production no longer needed a reserve army of unemployed. Nor does it need healthy young men for an infantry war. As industry gave way to the new electronically controlled means of production, it downsized. The government necessarily had to follow suit.
2. What we are dealing with is not an underclass, but a new class. A new class outside the constraints imposed by the worker-capitalist relationship is a mortal danger to the system.
3 This modern proletariat will play an independent political role. It is, by it social position, communistic. Owning no property whatsoever, without employment or resources, it cannot move in the direction of securing individual property. It is the only class in modern society where “each for all and all for each” has any real political meaning, and where “from each according to ability, to each according to need” makes economic sense.
4. ...They are forming a new class that has few or no ties to capital. This class is revolutionary because it is increasingly outside of or hostile to the wages system. ... It is revolutionary because robotics makes it impossible for them to co-exist with private property. The only way for them to prevent these gigantic means of production from crushing them is to make the means of production public property.
Revolutionary Change in America
Excerpt
How we are changing
Great social problems do not happen out of the context of a certain time. To understand a problem, we must understand the period of time in which it occurred. I do not think it is possible to understand a period of time by simply describing a series of events. Events are a chain with a key link which drags the entire chain forward. We must identify and concentrate our thinking on that key link. Or to put it another way, it is necessary to understand the crucial content of a time in order to understand the time.
The content of our time is the historic shift from production by electromechanics, that is, production by human labor aided by electrically driven machinery, to production by robotics, or production by computer-controlled machinery with very little or no human labor involved. This ongoing economic revolution shapes and determines the social destruction we see around us. It is bringing to the forefront a political struggle unknown to our country.
With this in mind, let us dig beneath the form that this historic shift is taking — the millions of homeless, the tens of millions of jobless, the acres of burned-out neighborhoods, the slaughter of our youth, the “in your face” looting of the public treasury, the decline of health care and education and the elimination of social services. The important thing is to understand why this is happening and what the political results are bound to be.
When and why did government grow big with the alphabet programs and when and why did it suddenly need to shed itself of these programs?
The major task of government is to create the structural programs and policies that allow the economy to function. For example, when the government was the instrument of the farmers, that government did the things necessary to protect and expand the farm. The Indians were cleared from the fertile lands, slavery was protected and extended, shipping lanes for export were cleared and frontiers expanded. As the farm gave way to industry, the government transformed itself into a committee to take care of the new needs of industry.
At that point, government began to grow. Industry needed literate workers, so the school system expanded. The army needed healthy young men to fight the wars brought on by industrial expansion, so a school lunch program was started. As industry got big, a Department of Housing and Urban Development provided order to the chaotic, burgeoning cities it created. In other words, government became big government in order to serve the needs of industry as it became big industry. The workers were kept relatively healthy and the unemployed were warehoused in such a manner as to keep them available for work with every industrial expansion.
New means of production changed the game. Expanding sections of the working class are permanently unneeded. The new mode of production no longer needed a reserve army of unemployed. Nor does it need healthy young men for an infantry war. As industry gave way to the new electronically controlled means of production, it downsized. The government necessarily had to follow suit. Robots do not need unemployment compensation or Social Security, decent food or environmental protection. These entitlements are part of the cost of production. Newt Gingrich aims to transform them into increased profitability. This is the demand of internationally competitive industry. This is the meaning of his revolution.
These fundamental changes in the economy opened the political door for reaction and social progress to fight out who was to benefit from the economic revolution. The initiative was seized by the reaction under the slogan of the Republican Contract With America. The first 100 days of the 1995-96 Congress was a whirlwind of reactionary legislation.
The historic result has not been the legislation, but the beginnings of a new mass political awakening. The recent quarter of a million-person march in Washington called by the National Organization for Women was the first mass reaction to the change. The million-plus march called by a coalition of major black organizations and churches was a watershed that defines the approaching mass struggle. It was the tip of a political iceberg of social discontent. The unreported struggles and growing restlessness in the streets of the nation’s poor are even more important. The conscious forces on both sides realize they must prepare to take political advantage of the social upheavals that are now absolutely inevitable.
Wanting to turn the spontaneous social struggles to one’s political advantage and being able to do so are different things. The game has changed. This is not 1932.
Apparently, Gingrich does not understand the social consequences of the economic changes he is pushing through Congress.
As the application of these new scientific marvels to production expanded, a new economic category, the structurally unemployed, was created. A hundred and fifty years ago, the philosophers and scientists Karl Marx and Frederick Engels coined the term “the reserve army of the unemployed.” This was the industrial reserve to be thrown into the battle for production as the need arose. The structurally unemployed are different. They are a new, growing, permanently unemployed sector created by the new emerging economic structure. Once a job is taken over by robotics, the worker who once performed that job becomes permanently unemployed. His category of work , his job, is eliminated because no human being can work as efficiently or as cheaply as a robot.
Worst than that, the government turns its back to the former worker. He or she is not considered unemployed, but jobless.
The government, which today is little more than an executive committee to manage the affairs of the ruling, capitalist class, is not going to care for something it cannot exploit.
Naturally, robotics entered industry at the lowest and simplest level. Its first victims were the unskilled and semiskilled workers. Part of the legacy of slavery was that a huge section of the African American work force remained tied to the land and especially employed in cotton culture after emancipation. Tractored off the land after the development of the cotton-picking machine, they were the last section of the rural population to join the industrial work force. Consequently, they were concentrated in that sector — the unskilled and semiskilled sector — that was first attacked by the robot.
The social oppression of the African American is the fulcrum for the political leverage of the economic elite of America. We are used to using this historic oppression as a context of understanding the economic and social motion of the country. Last hired and first fired has been the economic lot of the African American since Emancipation. Therefore, it was natural that the wholesale wiping out of African Americans from industry was understood as racism. It is one of the rare times when this analysis was wrong.
The effects of robotics on the white unskilled and semiskilled workers were not so easily seen. They are scattered throughout the general white population, especially in the suburbs. The African Americans were highly visible, being concentrated in a relatively small urban area. Also, the percentage of black laborers among the African American population was higher than white laborers among the white population. Racism provided the form, but the content is the beginnings of a social revolution. The first expression of that revolution was the wrecking of the economy of working-class black America. That revolution now is moving on to wreak its havoc against the formerly secure sections of the blue-collar, white-collar and lower management levels of the white workers.
The economists, their social vision distorted by racist ideology, were unable to understand the difference between the reserve army of unemployed created by industrial capitalism and the structural, permanent joblessness created by robotics. They only saw a growing mass of African Americans outside the labor market. They eagerly embraced the term “underclass.” What were the origins of that term?
European industry was born and began its development while feudal political and economic relations still existed. As industry developed, new economic classes came into being. The bourgeoisie and the modern working class were created from the serfs. Some of these ex-serfs did not make it into either of these new classes. This social flotsam existed as best it could on the periphery of emerging capitalist society until the system finally absorbed them.
Those who coined the term “underclass” perhaps thought here again was a group unable to keep up, and once falling behind and supported by welfare, consciously accepted an existence outside the capitalist relations of worker and employer. It must have seemed that a subclass of blacks, reliant on welfare, had lost the work ethic. Worse, that they were creating a subculture of immorality and criminality in the midst of a great national expansion of wealth and productivity.
A more concrete look will show something different. First, the new productive equipment has polarized wealth and poverty as never before. Absolute wealth in the form of 145 billionaires and absolute poverty in the form of some eight million homeless and absolutely destitute are new to our country. Secondly, the increase in production was accompanied by an increase in unemployment and joblessness.
The black poor were hit first and hardest by both these aspects of the new economy. The black bourgeoisie fled their traditional sections of the city as soon as the ink was dry on the laws allowing them to do so. A section of the African American workers also benefited from integration. Holding stable jobs, they too, moved from the inner city into much more stable neighborhoods. With the factories shutting down, the land around these factories quickly lost their value. Those who could flee did so. Taxes fell, maintenance dwindled and the combination of the American form of apartheid, plus the liquidation of jobs, created a new type of slum: the black, permanently destitute, rotting inner core of the formerly central working-class area of the city. This was also accepted as simply the result of racist economic policies of capitalist industry, rather than the social expression of an economic revolution that was couched in the historic American form of racial discrimination.
Since that phrase “underclass” was coined, the process of social destruction has continued. We can see now that this new group of permanently unemployed is not the result of the welfare system, but of the new means of production, of what they call downsizing.
The results are broader than the social problems caused by racism. It is acknowledged now that, in fact, the white so-called underclass is larger and growing faster than the black. What we are dealing with is not an underclass, but a new class. Gingrich and Company understand the implications of this. A new class outside the constraints imposed by the worker-capitalist relationship is a mortal danger to the system.
Electronics as a new means of production is producing more than an irresolvable depression. It is creating a social revolution. By social revolution we mean the process of qualitatively new means of production disrupting the economic order. In turn, new classes are created that disrupt and disorganize the existing society. The new class (or classes) finally overthrow the ruling class and create a society in their own image. We are in the first, elementary stage of a social revolution. It is important that we take this abstract idea and see what happens in a concrete way.
Let us look at the social revolution from agriculture to industry. In Europe, its political expression was from feudalism to capitalism.
Over a considerable period of time, manufacturing developed from simple, manual manufacture to a system of power-driven machines. As the principal means of production, machinery was qualitatively different from plots of land. As the use of machinery increased, so did the new class of workers who manipulated them. The two classes that developed with machinery — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat — grew with the spreading use of machinery. Wage labor, the new system of exploitation, ruined the peasants and the handicraftsmen. This was the process of social revolution: the new classes forcing their way into and disrupting the established class relationships, forcing the reorganization of society. The new classes were totally outside of the relationship between the existing classes. Therefore, there was no social contract between the serfs and the nobility. A new social relationship could be finally settled only by force.
Once again, social revolution is beginning before our very eyes. This process could not begin without the creation of new instruments of production, and a new class or classes to interrupt, disorganize and finally overthrow the existing order. This has been the historical evolution of society thus far.
This new class of propertyless people, structurally forced away from production, is a true proletariat. One big difference is that while the Roman proletariat was politically passive, or troops for another class, this modern proletariat will play an independent political role. It is, by its social position, communistic. Owning no property whatsoever, without employment or resources, it cannot move in the direction of securing individual property. It is the only class in modern society where “each for all and all for each” has any real political meaning, and where “from each according to ability, to each according to need” makes economic sense.
The new class of the new poor includes the throw-away workers — temporary laborers with no benefits, the part-time workers, the newly unemployed as well as the permanently unemployed. This class is rapidly gaining an elementary consciousness of itself and the world. This consciousness is couched in the concepts of rich and poor. It is elementary and shallow, but it is a different conception than white and black.
It is already clear to the more advanced thinkers that as this society is destroyed, a new one must be built. The class struggle is the fight between the old and new classes over how, and in whose interest, the new society will be organized.
The New Class: A definition
Rally, Comrades, Vol. 16, No. 1, December 2005
Since many of the articles appearing in Rally, Comrades! contain the phrase, “the new class,” the Editorial Board thought it would be helpful if we explain precisely what we mean by the term.
Often, when new phenomena arise there are no terms to adequately describe them and writers are forced to create a new term or give new meaning to an existing one.
The double-acting steam engine created industry. The working class created by industry was different from the old class that was created by hand labor or manufacturing. It was still a working class but the emphasis rapidly shifted from the manufacturing sector to the industrial sector. Thus, the industrial workers were a new class. In a somewhat like manner the application of electronics to production is creating a new class. What are these new means of production creating? On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of part time, contingency, temporary workers. They work at or below minimum wage with few if any benefits. In fact, this sector already constitutes almost a third of the work force.
On the other hand, a growing number of jobs are simply disappearing forever, taken over by automation. The workers who held these jobs are often forced into a new category of unemployment – the permanently unemployed. We see them every day, picking through the trash, begging on the street corners. This is not a “lumpen proletariat” – a group that was created in the wake of the industrial revolution out of the serfs who never entered either the manufacturing force or the bourgeoisie. These new strata of workers and this new permanently unemployed are the result of the introduction of electronics into the workplace.
They are a new class.
Why is the New Class Revolutionary?
Rally, Comrades, Vol. 16, No. 2, February 2006
We have entered a revolutionary era. New electronic means of production are destroying the society based on industry. It is only a matter of time until there will be a political decision as to what kind of society will replace this one. Herein lies the importance of revolutionaries strategically understanding which social force is capable of overthrowing the existing order and reconstructing society on the basis of social ownership of socially necessary means of production. Only after answering this question can we set about the task of educating and politicizing this social force.
Revolution is a change in quality. Therefore we begin our inquiry by answering the question, how does quality change? Scientists for centuries have agreed that simply re-arranging quantitative aspects or relations will not change quality. To change a quality, something must be extracted from or added into the process. While this is obvious in the material world, it is not so easily seen in the process of social change. Social scientists such as Frederick Engels touched upon this concept a hundred and forty years ago. However, he believed that the introduction of large-scale industrial production would be the introduction of the “something new” that would create the conditions for the workers to overthrow capitalism.
Industrialization brought about a great social revolution in Europe and America; however it did not go far enough and deep enough to bring about the kind of political revolution that could lead to the elimination of private property. Why? We think that since all the social elements that overthrew the political shell of feudalism (or in America, chattel slavery) were within capitalist society, they were restricted to reforming that system – no matter how militant the struggle. The industrial workers were in antagonism with feudalism and slavery because they were external to that system. They were in contradiction to the capitalists because they were inside that system. Industry got bigger, manufacturing and agriculture got smaller. The existing elements were re-arranged, but nothing was extracted or added. Therefore, the quality could not change. The industrial revolution changed the productive forces – i.e., the means of production and the resultant skills of the working class — but could not change the mode of production, which remained capitalist.
A social force capable of such a change must be outside capitalist society and antagonistic to it. True to the dialectic, electronics itself is creating this force. As more and more production is taken over by electronics, the displaced workers are forced into lower and lower paying jobs and many of them end up in the growing mass of permanently unemployed. Today over a third of the work force is unemployed, contingency, parttime or temporary workers. A huge section works at or below minimum wage. They are forming a new class that has few or no ties to capital. This class is revolutionary because it is increasingly outside of and hostile to the wages system. It is revolutionary because it cannot fight the individual employer – it must fight the state. It is revolutionary because robotics makes it impossible for them to co-exist with private property. The only way for them to prevent these gigantic means of production from crushing them is to make them public property.
We hope our ongoing statements on the new class will become the basis of discussion and inquiry. It is sorely lacking in the American Left. As in all social transitions, we revolutionaries will have a small and very temporary window of opportunity. If we do not understand the historical line of march and have not worked out a strategy of transition, that window will close.
by Anon00
This is material from a workers' school class from around 2005. At the time that the book "The Future is up to Us" was being written by Nelson Peery, he didn't have a name for this new emergent class. I would suggest that the term "the precariat" coined by UK Professor Guy Standing captures these concepts fairly well. He came out with his paper on this around the time that the "indignados" (indignant ones) and the "Juventud Sin Futuro" (youth without a future) movement in Spain were in high gear). Compare his paper linked here with what follows below the dashed line.
http://workerspartypac.blogspot.com/2011/12/who-is-new-dangerous-class.html
------------------------
CLASS 4: THE NEW CLASS
Readings:
Revolutionary Change in America (How We are Changing, pages 12-19
The New Class: A Definition (Rally, ComradesVol. 16, #1, December 2005)
Why is the New Class Revolutionary? (Rally, ComradesVol. 16, #2, February 2006)
Discussion points:
1. New means of production changed the game. Expanding sections of the working class are permanently unneeded. The new mode of production no longer needed a reserve army of unemployed. Nor does it need healthy young men for an infantry war. As industry gave way to the new electronically controlled means of production, it downsized. The government necessarily had to follow suit.
2. What we are dealing with is not an underclass, but a new class. A new class outside the constraints imposed by the worker-capitalist relationship is a mortal danger to the system.
3 This modern proletariat will play an independent political role. It is, by it social position, communistic. Owning no property whatsoever, without employment or resources, it cannot move in the direction of securing individual property. It is the only class in modern society where “each for all and all for each” has any real political meaning, and where “from each according to ability, to each according to need” makes economic sense.
4. ...They are forming a new class that has few or no ties to capital. This class is revolutionary because it is increasingly outside of or hostile to the wages system. ... It is revolutionary because robotics makes it impossible for them to co-exist with private property. The only way for them to prevent these gigantic means of production from crushing them is to make the means of production public property.
Revolutionary Change in America
Excerpt
How we are changing
Great social problems do not happen out of the context of a certain time. To understand a problem, we must understand the period of time in which it occurred. I do not think it is possible to understand a period of time by simply describing a series of events. Events are a chain with a key link which drags the entire chain forward. We must identify and concentrate our thinking on that key link. Or to put it another way, it is necessary to understand the crucial content of a time in order to understand the time.
The content of our time is the historic shift from production by electromechanics, that is, production by human labor aided by electrically driven machinery, to production by robotics, or production by computer-controlled machinery with very little or no human labor involved. This ongoing economic revolution shapes and determines the social destruction we see around us. It is bringing to the forefront a political struggle unknown to our country.
With this in mind, let us dig beneath the form that this historic shift is taking — the millions of homeless, the tens of millions of jobless, the acres of burned-out neighborhoods, the slaughter of our youth, the “in your face” looting of the public treasury, the decline of health care and education and the elimination of social services. The important thing is to understand why this is happening and what the political results are bound to be.
When and why did government grow big with the alphabet programs and when and why did it suddenly need to shed itself of these programs?
The major task of government is to create the structural programs and policies that allow the economy to function. For example, when the government was the instrument of the farmers, that government did the things necessary to protect and expand the farm. The Indians were cleared from the fertile lands, slavery was protected and extended, shipping lanes for export were cleared and frontiers expanded. As the farm gave way to industry, the government transformed itself into a committee to take care of the new needs of industry.
At that point, government began to grow. Industry needed literate workers, so the school system expanded. The army needed healthy young men to fight the wars brought on by industrial expansion, so a school lunch program was started. As industry got big, a Department of Housing and Urban Development provided order to the chaotic, burgeoning cities it created. In other words, government became big government in order to serve the needs of industry as it became big industry. The workers were kept relatively healthy and the unemployed were warehoused in such a manner as to keep them available for work with every industrial expansion.
New means of production changed the game. Expanding sections of the working class are permanently unneeded. The new mode of production no longer needed a reserve army of unemployed. Nor does it need healthy young men for an infantry war. As industry gave way to the new electronically controlled means of production, it downsized. The government necessarily had to follow suit. Robots do not need unemployment compensation or Social Security, decent food or environmental protection. These entitlements are part of the cost of production. Newt Gingrich aims to transform them into increased profitability. This is the demand of internationally competitive industry. This is the meaning of his revolution.
These fundamental changes in the economy opened the political door for reaction and social progress to fight out who was to benefit from the economic revolution. The initiative was seized by the reaction under the slogan of the Republican Contract With America. The first 100 days of the 1995-96 Congress was a whirlwind of reactionary legislation.
The historic result has not been the legislation, but the beginnings of a new mass political awakening. The recent quarter of a million-person march in Washington called by the National Organization for Women was the first mass reaction to the change. The million-plus march called by a coalition of major black organizations and churches was a watershed that defines the approaching mass struggle. It was the tip of a political iceberg of social discontent. The unreported struggles and growing restlessness in the streets of the nation’s poor are even more important. The conscious forces on both sides realize they must prepare to take political advantage of the social upheavals that are now absolutely inevitable.
Wanting to turn the spontaneous social struggles to one’s political advantage and being able to do so are different things. The game has changed. This is not 1932.
Apparently, Gingrich does not understand the social consequences of the economic changes he is pushing through Congress.
As the application of these new scientific marvels to production expanded, a new economic category, the structurally unemployed, was created. A hundred and fifty years ago, the philosophers and scientists Karl Marx and Frederick Engels coined the term “the reserve army of the unemployed.” This was the industrial reserve to be thrown into the battle for production as the need arose. The structurally unemployed are different. They are a new, growing, permanently unemployed sector created by the new emerging economic structure. Once a job is taken over by robotics, the worker who once performed that job becomes permanently unemployed. His category of work , his job, is eliminated because no human being can work as efficiently or as cheaply as a robot.
Worst than that, the government turns its back to the former worker. He or she is not considered unemployed, but jobless.
The government, which today is little more than an executive committee to manage the affairs of the ruling, capitalist class, is not going to care for something it cannot exploit.
Naturally, robotics entered industry at the lowest and simplest level. Its first victims were the unskilled and semiskilled workers. Part of the legacy of slavery was that a huge section of the African American work force remained tied to the land and especially employed in cotton culture after emancipation. Tractored off the land after the development of the cotton-picking machine, they were the last section of the rural population to join the industrial work force. Consequently, they were concentrated in that sector — the unskilled and semiskilled sector — that was first attacked by the robot.
The social oppression of the African American is the fulcrum for the political leverage of the economic elite of America. We are used to using this historic oppression as a context of understanding the economic and social motion of the country. Last hired and first fired has been the economic lot of the African American since Emancipation. Therefore, it was natural that the wholesale wiping out of African Americans from industry was understood as racism. It is one of the rare times when this analysis was wrong.
The effects of robotics on the white unskilled and semiskilled workers were not so easily seen. They are scattered throughout the general white population, especially in the suburbs. The African Americans were highly visible, being concentrated in a relatively small urban area. Also, the percentage of black laborers among the African American population was higher than white laborers among the white population. Racism provided the form, but the content is the beginnings of a social revolution. The first expression of that revolution was the wrecking of the economy of working-class black America. That revolution now is moving on to wreak its havoc against the formerly secure sections of the blue-collar, white-collar and lower management levels of the white workers.
The economists, their social vision distorted by racist ideology, were unable to understand the difference between the reserve army of unemployed created by industrial capitalism and the structural, permanent joblessness created by robotics. They only saw a growing mass of African Americans outside the labor market. They eagerly embraced the term “underclass.” What were the origins of that term?
European industry was born and began its development while feudal political and economic relations still existed. As industry developed, new economic classes came into being. The bourgeoisie and the modern working class were created from the serfs. Some of these ex-serfs did not make it into either of these new classes. This social flotsam existed as best it could on the periphery of emerging capitalist society until the system finally absorbed them.
Those who coined the term “underclass” perhaps thought here again was a group unable to keep up, and once falling behind and supported by welfare, consciously accepted an existence outside the capitalist relations of worker and employer. It must have seemed that a subclass of blacks, reliant on welfare, had lost the work ethic. Worse, that they were creating a subculture of immorality and criminality in the midst of a great national expansion of wealth and productivity.
A more concrete look will show something different. First, the new productive equipment has polarized wealth and poverty as never before. Absolute wealth in the form of 145 billionaires and absolute poverty in the form of some eight million homeless and absolutely destitute are new to our country. Secondly, the increase in production was accompanied by an increase in unemployment and joblessness.
The black poor were hit first and hardest by both these aspects of the new economy. The black bourgeoisie fled their traditional sections of the city as soon as the ink was dry on the laws allowing them to do so. A section of the African American workers also benefited from integration. Holding stable jobs, they too, moved from the inner city into much more stable neighborhoods. With the factories shutting down, the land around these factories quickly lost their value. Those who could flee did so. Taxes fell, maintenance dwindled and the combination of the American form of apartheid, plus the liquidation of jobs, created a new type of slum: the black, permanently destitute, rotting inner core of the formerly central working-class area of the city. This was also accepted as simply the result of racist economic policies of capitalist industry, rather than the social expression of an economic revolution that was couched in the historic American form of racial discrimination.
Since that phrase “underclass” was coined, the process of social destruction has continued. We can see now that this new group of permanently unemployed is not the result of the welfare system, but of the new means of production, of what they call downsizing.
The results are broader than the social problems caused by racism. It is acknowledged now that, in fact, the white so-called underclass is larger and growing faster than the black. What we are dealing with is not an underclass, but a new class. Gingrich and Company understand the implications of this. A new class outside the constraints imposed by the worker-capitalist relationship is a mortal danger to the system.
Electronics as a new means of production is producing more than an irresolvable depression. It is creating a social revolution. By social revolution we mean the process of qualitatively new means of production disrupting the economic order. In turn, new classes are created that disrupt and disorganize the existing society. The new class (or classes) finally overthrow the ruling class and create a society in their own image. We are in the first, elementary stage of a social revolution. It is important that we take this abstract idea and see what happens in a concrete way.
Let us look at the social revolution from agriculture to industry. In Europe, its political expression was from feudalism to capitalism.
Over a considerable period of time, manufacturing developed from simple, manual manufacture to a system of power-driven machines. As the principal means of production, machinery was qualitatively different from plots of land. As the use of machinery increased, so did the new class of workers who manipulated them. The two classes that developed with machinery — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat — grew with the spreading use of machinery. Wage labor, the new system of exploitation, ruined the peasants and the handicraftsmen. This was the process of social revolution: the new classes forcing their way into and disrupting the established class relationships, forcing the reorganization of society. The new classes were totally outside of the relationship between the existing classes. Therefore, there was no social contract between the serfs and the nobility. A new social relationship could be finally settled only by force.
Once again, social revolution is beginning before our very eyes. This process could not begin without the creation of new instruments of production, and a new class or classes to interrupt, disorganize and finally overthrow the existing order. This has been the historical evolution of society thus far.
This new class of propertyless people, structurally forced away from production, is a true proletariat. One big difference is that while the Roman proletariat was politically passive, or troops for another class, this modern proletariat will play an independent political role. It is, by its social position, communistic. Owning no property whatsoever, without employment or resources, it cannot move in the direction of securing individual property. It is the only class in modern society where “each for all and all for each” has any real political meaning, and where “from each according to ability, to each according to need” makes economic sense.
The new class of the new poor includes the throw-away workers — temporary laborers with no benefits, the part-time workers, the newly unemployed as well as the permanently unemployed. This class is rapidly gaining an elementary consciousness of itself and the world. This consciousness is couched in the concepts of rich and poor. It is elementary and shallow, but it is a different conception than white and black.
It is already clear to the more advanced thinkers that as this society is destroyed, a new one must be built. The class struggle is the fight between the old and new classes over how, and in whose interest, the new society will be organized.
The New Class: A definition
Rally, Comrades, Vol. 16, No. 1, December 2005
Since many of the articles appearing in Rally, Comrades! contain the phrase, “the new class,” the Editorial Board thought it would be helpful if we explain precisely what we mean by the term.
Often, when new phenomena arise there are no terms to adequately describe them and writers are forced to create a new term or give new meaning to an existing one.
The double-acting steam engine created industry. The working class created by industry was different from the old class that was created by hand labor or manufacturing. It was still a working class but the emphasis rapidly shifted from the manufacturing sector to the industrial sector. Thus, the industrial workers were a new class. In a somewhat like manner the application of electronics to production is creating a new class. What are these new means of production creating? On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of part time, contingency, temporary workers. They work at or below minimum wage with few if any benefits. In fact, this sector already constitutes almost a third of the work force.
On the other hand, a growing number of jobs are simply disappearing forever, taken over by automation. The workers who held these jobs are often forced into a new category of unemployment – the permanently unemployed. We see them every day, picking through the trash, begging on the street corners. This is not a “lumpen proletariat” – a group that was created in the wake of the industrial revolution out of the serfs who never entered either the manufacturing force or the bourgeoisie. These new strata of workers and this new permanently unemployed are the result of the introduction of electronics into the workplace.
They are a new class.
Why is the New Class Revolutionary?
Rally, Comrades, Vol. 16, No. 2, February 2006
We have entered a revolutionary era. New electronic means of production are destroying the society based on industry. It is only a matter of time until there will be a political decision as to what kind of society will replace this one. Herein lies the importance of revolutionaries strategically understanding which social force is capable of overthrowing the existing order and reconstructing society on the basis of social ownership of socially necessary means of production. Only after answering this question can we set about the task of educating and politicizing this social force.
Revolution is a change in quality. Therefore we begin our inquiry by answering the question, how does quality change? Scientists for centuries have agreed that simply re-arranging quantitative aspects or relations will not change quality. To change a quality, something must be extracted from or added into the process. While this is obvious in the material world, it is not so easily seen in the process of social change. Social scientists such as Frederick Engels touched upon this concept a hundred and forty years ago. However, he believed that the introduction of large-scale industrial production would be the introduction of the “something new” that would create the conditions for the workers to overthrow capitalism.
Industrialization brought about a great social revolution in Europe and America; however it did not go far enough and deep enough to bring about the kind of political revolution that could lead to the elimination of private property. Why? We think that since all the social elements that overthrew the political shell of feudalism (or in America, chattel slavery) were within capitalist society, they were restricted to reforming that system – no matter how militant the struggle. The industrial workers were in antagonism with feudalism and slavery because they were external to that system. They were in contradiction to the capitalists because they were inside that system. Industry got bigger, manufacturing and agriculture got smaller. The existing elements were re-arranged, but nothing was extracted or added. Therefore, the quality could not change. The industrial revolution changed the productive forces – i.e., the means of production and the resultant skills of the working class — but could not change the mode of production, which remained capitalist.
A social force capable of such a change must be outside capitalist society and antagonistic to it. True to the dialectic, electronics itself is creating this force. As more and more production is taken over by electronics, the displaced workers are forced into lower and lower paying jobs and many of them end up in the growing mass of permanently unemployed. Today over a third of the work force is unemployed, contingency, parttime or temporary workers. A huge section works at or below minimum wage. They are forming a new class that has few or no ties to capital. This class is revolutionary because it is increasingly outside of and hostile to the wages system. It is revolutionary because it cannot fight the individual employer – it must fight the state. It is revolutionary because robotics makes it impossible for them to co-exist with private property. The only way for them to prevent these gigantic means of production from crushing them is to make them public property.
We hope our ongoing statements on the new class will become the basis of discussion and inquiry. It is sorely lacking in the American Left. As in all social transitions, we revolutionaries will have a small and very temporary window of opportunity. If we do not understand the historical line of march and have not worked out a strategy of transition, that window will close.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
"Race Against the Machine" review
Part of our ongoing series about the auto-destruct sequence that global capitalism has engaged for itself, here's a Financial Times review (click blue text) of
"Race Against the Machine," a new book.
"Race Against the Machine," a new book.
October 30, 2011 9:40 pm
Race Against the Machine
Robots are finally capturing our jobs, argue Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
America is in the midst of a jobs crisis. The latest data show 103,000 jobs added in September; roughly half what is needed to keep pace with population growth. But previous months had seen no increase whatsoever, so even this paltry rise was greeted with relief.
Unemployment is to be expected after a recession. Yet when Barack Obama first pushed his stimulus package, the US president warned darkly what would happen without it: joblessness would exceed 9 per cent in 2009, before falling back. Today, the rate is stuck at 9.1 per cent; still on a par with the do-nothing worst-case scenario predicted two years ago.
Why has it stayed so high for so long? Some economists point to weak demand. Others note credit-starved companies shedding jobs to pep up profits. Yet this does not explain an unusual pattern seen in US and European labour markets after the financial crisis: strong corporate earnings and robust investment in capital equipment, but miserly hiring rates.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, make a powerful case that a different villain is to blame: technology. Their essay is interesting as part of a trend for speedily produced ebooks on urgent economic issues, and it contains more insight in its 60 pages than many books three times the length. But it is compelling for its claim to explain two crumbling economic laws: the first that growth will create jobs; the second that rising wages will follow rising productivity.
The authors think this stems from the erosion of a third pattern – that technology creates at least as many jobs as it destroys. Many intuitively doubt this idea, as the looms long ago smashed by Ned Ludd attest. John Maynard Keynes even coined the term “technological unemployment” in 1930 for the long-term process by which machines would replace workers.
Yet, as the authors admit, the evidence is irrefutable: until now technology has been a net plus for jobs. Given this, the onus is on them to prove that this time really is different. The crux of their case lies in the fact that machines are increasingly able to perform tasks in which humans were once unquestioned masters.
Computers now exhibit human-like capabilities not just in games such as chess, but also in complex communication such as linguistic translation and speech. These new abilities stem from “pattern recognition” technologies – the same techniques that underpin, for example, the Siri voice recognition tool in Apple’s iPhone 4S.
Pattern recognition, the authors think, will quickly allow machines to branch out further. Computers will soon drive more safely than humans, a fact Google has demonstrated by allowing one to take out a Toyota Prius for a 1,000-mile spin. Truck and taxi drivers should be worried – but then so should medical professionals, lawyers and accountants; all of their jobs are at risk too.
The outcome is a nightmarish but worryingly convincing vision of a future in which an ever-decreasing circle of professions is immune from robotic encirclement. But while this book is a brisk must-read for anyone trying to grapple with the dilemmas of capitalism beyond the credit crunch, it is not without flaws – the most important being the way its technological focus underplays other factors, especially globalisation.
That the pace of technological change has sped up in recent years is only arguable. But there is no doubt that the entry of China, in particular, into the world economy has sent shockwaves through global supply chains, creating huge competitive pressures on western businesses and the people they employ. If the US and Europe face a jobs crisis, this is a big part of the reason why.
Yet the author’s more basic conclusion – that technological progress is sufficiently rapid that “many present-day organisations, institutions, policies, and mindsets are not keeping up” – is surely right. The result is a conundrum that shares much in common with trade policy. Technology is essential for creating value and raising productivity, but it creates losers as well as winners. These losers are recognised in theory, but too rarely compensated in practice.
This brings the argument back to a more basic problem: fair distribution. Machines work for free, but their benefits end up in someone’s pocket. If technology is indeed speeding up, more of that benefit must be returned to those it affects, especially in the form of investment in human capital. If not, the march of the machines will overtake us sooner than we think.
The writer is the FT’s Mumbai correspondent
Race Against the Machine: How the digital revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly transforming employment and the economy, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee Digital Frontier Press
Unemployment is to be expected after a recession. Yet when Barack Obama first pushed his stimulus package, the US president warned darkly what would happen without it: joblessness would exceed 9 per cent in 2009, before falling back. Today, the rate is stuck at 9.1 per cent; still on a par with the do-nothing worst-case scenario predicted two years ago.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, make a powerful case that a different villain is to blame: technology. Their essay is interesting as part of a trend for speedily produced ebooks on urgent economic issues, and it contains more insight in its 60 pages than many books three times the length. But it is compelling for its claim to explain two crumbling economic laws: the first that growth will create jobs; the second that rising wages will follow rising productivity.
The authors think this stems from the erosion of a third pattern – that technology creates at least as many jobs as it destroys. Many intuitively doubt this idea, as the looms long ago smashed by Ned Ludd attest. John Maynard Keynes even coined the term “technological unemployment” in 1930 for the long-term process by which machines would replace workers.
Yet, as the authors admit, the evidence is irrefutable: until now technology has been a net plus for jobs. Given this, the onus is on them to prove that this time really is different. The crux of their case lies in the fact that machines are increasingly able to perform tasks in which humans were once unquestioned masters.
Computers now exhibit human-like capabilities not just in games such as chess, but also in complex communication such as linguistic translation and speech. These new abilities stem from “pattern recognition” technologies – the same techniques that underpin, for example, the Siri voice recognition tool in Apple’s iPhone 4S.
Pattern recognition, the authors think, will quickly allow machines to branch out further. Computers will soon drive more safely than humans, a fact Google has demonstrated by allowing one to take out a Toyota Prius for a 1,000-mile spin. Truck and taxi drivers should be worried – but then so should medical professionals, lawyers and accountants; all of their jobs are at risk too.
The outcome is a nightmarish but worryingly convincing vision of a future in which an ever-decreasing circle of professions is immune from robotic encirclement. But while this book is a brisk must-read for anyone trying to grapple with the dilemmas of capitalism beyond the credit crunch, it is not without flaws – the most important being the way its technological focus underplays other factors, especially globalisation.
That the pace of technological change has sped up in recent years is only arguable. But there is no doubt that the entry of China, in particular, into the world economy has sent shockwaves through global supply chains, creating huge competitive pressures on western businesses and the people they employ. If the US and Europe face a jobs crisis, this is a big part of the reason why.
Yet the author’s more basic conclusion – that technological progress is sufficiently rapid that “many present-day organisations, institutions, policies, and mindsets are not keeping up” – is surely right. The result is a conundrum that shares much in common with trade policy. Technology is essential for creating value and raising productivity, but it creates losers as well as winners. These losers are recognised in theory, but too rarely compensated in practice.
This brings the argument back to a more basic problem: fair distribution. Machines work for free, but their benefits end up in someone’s pocket. If technology is indeed speeding up, more of that benefit must be returned to those it affects, especially in the form of investment in human capital. If not, the march of the machines will overtake us sooner than we think.
The writer is the FT’s Mumbai correspondent
Race Against the Machine: How the digital revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly transforming employment and the economy, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee Digital Frontier Press
Robotic Nation, by Marshall Brain
Robotic Nation, by Marshall Brain (click blue title to open the article) is another in our ongoing series to discover the auto-destruct feature that has been switched on in the global capitalist economy.
This time is different. There will be no recovery from this type of unemployment. It's truly an end-game.
This time is different. There will be no recovery from this type of unemployment. It's truly an end-game.
Friday, January 6, 2012
January 17th, 2012: Rank-and-file Assembly for this PAC, Stevens Point WI
This is a listening and action session for this Political Action Committee:
7 p.m. Tues. January 17 2012
Pineries Room, Charles White Portage County Library 1001 Main Street Stevens Point WI
Bring your issues ideas that can be acted on as campaigns in the coming year. "Brainstorm" session.
Please consider working in one of these committees:
Media
Issues & Campaigns
Stopping the Penokee Hills mine
Veterans' issues - Maybe Dan M. can update us?
Outreach
Fundraising
Transport - getting activists where they need to get to.
Steering Committee
Report on Mining Hearing in West Allis (previous action item)
Proposed Wisconsin statewide action items so far:
1. Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement - Reducing the incidence of military-style over-reactions by SWAT teams; decommissioning "gift" equipment foisted on law enforcement agencies by the Pentagon.
2. Urban Ag enabling legislation -- removing municipal ordinances against greenhouses, chicken coops, and other urban agriculture infrastructure.
3. Legalizing Eco-Villages -- County-level removal of all zoning ordinances pertaining to number of housing units on small agriculture parcels, repeal of ordinances pertaining to "unrelated people" sharing housing units, and so forth. This is a key sustainability issue going forward. Less land use for 'trophy homes;' more land use for small-scale food and other production.
4. Re-introduce the raw milk sales bill to Wisc. legislature. Make a way for small dairy farmers to sell direct to customers, using standards of cleanliness and food safety.
5. Endorse Rick Kissell for City of Milwaukee Treasurer. Rick has been working at local, independent politics for a long time and would do right by Milwaukee's working class.
7 p.m. Tues. January 17 2012
Pineries Room, Charles White Portage County Library 1001 Main Street Stevens Point WI
Bring your issues ideas that can be acted on as campaigns in the coming year. "Brainstorm" session.
Please consider working in one of these committees:
Media
Issues & Campaigns
Stopping the Penokee Hills mine
Veterans' issues - Maybe Dan M. can update us?
Outreach
Fundraising
Transport - getting activists where they need to get to.
Steering Committee
Report on Mining Hearing in West Allis (previous action item)
Proposed Wisconsin statewide action items so far:
1. Demilitarizing Local Law Enforcement - Reducing the incidence of military-style over-reactions by SWAT teams; decommissioning "gift" equipment foisted on law enforcement agencies by the Pentagon.
2. Urban Ag enabling legislation -- removing municipal ordinances against greenhouses, chicken coops, and other urban agriculture infrastructure.
3. Legalizing Eco-Villages -- County-level removal of all zoning ordinances pertaining to number of housing units on small agriculture parcels, repeal of ordinances pertaining to "unrelated people" sharing housing units, and so forth. This is a key sustainability issue going forward. Less land use for 'trophy homes;' more land use for small-scale food and other production.
4. Re-introduce the raw milk sales bill to Wisc. legislature. Make a way for small dairy farmers to sell direct to customers, using standards of cleanliness and food safety.
5. Endorse Rick Kissell for City of Milwaukee Treasurer. Rick has been working at local, independent politics for a long time and would do right by Milwaukee's working class.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Tectonic shifts in employment - The precariat as fastest-growing class?
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/39319/#.TwVfoIv33TM.facebook
The United States faces a protracted unemployment crisis: 6.3 million fewer Americans have jobs than was true at the end of 2007. And yet the country's economic output is higher today than it was before the financial crisis. Where did the jobs go? Several factors, including outsourcing, help explain the state of the labor market, but fast-advancing, IT-driven automation might be playing the biggest role.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people have feared that new technologies would permanently erode employment. Over and over again, these dislocations of labor have been temporary: technologies that made some jobs obsolete eventually led to new kinds of work, raising productivity and prosperity with no overall negative effect on employment.
There's nothing to suggest that this dynamic no longer operates, but new research is showing that advances in workplace automation are being deployed at a faster pace than ever, making it more difficult for workers to adapt and wreaking havoc on the middle class: the clerks, accountants, and production-line workers whose tasks can increasingly be mastered by software and robots. "Do I think we will have permanently high unemployment as a consequence of technology? No," says Peter Diamond, the MIT economist who won a 2010 Nobel Prize for his work on market imperfections, including those that affect employment. "What's different now is that the nature of jobs going away has changed. Communication and computer abilities mean that the type of jobs affected have moved up the income distribution."
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee study information-supercharged workplaces and the innovations and productivity advances they continually create. Now they have turned their sights to how these IT-driven improvements affect employment. In their new book, Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and McAfee, its principal research scientist, see a paradox in the first decade of the 2000s. Even before the economic downturn caused U.S. unemployment to rise from 4.4 percent in May 2007 to 10.1 percent in October 2009, a disturbing trend was visible. From 2000 to 2007, GDP and productivity rose faster than they had in any decade since the 1960s, but employment growth was comparatively tepid.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee posit that more work was being done by, or with help from, machines. For example, Amazon.com reduced the need for retail staffers; computerized kiosks in hotels and airports replaced clerks; voice-recognition and speech systems replaced customer support staff and operators; and businesses of all kinds took advantage of tools such as enterprise resource planning software. "A classically trained economist would say: 'This just means there's a big adjustment taking place until we find the new equilibrium—the new stuff for people to do,' " says McAfee.
We've certainly made such adjustments before. But whereas agricultural advances played out over a century and electrification and factory automation rolled out over decades, the power of some information technologies is essentially doubling every two years or so as a consequence of Moore's Law. It took some time for IT to fully replace the paper-driven workflows in cubicles, management suites, and retail stores. (In the 1980s and early 1990s productivity grew slowly, and then it took off after 1996; some economists explained that IT was finally being used effectively.) But now, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, the efficiencies and automation opportunities made possible by IT are advancing too fast for the labor market to keep up.
More evidence that technology has reduced the number of good jobs can be found in a working paper by David Autor, an economist at MIT, and David Dorn, an economist at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid. They too point to the crucial years of 2000–2005. Job growth happened mainly at the ends of the spectrum: in lower-paying positions, in areas such as personal care, cleaning services, and security, and in higher-end professional positions for technicians, managers, and the like. For laborers, administrative assistants, production workers, and sales representatives, the job market didn't grow as fast—or even shrank. Subsequent research showed that things got worse after 2007. During the recession, nearly all the nation's job losses were in those middle categories—the positions easiest to replace, fully or in part, by technology.
Brynjolfsson says the trends are "troubling." And they are global; some of the jobs that IT threatens, for example, are at electronics factories in China and transcription services in India. "This is not about replacing all work, but rather about tectonic shifts that have left millions much worse off and others much better off," he says. While he doesn't believe the problem is permanent, that's of little solace to the millions out of work now, and they may not be paid at their old rates even when they do find new jobs. "Over the longer term, they will develop new skills, or entrepreneurs will figure out ways of making use of their skills, or wages will drop, or all three of those things will happen," he says. "But in the short run, your old set of skills that created a lot of value are not useful anymore."
This means there's a risk, unless the economy generates new high-quality jobs, that the people in the middle will face the prospect of menial jobs—whose wages will actually decline as more people compete for them. "Theory says the labor market will 'clear.' There are always things for people to do," Autor says. "But it doesn't say at what price." And even as it gets crowded and potentially even less rewarding at the bottom, employees at the top are getting paid more, thanks to the multiplier effects of technology. Some 60 percent of the income growth in the United States between 2002 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent of Americans—the bulk of whom are executives whose companies are getting richer by using IT to become more efficient, Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out.
Dramatic shifts have happened before. In 1800, 90 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture. The figure was down to 41 percent by 1900 and stands at 2 percent today. People work, instead, in new industries that were unimaginable in the early 19th century. Such a transformation could happen again. Today's information technologies, even as they may do short-term harm to some kinds of employees, are clearly a boon to entrepreneurs, who now have cheaper and more powerful tools at their disposal than at any other time in history. As jobs are lost, Brynjolfsson says, "we will be running an experiment on the economy to see if entrepreneurs invent new ways to be productive equally quickly." As examples, he points to eBay and Amazon Marketplace, which together allow hundreds of thousands of people to make their living hawking items to customers around the world.
The problem, he says, is that not enough people are sufficiently educated or technologically savvy to exploit such rapid advances and develop as-yet-unimagined entrepreneurial niches. He and McAfee conclude their book by arguing that the same technologies now making industry far more productive should be applied to updating and improving the educational system. (In one promising example they cite, 58,000 people went online to take an artificial-intelligence class offered by Stanford University.)
IT-based entrepreneurship isn't the only potential technological driver of new jobs. Revitalizing manufacturing (see "Can We Build Tomorrow's Breakthroughs?") could also help. But automation has made manufacturing far less labor intensive, so even a manufacturing revival is not likely to mean a great many new jobs on balance. Likewise, anyone whose hopes are pinned on "green jobs" may be disappointed. Though jobs will be created in the switch to cleaner energy sources, jobs tied to traditional energy will be lost in the same process. Many economists are not certain what the net effect will be. And in any case, these days manufacturing and energy account for small slices of the U.S. economy, which is now driven much more by the service sector. That's why fast-advancing information technologies, with their pervasive reach and their potential to create new services and satisfy new niche markets, may be a better bet for job creation—though the tumult IT is causing in the labor market isn't necessarily going to resolve itself quickly.
Peter Diamond says that one of the most important things the government can do for employment is to take care of basics, like infrastructure and education. "As long as we have so many idle resources, this is the time when it's advantageous—and socially less expensive—to engage in public investment," he says. Eventually, he believes, the economy will adapt and things will work out, once again. "Jobs have been changing and moving around—within the country, out of the country—for a very long time," he says. "There will be other kinds of jobs that still require people."
David Talbot is TR's chief correspondent.
"Tectonic Shifts" in Employment
Information technology is reducing the need for certain jobs faster than new ones are being created.
- January/February 2012
- By David Talbot
The United States faces a protracted unemployment crisis: 6.3 million fewer Americans have jobs than was true at the end of 2007. And yet the country's economic output is higher today than it was before the financial crisis. Where did the jobs go? Several factors, including outsourcing, help explain the state of the labor market, but fast-advancing, IT-driven automation might be playing the biggest role.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people have feared that new technologies would permanently erode employment. Over and over again, these dislocations of labor have been temporary: technologies that made some jobs obsolete eventually led to new kinds of work, raising productivity and prosperity with no overall negative effect on employment.
There's nothing to suggest that this dynamic no longer operates, but new research is showing that advances in workplace automation are being deployed at a faster pace than ever, making it more difficult for workers to adapt and wreaking havoc on the middle class: the clerks, accountants, and production-line workers whose tasks can increasingly be mastered by software and robots. "Do I think we will have permanently high unemployment as a consequence of technology? No," says Peter Diamond, the MIT economist who won a 2010 Nobel Prize for his work on market imperfections, including those that affect employment. "What's different now is that the nature of jobs going away has changed. Communication and computer abilities mean that the type of jobs affected have moved up the income distribution."
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee study information-supercharged workplaces and the innovations and productivity advances they continually create. Now they have turned their sights to how these IT-driven improvements affect employment. In their new book, Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and McAfee, its principal research scientist, see a paradox in the first decade of the 2000s. Even before the economic downturn caused U.S. unemployment to rise from 4.4 percent in May 2007 to 10.1 percent in October 2009, a disturbing trend was visible. From 2000 to 2007, GDP and productivity rose faster than they had in any decade since the 1960s, but employment growth was comparatively tepid.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee posit that more work was being done by, or with help from, machines. For example, Amazon.com reduced the need for retail staffers; computerized kiosks in hotels and airports replaced clerks; voice-recognition and speech systems replaced customer support staff and operators; and businesses of all kinds took advantage of tools such as enterprise resource planning software. "A classically trained economist would say: 'This just means there's a big adjustment taking place until we find the new equilibrium—the new stuff for people to do,' " says McAfee.
We've certainly made such adjustments before. But whereas agricultural advances played out over a century and electrification and factory automation rolled out over decades, the power of some information technologies is essentially doubling every two years or so as a consequence of Moore's Law. It took some time for IT to fully replace the paper-driven workflows in cubicles, management suites, and retail stores. (In the 1980s and early 1990s productivity grew slowly, and then it took off after 1996; some economists explained that IT was finally being used effectively.) But now, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, the efficiencies and automation opportunities made possible by IT are advancing too fast for the labor market to keep up.
More evidence that technology has reduced the number of good jobs can be found in a working paper by David Autor, an economist at MIT, and David Dorn, an economist at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid. They too point to the crucial years of 2000–2005. Job growth happened mainly at the ends of the spectrum: in lower-paying positions, in areas such as personal care, cleaning services, and security, and in higher-end professional positions for technicians, managers, and the like. For laborers, administrative assistants, production workers, and sales representatives, the job market didn't grow as fast—or even shrank. Subsequent research showed that things got worse after 2007. During the recession, nearly all the nation's job losses were in those middle categories—the positions easiest to replace, fully or in part, by technology.
Brynjolfsson says the trends are "troubling." And they are global; some of the jobs that IT threatens, for example, are at electronics factories in China and transcription services in India. "This is not about replacing all work, but rather about tectonic shifts that have left millions much worse off and others much better off," he says. While he doesn't believe the problem is permanent, that's of little solace to the millions out of work now, and they may not be paid at their old rates even when they do find new jobs. "Over the longer term, they will develop new skills, or entrepreneurs will figure out ways of making use of their skills, or wages will drop, or all three of those things will happen," he says. "But in the short run, your old set of skills that created a lot of value are not useful anymore."
This means there's a risk, unless the economy generates new high-quality jobs, that the people in the middle will face the prospect of menial jobs—whose wages will actually decline as more people compete for them. "Theory says the labor market will 'clear.' There are always things for people to do," Autor says. "But it doesn't say at what price." And even as it gets crowded and potentially even less rewarding at the bottom, employees at the top are getting paid more, thanks to the multiplier effects of technology. Some 60 percent of the income growth in the United States between 2002 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent of Americans—the bulk of whom are executives whose companies are getting richer by using IT to become more efficient, Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out.
Dramatic shifts have happened before. In 1800, 90 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture. The figure was down to 41 percent by 1900 and stands at 2 percent today. People work, instead, in new industries that were unimaginable in the early 19th century. Such a transformation could happen again. Today's information technologies, even as they may do short-term harm to some kinds of employees, are clearly a boon to entrepreneurs, who now have cheaper and more powerful tools at their disposal than at any other time in history. As jobs are lost, Brynjolfsson says, "we will be running an experiment on the economy to see if entrepreneurs invent new ways to be productive equally quickly." As examples, he points to eBay and Amazon Marketplace, which together allow hundreds of thousands of people to make their living hawking items to customers around the world.
The problem, he says, is that not enough people are sufficiently educated or technologically savvy to exploit such rapid advances and develop as-yet-unimagined entrepreneurial niches. He and McAfee conclude their book by arguing that the same technologies now making industry far more productive should be applied to updating and improving the educational system. (In one promising example they cite, 58,000 people went online to take an artificial-intelligence class offered by Stanford University.)
IT-based entrepreneurship isn't the only potential technological driver of new jobs. Revitalizing manufacturing (see "Can We Build Tomorrow's Breakthroughs?") could also help. But automation has made manufacturing far less labor intensive, so even a manufacturing revival is not likely to mean a great many new jobs on balance. Likewise, anyone whose hopes are pinned on "green jobs" may be disappointed. Though jobs will be created in the switch to cleaner energy sources, jobs tied to traditional energy will be lost in the same process. Many economists are not certain what the net effect will be. And in any case, these days manufacturing and energy account for small slices of the U.S. economy, which is now driven much more by the service sector. That's why fast-advancing information technologies, with their pervasive reach and their potential to create new services and satisfy new niche markets, may be a better bet for job creation—though the tumult IT is causing in the labor market isn't necessarily going to resolve itself quickly.
Peter Diamond says that one of the most important things the government can do for employment is to take care of basics, like infrastructure and education. "As long as we have so many idle resources, this is the time when it's advantageous—and socially less expensive—to engage in public investment," he says. Eventually, he believes, the economy will adapt and things will work out, once again. "Jobs have been changing and moving around—within the country, out of the country—for a very long time," he says. "There will be other kinds of jobs that still require people."
David Talbot is TR's chief correspondent.
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