Bush is starting to run out of options, because whatever is done with the
currency or taxes, fundamentally there is a finite global mass of exchange
value. It is a zero sum game. The incessant drive of capital to accumulate
will inevitably come up against the limited purchasing power of the masses.
Chris Burford
London
"What U gon do when he come for U?"
The industrial production of commodities - a historically specific method and form of production, is undergoing worldwide transition. The revolution in the mode of production has many sides, made understandable to me by using the concept of "methods (means) of production" - the tools, machinery, infrastructure and energy source, and the mode of distribution that more than less correspond to a given state of development of production.
On the one hand there is the revolutionary development of tools. In this instance advanced robotics, computerization and digitalized production process, which are quite advanced. Then there is the application of this technology in daily life, which is not as far advanced as the pace of the revolutionary development of the tools. We have experienced a tremendous wave of change in the application of the revolutionary new production process and its displacement and replacement of human labor. The displacement unfolds step by step in one sector of the economy after another.
The slow and long introduction of robotics and new generations of technology by definition lower the standard of living of the working or laboring classes. Our wages have been dropping worldwide for the past 30 years as the historical trend and this does not exclude what appears as a rise in wages for different sections of the world working class. Interestingly, this lowering of wages meant the employers could hire more workers during the past twenty years. This contradictory tendency was the basis of unwarranted optimism by certain intellectual spokesmen for the bourgeoisie.
As a historically specific mode of production, the industrial system operating within the political shell of capitalist property relations have been faced with periodic crisis of overproduction or productive capacity that outruns the ability of the people to buy all the goods available in the market. This periodic crisis of overproduction, given life by industrious owners of property eager to compete in the market for your business and seeking better - meaning cheaper, methods of production to outdo their competitors, has entered a new qualitative phase of crisis with the application of a generation of advanced robotics.
The basis of the industrial system of production - (no matter what its political shell, be it Soviet or public property relations in the industrial infrastructure, or capitalist - private owners of the means of production in the industrial infrastructure), is value and value means the expenditure of human labor. Exchange means exchange: you give me something and I give you something - a relationship between human beings. Price is connected to and expresses the value system or a mode of expression of exchange. Everyone must sell something in the value system in order to take part in exchange and most of us sell our labor power for a certain price because price is a mode of expression of the value system.
The robot - advanced robotics, is destroying the value system and its mode of expression. That is the "commodity form" itself is being destroyed. Each stage in the application of advanced robotics not simply replaces human labor but destroys the commodity form because there is no way to say what something is worth produced by robots. Price because torn - polarized, from the damn thing it supposed to express!
The basis of pricing (not individual items but the totality of all products) is in the last instance "how much does it cost to raise the working class?" That is what the working class has to earn or it would not be alive - it would die of starvation and lack of shelter, and then all exchange would collapse. How much does it cost to build a robot in relationship to creating a worker? The robot is a hell of a lot more productive than the worker. Not so much that the worker is being replaced - which is extremely important, if you are the one to lose your job to the robot. Bourgeois society will find something to do with the unemployed workers - including shooting them or putting them in jail for not having a job and being a threat to the social order by demanding food, transportation, shelter, beer, a shot of cognac and software without having money. It is not just the owners in the music industry who are crying crocodile tears over the free distribution of music or Bill Gates ! running around the world trying to pay people not to use free software and applications systems, but the capitalist as a class that's starting to say "damn, I better hurry up and get all the market shares I can while their is still time."
Mr. Bourgeois - as a class, then runs and uses more improved robotics to cheapen products and beat out his competitor and the value system gets shaken to its core again.
The gravedigger of the industrial system of production - not just capitalism, is the robot or advanced robotics, which kicks the worker out of his active economic class and coverts him into . . . . . . . what are we going to call this mass? . . . .. . A class of workers who cannot work because the robot got his job? Unemployed is good for now, but a younger generation is going to create a word for this workers who ca no longer work.
Here is the real zero sum game in a nutshell. The mode of production (technology) is not simply in rebellion to the mode of accumulation - private appropriation of the social products, as in the past. The mode of production is also rebelling against the mode of distribution - exchange or the sell and purchase of labor power, in the absolute sense. Then . . . . "Then" . . . the mode of production is rebelling against itself: that is one mode of production is giving way to a new mode of production. Electronic computerized production process is kicking electro-mechanical production process in the pants, in the same way that the automobile stepped on the horse and buggy or the computer on the slide rule. My kids don't know what a slid rule is.
What is value? Value is the amount of socially necessary labor that is inside the production of everything - commodities. In the economic sense, screwing around with value is like messing with Mother Nature, because value is the basis of the industrial production of commodities.
The robot not simply destroys the ability of the working class to sell its labor power but in turn destroys the ability - internal compelling reason, for the capitalist to buy massive quantities of labor power in one section of the economy and one ranch of industry after another. The robot wrenches - zaps, the capitalist out of their class position or rather, liberate them from the burden of having all of that money and ownership of the things that compels the worker to be a worker.
In the past century, the two dangers to the capitalist as a class was being out done by a competitor and driven out of the ballgame (out of the market), and political revolutionaries fighting against private appropriation of the social products. Today, the crisis has taken a qualitative leap.
The new worldwide unemployment is the expression of the destruction of value and the emerging ending to the buying and selling of labor power as the basis for the production and distribution of products. The commodity form itself is being assaulted at the hands - of all people, the modern bourgeoisie itself. The bourgeoisie the one applying the modern technology not me. Although I would apply advanced technology to everything all the time and then listen to the new music, have a cognac or two, take the ole lady out more often . . . .naw . . ., stay on the computer a little longer.
As the new American proletariat begins to understand this social process, they will begin to understand and identify their class enemies and class friends.
The robot is the gravedigger of the value system.
"What you gonna do when they come for you?"
Melvin P.
