About categories / categories: Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are)
Transclude of productive-forces#^82406a
Machines do not create value but simply transfer their own value bit by bit to the new commodities through wear and tear or depreciation. Machines, in any case, have to be put to use by workers, otherwise standing alone they produce nothing. Raw materials, likewise, are used up in the process and simply transfer their value to the new products (depreciation). In other words, a tailor adds value to that value transferred from the materials on which he is working by applying labour through cutting and sewing.
Machines carry in themselves past labour or dead labour as opposed to the newly added value - living labour as Marx described it.
Labour (combined with nature) is the source of all new value, including surplus value. A machine simply increases the productivity of human labour, which allows the effort of the workers to produce more in a given time. However, it is not the machine that creates the new values, but the labour of the workers.
Link to originalcommodity fetishism, reserve army of labour, malthusianism (overpopulation)
We encounter commodities in finished form. We don’t see the labour that has gone into it, so we don’t understand why a thing costs what it does. “The price is guided by the law of the value”, and you can’t understand values as things themselves, but you must look at the labour time that goes into production.
→ Because this is hidden, relations between things cover relations between people. Marx calls this commodity fetishism.
It mystifies the underlying relations.
Example: technology has the capacity to shorten labour time. But work has to be done by a worker in order to put it to use (and create new value), just like it took work to produce the tech.
They are not eliminating human labour, they are degrading it (?) and making it cheaper (e.g. sweatshop workers filtering images for AI training; programming jobs becoming way cheaper). That’s what capitalism does best, called progressive accumulation of capital.
Capitalists are not satisfied to feed themselves on their profits, they must turn those profits into new capital, increase the scale of production, increase the productivity of machines.
→ The worker becomes an appendage to the machine!
→ Capitalists can reduce the number of workers and pay them less.
Capital is increasingly dedicated to the machines / means of production (see TRPF), and a section of the working class is increasingly pushed to the side, condemned to idleness - temporarily or permanently (the reserve army of labour), while those in the factories are condemned to overwork.
→ Downwards pressure on the actively working people’s wages.
Today, ome of these extra workers are utilized through things like “gig work” / freelance work, lying around for the capitalists to use for whatever purpose, only useful so long, as they can produce surplus.
This is also where the idea of overpopulation looks at it backwards. It’s not that there are too many people / that the working class has grown too much, but capital has grown too much, and increasingly cannot absorb the working class! It reproduces and even depends on the division between the active and idle army!
Transclude of labour-power#^2b63b1
Mass layoffs due to automation would massively aggravate the crisis of overproduction / TRPF.
What happens if you automate millions of jobs away? Who’s gonna buy the products you produce?
→ if u do not need to employ humans at all, it gets very dystopian very quickly under capitalism / without democracy in the economy. But this scenario of complete takeover of the workforce by robots is extremely unlikely… What’s way more likely is jobs being replaced… but… what happens when you take away the salaries of the people buying your products? → Crisis
Under a democratically planned economy, all these things that cause such problems under capitalism would be the precise way we would free workers from the drudgery of labour, so that they could run society.
Full Automation
Technology brings the wages down and pushes profits up, but over time, it decreases the rate of profit. Full automation would mean: No socially necessary labour time, values falling towards zero. So unless monopolies don’t dominate everything - which they do - profits would tend towards zero. It is a graphic illustration of what Marx said: The forces of production - the ability to produce - comes into conflict with the mode of production - the way in which we distribute wealth / the way in which capital / wealth is owned.
”At the end of the day, these machines are not being paid a wage.”
ok, for the rest of this callout, let’s assume we don’t… but what if we do give them feelings?Henry Ford: “How are you gonna get those machines to pay your union dues? Trade union organizer: “Yeah, but how are you gonna get them to buy you cars?”
(Timestamped rci adam booth comment on this)
A recent argument against the marxist view of machinery (& its debunking): “The contribution of the machine to production is significantly greater than its depreciation”