The “robots will replace slave work if the slaves were to be paid accordingly” shit is so infuriating at so many fucking levels and I don’t even read theory.
This situation really is a great example of how much open contempt capitalists have for workers. “We won’t raise wages, we won’t automate, we want the government to pressure people to accept the wages we’re offering. This is the free market to me.”
They’ve figured they can just wait for the next economic crisis instead of raising wages because they know the government will just bail them out and then go back to cracking the whip over the workers when it’s over
We literally watched this happen last year
It really is deeply ironic that the neoliberal consensus is that a social safety net for individuals is some combination of too expensive, difficult, and inefficient, while at the same time propping up businesses during economic downturns on the basis that it would cause too many people to lose their jobs. Either let the market decide what’s an efficient capital distribution, or stop pretending and just guarantee people a standard of living. That’s essentially what’s happening anyway, it’s just expensive, difficult, and inefficient.
The hypocrites literally always do Keynesianism when the economy goes into crisis despite railing against it at all times. When the time comes they don’t necessarily need to keep doing Keynesianism they launch a propaganda offensive against Keynesianism hoping no one notices.
That technically isn’t the free market just as the army and police cracking down on unions isn’t a free market. It’s what I refer to as a fuck you market
From a theoretical standpoint of course they won’t do this because investing into constant fixed capital causes the rate of profit to fall over time, they maintain their profit margins by exploiting variable capital (labor-power) to the highest extent possible until it becomes advantageous to cut variable capital expenses while undercutting rival capitalists by investing in new developments in constant capital; specifically that which allows them to expand production, while cutting labor costs, while still maintaining a relatively high rate of exploitation of variable capital
For example, it is cheaper for a McDonald’s franchise to employ 20 people for $8/hr than invest in machines that replace 12 of them, the rise in production is marginal because the capital must be valorized by the sale of the commodities, so if you increase production but consumption remains stagnant it’s not worth it. But if wages rise to, say, $15/hr yes it’s totally worth investing in the machines to cut labor costs.
Profit will always be (on average, outside of fraud and opportunism) defined by productivity minus wages. Machinery is just the method used to increase productivity.
Profit is derived from exploitation of human labor-power. Machinery does not produce value, it merely transfers a portion of the labor-power which it embodies into its output. Investment of capital into machinery increases the cost of maintaining it, and more importantly, replacing it later on when it depreciates (transfers the overwhelming majority of embodied labor-power into outputs) while technology has developed. Cutting exploitation of labor-power in favor of automation thus drives down profit margins. Not only does it necessitate a future capital investment or creative destruction at a later date, and fix dead capital in a specific geographic location for a long period of time (thus rendering the capitalist dependent on geographic conditions of, say, wages), the temporary undercutting of rival capitalists with new technology and higher productivity drives down the price of the produced commodity. The capitalist is therefore getting a smaller return on a larger quantity of commodities. While this allows a temporary increase in market share, it causes the situation of the market to change, which can only be reversed in certain specific ways which mostly require the destruction of constant fixed capital.
To add to that last part, NATO is basically the “destruction of constant fixed capital” part of financial imperialism. Laying waste to developed nations is more profitable then dealing with organized, industrial resistance.
It’s all largely hypothetical technology anyway. If your job can be automated, they will do it as soon as practical and it’s not going to matter whether you make $7 and hour or $15 because if your job could be automated, you’d just be changing the return on investment rate slightly.
:curious-marx:
