By the way, Marx literally predicted wages stagnating even as production increases. I’ve also added some other benchmarks to help gauge where earners would stand given how much they currently earn.
25k in 2020-> 57k
35k in 2020-> 80k
45k in 2020-> 103k
50k in 2020-> 108k
75k in 2020-> 172k
100k in 2020-> 229k
Just when I was like “maybe I’ll try today at work”
I was a barista for over a decade and I’ve always wondered “What if I just put 50% of the money in my pocket?”
Can’t ring up the item of you do that, or at least only ring up half the items
Imagine working for THREE months a year and being able to afford a place to live or a semester of college tuition
Automation is great for those who own it. That’s why automation is such a focus for giant corporations right now. They want to remove power from the hands of the workers
Automation usually means an increase in productivity so now you can produce the same quantum of commodities with less manhours going into them. So their value is less then before, but because your competiton has not become more productive it sells pretty much for the same price as before and therefore you make an extra profit. That is the classic motiv for automation. Removing power from the workers is usually not the reason unless maybe in full employment. Unions have overall lost all over north America and Europe in the last decades. Within international competition nationally organized labour doesn’t hold that much power.
I both love and hate reading that kind of stuff. On one hand, the right idea is there - advances in automation even on basic levels like those found in the 18-1900’s can absolutely lead to those benefits for people. But because of reasons it hasn’t for the vast majority of us. so we’re here all these years later with working people not seeing those benefits and it’s infuriating that things which should help humanity as a whole are still only helping a small number of people on top
I have literally no idea but I know somebody who is smart out there will tell us
Uhh to be really quick that’s when the bottom fell out of the economic model the US was doing. A triple whacking of capital accumulation in Europe and Asia reducing profitability of us corporations (this buildup was required to buffer against the SU, so it’s an internal contradiction), the oil shock from opec ( blowback from imperial adventurism to maintain profitability ), and a wage-inflation spiral from full employment hitting against that reduced profitability ( again another internal contradiction ), these three collapsed the previous economic model. Nixon swaps the US over to completely greenbacks and we begin the process of totalizing financialization and economic auto-cannabalism. There’s a lot more to it but I’m on my lunch break.
Uhh to be really quick that’s when the bottom fell out of the economic model the US was doing. A triple whacking of capital accumulation in Europe and Asia reducing profitability of us corporations (this buildup was required to buffer against the SU, so it’s an internal contradiction), the oil shock from opec ( blowback from imperial adventurism to maintain profitability ), and a wage-inflation spiral from full employment hitting against that reduced profitability ( again another internal contradiction ), these three collapsed the previous economic model. Nixon swaps the US over to completely greenbacks and we begin the process of totalizing financialization and economic auto-cannabalism. There’s a lot more to it but I’m on my lunch break.
The oil price shock is what triggered the era of neoliberalism in order to prevent that from ever happening again. The end of the gold standard also played a role.
What @truth said below is a much more elaborate comment than mine and is very accurate.
It’s that the oil price shocks shook the existing system from a profitability and inflationary standpoint and in order to bring in higher levels of growth increased globalization became necessary. Part of that involved things like ending the gold standard, and pushing for neoliberalism which expanded economies of scale that benefited large enterprises over small ones. The end of small business that slowly followed this is really what resulted in the change in productivity wage curve as the market for hiring employees became looser.
