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As this brilliantly referenced article argues, one of the most fundamental changes that is taking place in the economy is the gradual reduction in productive activity as a proportion of what we call 'work'. As first agriculture, and now industry, becomes automated, less and less people are required to produce the goods which support the subsistence of the population. This paradox is not a widely discussed phenomenon, probably because it raises tough questions about what sort of economy we need or want.
The writer, Bob Black, is something of a provocateur since he lumps conservatives, Marxists, anarchists and feminists together as conspiring to keep us working to the grave, albeit for different classes of boss. Beneath the rhetoric, though, he has a serious point to make. Perhaps the future will see humans mainly engaged in 'play' (or art or creative work) as he claims, or engaged in a gift economy as advocated by Charles Eisenstein, Nipun Mehta and many feminists. Fundamentally the gift economy involves giving without expecting anything in return - the latter is called exchange and is fundamental to capitalism. The gift economy is what humans used for millennia, and is typical of nomadic and subsistence societies. I was in France on holiday recently and noticed how the French, rather like the British, are not very good at interacting with children. This contrasts with the way people in Asian societies and in Latin America are very receptive to the presence of children. The gift economy is rather like what happens in a family which is supportive without necessarily expecting anything in return. This is most obvious in the case of parents and their children. It struck me that in societies that have not been thoroughly indoctrinated in capitalism, nurture is a more natural reaction, as is giving and hospitality. This applies to children and strangers -as I have witnessed in my travels around the world. In countries with a capitalist or imperialist tradition, such as France and the UK, nurture has been bred out of us, hence the awkward response to other people's children. In other cultures children are invariably received with joy by both sexes and all ages - I saw this in Vietnam and the Middle East, and Ireland.
Capitalism is defined by scarcity, wage labour, the capital (financial) market, and private property. The difficulty we are facing now is that by virtue of rising productivity in sectors such as agriculture and industry, we have created abundance and an ever increasing surplus of necessary labour. Wage labour works in an economy based on scarcity but not in one in which abundance/high productivity is the norm. Of course, we have created all kinds of new 'jobs' to keep people busy appropriating surplus for their companies, but if you examine what those jobs entail, you will see that they only serve the superstructure of capitalism. Marketing, administration, communication, security etc. These do not directly supply the things we need. Rather, they support the social structure of the existing private property and consumption based society. They are not fundamentally 'useful' - as in providing things that we can use.
This problem will not go away, even if the powers that be can get us out of this crisis. There are useful things that people can do such as provide health, education, social services, the arts - all of them in their own way acts of human giving rather than production. But as long as we are caught in the scarcity-exchange-wage-monetisation paradigm, the dysfunction of continuing with the capitalist system will become more and more obvious, especially in advanced economies. The transition will take decades, even centuries. After all, the first shareholding companies were developed over 400 years ago in Holland and England for international trade. Capitalism is still relatively young and yet we still have remnants of feudalism 400 years later.
At the level of capital, in its most productive phase, capital is invested in productive activity including commercial agriculture and new technology goods. In the recent neoliberal phase more and more capital is concentrated in rent seeking - this is both in the financial and non-financial sector. Essentially large companies take a rent from the provision of products such as energy, housing, and loan capital. This is essentially the extraction of value from the economy, rather than the creation of value. It signifies stagnation and crisis. Also, as manufacturing is automated, there is less surplus value to be taken and so capital must look elsewhere for profit. This not only leads to financialisation of capital, as witnessed prior to the 2008 crash in western markets. It also presents a problem for traditional marxists, in that as industrial capital declines, so does the relative weight of the traditional working class. Most people end up in the informal sector or in 'middle class' jobs. Thus we see in recent unrest and revolutions, the preponderance of middle class and student agitation, notwithstanding a role for working class protest in Europe and elsewhere against austerity. However this hardly means the 'end' of the working class - that class has never been larger, and is concentrated in developing countries, especially Asia.
Looking to the future, private personal property may survive in a post work economy, as against corporate property which should take on new social forms. As for wage labour, it should decline over time as the main form of economic activity and will go the way of serfdom and slavery. All those who no longer work for a fixed number of hours a week for a corporate entity are already on their way to some kind of freedom.
As this brilliantly referenced article argues, one of the most fundamental changes that is taking place in the economy is the gradual reduction in productive activity as a proportion of what we call 'work'. As first agriculture, and now industry, becomes automated, less and less people are required to produce the goods which support the subsistence of the population. This paradox is not a widely discussed phenomenon, probably because it raises tough questions about what sort of economy we need or want.
The writer, Bob Black, is something of a provocateur since he lumps conservatives, Marxists, anarchists and feminists together as conspiring to keep us working to the grave, albeit for different classes of boss. Beneath the rhetoric, though, he has a serious point to make. Perhaps the future will see humans mainly engaged in 'play' (or art or creative work) as he claims, or engaged in a gift economy as advocated by Charles Eisenstein, Nipun Mehta and many feminists. Fundamentally the gift economy involves giving without expecting anything in return - the latter is called exchange and is fundamental to capitalism. The gift economy is what humans used for millennia, and is typical of nomadic and subsistence societies. I was in France on holiday recently and noticed how the French, rather like the British, are not very good at interacting with children. This contrasts with the way people in Asian societies and in Latin America are very receptive to the presence of children. The gift economy is rather like what happens in a family which is supportive without necessarily expecting anything in return. This is most obvious in the case of parents and their children. It struck me that in societies that have not been thoroughly indoctrinated in capitalism, nurture is a more natural reaction, as is giving and hospitality. This applies to children and strangers -as I have witnessed in my travels around the world. In countries with a capitalist or imperialist tradition, such as France and the UK, nurture has been bred out of us, hence the awkward response to other people's children. In other cultures children are invariably received with joy by both sexes and all ages - I saw this in Vietnam and the Middle East, and Ireland.
Capitalism is defined by scarcity, wage labour, the capital (financial) market, and private property. The difficulty we are facing now is that by virtue of rising productivity in sectors such as agriculture and industry, we have created abundance and an ever increasing surplus of necessary labour. Wage labour works in an economy based on scarcity but not in one in which abundance/high productivity is the norm. Of course, we have created all kinds of new 'jobs' to keep people busy appropriating surplus for their companies, but if you examine what those jobs entail, you will see that they only serve the superstructure of capitalism. Marketing, administration, communication, security etc. These do not directly supply the things we need. Rather, they support the social structure of the existing private property and consumption based society. They are not fundamentally 'useful' - as in providing things that we can use.
This problem will not go away, even if the powers that be can get us out of this crisis. There are useful things that people can do such as provide health, education, social services, the arts - all of them in their own way acts of human giving rather than production. But as long as we are caught in the scarcity-exchange-wage-monetisation paradigm, the dysfunction of continuing with the capitalist system will become more and more obvious, especially in advanced economies. The transition will take decades, even centuries. After all, the first shareholding companies were developed over 400 years ago in Holland and England for international trade. Capitalism is still relatively young and yet we still have remnants of feudalism 400 years later.
At the level of capital, in its most productive phase, capital is invested in productive activity including commercial agriculture and new technology goods. In the recent neoliberal phase more and more capital is concentrated in rent seeking - this is both in the financial and non-financial sector. Essentially large companies take a rent from the provision of products such as energy, housing, and loan capital. This is essentially the extraction of value from the economy, rather than the creation of value. It signifies stagnation and crisis. Also, as manufacturing is automated, there is less surplus value to be taken and so capital must look elsewhere for profit. This not only leads to financialisation of capital, as witnessed prior to the 2008 crash in western markets. It also presents a problem for traditional marxists, in that as industrial capital declines, so does the relative weight of the traditional working class. Most people end up in the informal sector or in 'middle class' jobs. Thus we see in recent unrest and revolutions, the preponderance of middle class and student agitation, notwithstanding a role for working class protest in Europe and elsewhere against austerity. However this hardly means the 'end' of the working class - that class has never been larger, and is concentrated in developing countries, especially Asia.
Looking to the future, private personal property may survive in a post work economy, as against corporate property which should take on new social forms. As for wage labour, it should decline over time as the main form of economic activity and will go the way of serfdom and slavery. All those who no longer work for a fixed number of hours a week for a corporate entity are already on their way to some kind of freedom.
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