the armed parade : robot, work, ideology

In our parts, the issue is not burning. High unemployment but limited (compared to other places) use of information technology and its derivatives in the secondary sector. Internationally, however, it is one of demagoguery’s favorites. Technological unemployment. Many publications and scientific findings, appearing with notable and increasing intensity in recent years, are waving a warning (that is, threatening) finger: “Robots threaten jobs”! Although such anxieties are not appearing for the first time in history in general—and specifically in the history of the capitalist mode of production—journalists and experts (economists, historians, entrepreneurs…) insist: “This time, things might evolve differently”: The ever more rapid development of artificial intelligence and automation – they say – makes computable (literally!) the likelihood of automation and replacement by information machines of an increasing number of job types and specialties, which may be impossible to replenish quickly enough with new ones.

What is it that could give a basis to the phrase “this time things might evolve differently”? What were the previous times? What happened then? To the extent that the “prophets” of the idea that some kind of modern machines (robots mainly) will reduce human labor appeal to, even if vaguely, some “other times” of the past, they should at least be honest with these “previous times.” They are not.
The contested, of course, is machines. “What they can do” and “what they cannot do.” Phrased this way, the questions contain a high degree of metaphysics. Machines cannot do anything more than what they were designed and built for. From an ideological perspective, however, what machines can do as an argument is entirely different from these very machines themselves!

Let us first take a look at a “previous time”. It is enlightening.

In a 1997 analysis titled “Why Machines Cannot Create Value,” George Caffentzis¹ recounts:

… The first element of the problem was the intense propaganda that industrial capitalists had launched against the law for the 10-hour working day, in the 1830s and 1840s [note: until the establishment of the 10-hour day as the maximum duration of the working day, it was… of unlimited duration] and later against the legalization of unions, in the 1850s and 1860s. In both these campaigns their secret weapon was the ability to make most of the exploited (and therefore most necessary for the existence of capitalism) feel superfluous. In both campaigns the “machine question” was central.
One of the most important intellectuals and spokesmen of capital in the first period was Andrew Ure… Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures [note: published in 1835] was a paean to the use of machines from the capitalists’ side, so as to overthrow, undermine and ultimately completely shatter workers’ resistance to capitalist command. Indeed, Ure seemed to celebrate the exploitation of science by capitalists, with the purpose of taming and, if necessary, reducing the number of workers. His book is full of stories showing how cooperation between bosses and engineers can result in the construction of machines that cast aside those craftsmen trying to impose themselves on their employers.
And as he triumphantly praises: “when capital enlists science and its services, the defiant hand of labor is always crushed and made obedient.” Ure was particularly proud of the story of the inventive engineer Mr. Roberts, who undertook the design and construction of an “automatic spinning machine” on the order of mill owners struck by a strike in Lancashire and Lanarkshire. Within a few months he managed to create:

“…. the Iron Man, as the artisans have named him, who sprang from the hands of the modern Prometheus with a command from Athena – a creation destined to restore the sovereignty of the industrial classes and to confirm Great Britain as the sovereign of the arts. [Author’s note: meaning industrial technical knowledge, inventions and applications in production]. The news about this Herculean miracle would spread terror among the workers. And so, before he could properly leave his cradle, so to speak, this mechanical Hercules suffocated the Lernaean Hydra of rebellion….”

With today’s technological data, someone would ironically smile at Ure’s hymns to a mechanical loom. He could even be accused of fetishism. Wrong approach! One must understand (or, at best, imagine) the machine and its hymns within the social and technological environment in which it was “mobilized,” as a formatting of the then highest possible technological and scientific knowledge. From this perspective, Ure’s “Iron Man” was the equivalent of what in recent decades has been called a robot. Not as technology; but as social meaning and impression. Ure, in other praises of his, had named such machines Androids; without being shocked: the issue was not the form (nor is it now!)—it was the function.

Moreover, Ure became famous and remained in history, but he was not alone. For example, 20 years before the publication of the Philosophy of the Industrial Workers, on November 29, 1814, The Times announced with great pride the publication of their first issue from an advanced printing machine. The hymn to it did not lack the words:

… It is a mechanical system completely organic … [which] surpasses all human forces in speed and accuracy. … A device that has the thought, the sense and the skill of an experienced worker…

In a celebratory tone reminiscent of Ure, but without the frontal attack on “disobedient labor,” the ode to machines was entirely dedicated to replacing human labor with much better results (qualitatively, economically, etc.). But was this “replacement,” here and there, in the early 19th century (or is it, in the early 21st century) that generalized tendency which would relegate “living” labor to the margins and, sooner or later, to its disappearance? Or was it (and is it) something entirely different?
George Caffentzis insists, and rightly so, on the ideological aspect of this comparison between “far superior mechanical work” and “inferior, unruly, human labor.” Continuing from the above excerpt, he notes:

… This image of Ure was a dominant feature of 19th-century capitalist ideology. For example, the great industrial exhibitions of 1851 and 1862 were not merely opportunities for intra-capitalist exchanges of information regarding the latest technological advances. These exhibitions were held at London’s Crystal Palace, which meant greater expenditure, with the purpose of displaying machines to the working class. These exhibitions were a kind of “armed parade,” the purpose of which was to deter enemy attack through a public display of power.
The success of those preventive demonstrations was such that the machine and its power literally became the expression of capital, in general. This was the message that the Crystal Palace exhibitions conveyed from London throughout Europe, and even further, to the streets of Petersburg…

Beyond its historical significance, this brief reminder of the “spirit of machines” in the 19th century reminds us that the distinction (and opposition?) between human labor and mechanical work (between living and dead labor according to Marx) is an old story. And not an innocent one. Whether at the beginning or at the end, this “armed parade” as Caffentzis calls it—that is, the demonstration of the capabilities of machines (of every era)—carries as a clear message that human labor is inferior. Although there is no machine, capable or incapable, stupid or “smart,” that is not a product of human labor. And although there is no machine whose maintenance does not also require human labor.

the new threat of machines

Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, is one of the many flag-bearers of the modern, digital/cybernetic/robotic “armed parade.” Speaking in November 2015 at a conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), he unfolded the basic outlines of the Technological Holocaust that confronts the modern working class, not only in England:

The machines of the new era will think and act, they will feel and examine in detail, they will adapt and execute.² Therefore, they will extend to a considerably broader part of the distribution of abilities, more than ever before. As robots expand their range of abilities, the trend of disappearance will become faster, wider, and deeper than ever before…

… A study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne attempts to quantify this disappearing trend, assigning probabilities to certain types of jobs that could be automated within the coming decades…
Using this methodology, the Bank conducted the same exercise for the United Kingdom, categorizing jobs according to their likelihood of being automated into three categories – high risk (automation probability greater than 66%), medium (33%-66%), and low (less than 33%)…
…Approximately one-third of jobs fall into each of the risk categories, with high-risk jobs including administrative, clerical, and production activities… For the UK, it appears that 15 million jobs could be threatened with automation. In the US, the corresponding figure would be 80 million.

…The probability [of automation] increases significantly as we move down the scale of specialization and wages. Those who are most at risk from automation tend, on average, to have lower wages. In other words, technology could act as an income tax for the unskilled. It could further widen income inequality.

I don’t want to make all this sound like an argument for despair… History has taught us that increasing real incomes led to salvation, giving a boost to the demand for new goods from new industries that needed new workers. In previous phases of technological growth, workers moved up the wage scale as they increased their specialization, and thus stayed one step ahead of the machine.

And some have claimed that this trend will repeat itself in the future. That people will adapt their abilities to activities that have a comparative advantage over machines. One source of such an advantage is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) – the mechanical brain – differs in several important ways from human intelligence.

… These differences become apparent in activities such as learning a language. In this case, tremendous leaps have been made by machines in the previous decade. Rapid learning for computers does not resemble the classic way a student learns. Instead, it arises by devouring an entire library with a digital eye, and then searching for patterns that correspond to the text and syntax. Language, paradoxically, has become a game with numbers instead of words.

…Even if this diagnosis is correct, a radical transformation in the nature of work may emerge along the way. We may already be seeing early signs of this in trends toward part-time employment, temporary contracts, and especially self-employment… 

…But as machines become smarter, it is more likely that the space remaining for exclusively human activities could shrink further. Machines already occupy activities that were unthinkable – beyond any imagination – a decade ago. The self-driving car was science fiction no more than ten years ago. Today it is a scientific fact. Algorithms learn quickly not only to process and solve problems, but to perceive, even to display emotions.

If all these visions are realized, no matter how futuristic such a thing may sound, the labor market trends of the past three centuries will be rapidly disrupted. If the option of higher specialization is no longer available, this increases the risk of large-scale unemployment or underemployment. The wage premium for those who will hold highly specialized positions could explode, further widening wage inequalities. And the share of labor could fall even more dramatically than in the past…

Andy Haldane (November 2015): “Labour’s Share” – http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2015/speech864.pdf

The threat that Haldane (and many others) keeps in his mouth comes from the depths of capitalist history: “technological unemployment” or/and “de-skilling”. It seems convincing at first glance: it appears as if both are already happening… But because experts (and prophets) do not want to push large segments of the primary populations into despair, perhaps even into a new Luddism³, sometimes they explicitly support and other times imply that there could be a solution. A different (and continuous) education…
But is this threat real? Is unemployment a natural consequence of the mass use of information/cybernetic/robotic machines? Is de-skilling the cause of wage undervaluation, or perhaps is the undervaluation of labor using “de-skilling” as an excuse?

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a Japanese professor at the University of Canberra (in Australia), wrote in 1997:

… The strongest example of recent rapid automation among the major industrial economies is the case of Japan. In 1978 there were approximately 3,000 robots in operation in Japan; by 1982 there were more than 19,000. That year a government survey of companies in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka concluded that 33.5% of industrial companies were already using robots and that an additional 19.5% planned to incorporate robots into production within the next three years. The use of other types of labor-replacing machinery, such as computers and numerically controlled equipment, is also expanding very rapidly in Japan.
But between the mid-1970s and 1982, total employed labor in Japan increased by 8% and in industry by 3% (although unemployment also rose from 1.9% to 2.4%); average individual working time in industry increased by 9 hours per month; and the profit rate of companies remained generally stable, ranging between 5% and 6%…

Cutting Edge – Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution.

Is it not paradoxical that in pioneering Japan, during the period referred to by Morris-Suzuki, robotization, although indeed replacing human labor in many cases, did not reduce but rather increased the “volume” of wage labor (both generally in Japanese capitalism and specifically within its industries), while also increasing average individual working time? To what might this “paradox” be attributed—paradoxical only in relation to the supposedly impending Armageddon of human labor being displaced by robots and computers—which, however, is not at all original in capitalist history? Ultimately: does technological unemployment really exist as a “fate” of transitional phases of changing capitalist models and new mechanization, or is it merely a partial and temporary outcome, affecting specific sectors and jobs, and not at all reflective of a general capitalist tendency? And furthermore: what is “de-skilling” as a cause of labor devaluation, that is, the reduction of wages? A technical issue? Or a clearly political matter?

Using the speech of the English banker, the same questions formulated differently: is the evolution of machines the real cause of the devaluation of labor? Or, even better: why does a chief banker addressing the confederation of British unions put machines and their evolution at the center in order to justify the devaluation of labor?

Here is a first serious indication that this particular employers’ representative (and many others, in the same or different positions) is engaging in strategic sleight of hand: Marx himself had to deal with the exact same “theorem” shortly after the middle of the 19th century. But back then, the unions didn’t go around wagging their fingers at bankers; in a way, they had the bankers’ silence on this matter! Thus, Marx had the opportunity, in a speech to the General Council of the IWMA (the first international organization of workers) in June 1865 (a speech later titled “Value, Price and Profit”), to demystify this specific threat-of-the-machines, showing the real way capitalism “operates.” We again quote from G. Caffentzis, with our own emphasis:

… What was happening with the substitutive character of machines versus labor and wages? Couldn’t the bosses direct their innovations so that machine construction would increase their profits by reducing the share of wages? If machines could produce value, then surely this would be the golden (for capital) but gloomy (for workers) path to salvation in accumulation.
But if machines do not create value, then another possibility emerges. Every time capitalists introduce mechanical equipment into production, as a response to workers’ struggles for wage increases and/or reduction of the working day, the average profit rate is threatened. This means that wage struggles intensify mechanization, which in turn causes a relative reduction in labor, in variable (and value-creating) capital. Thus, the immediate consequence of strikes and other forms of worker action may not permanently be wage increases, but incidentally strengthen capital’s tendency to reduce the average profit rate, while simultaneously reducing the (socially) necessary portion of the average working day. And the main way that the capitalist class as such can escape this deadly trap as it attempts the “leap forward” is a further expansion of the capitalist labor market network…

So, then, Mr. Karolos, from distant 1865, explains very well what was happening in technologically pioneering Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s… Whereas for Mr. Haldane and his ilk, the expansion of the capitalist labor market (that is, wage labor) simultaneously and parallel to the robotization of Japanese capitalism would be an annoying “paradox” that contradicts their eschatological prophecies. Or, perhaps, it reveals their deceit: that supposedly, living, human labor may not be necessary for profitability, it can even “disappear” while productivity and profits increase exclusively through machines… And that evolution resembles a field where capitalists cultivate machines and living labor, as it competes with them in ingenuity, risks being left behind!

What Mr. Karolos had explained (and essentially predicted) since 1865, and which is deeply disliked by those who propose fasting and prayer as the correct worker stance (against today’s technological restructuring), is, unfortunately for these latter individuals, a strong factual reality throughout all of capitalist history. A fact that may not be easily recognizable at the micro level, leading to the persuasive credibility of misleading rhetorics about the “end of work.” We quote, for example, from the moderate Manuel Castells:

The spread of information technology in factories, offices and services has revived a very old fear of workers: that they will be replaced by machines, remaining excluded from the productive logic that remains dominant in our social organization… Historical experience shows that as technological progress replaces labor with more efficient means of production, a continuous transition [of living labor] occurs from one type of activity to another. Thus, in Britain, between 1780 and 1988 the agricultural workforce was reduced by half in absolute numbers, while as a percentage of the total workforce it fell from 50% to 2.2%. Nevertheless, productivity per capita increased by a factor of 68 units and the increase in productivity allowed capital and labor to be invested in industry, and later in services, so that additional population could be employed.
The spectacular rate of technological change in the American economy during the 20th century also massively displaced labor from agriculture; but the number of total paid employment positions created in the US economy rose from about 27 million in 1900 to 124.5 million in 1994. From this perspective, most traditional industrial jobs will have the same fate as agricultural ones. But new jobs are already being created and will be created in high-tech industries and, more importantly, in “services”.
…
According to the 1994 White Paper (of the European Commission on growth, competitiveness and employment) between 1970 and 1992 the US economy grew in real terms by 70% and employment by 49%. The Japanese economy grew by 173% and employment there by 25%…

The transformation of work and employment: networkers, jobless and flextimers – edition of the Club of 21st Century Spies, 2003. It is a chapter from the book The Rise of The Network Society, which was published in 1996 by Blackwell editions.

In contrast, therefore, with the “gloomy” prophecies⁴, historical data show this: every wave of mechanization is accompanied by the expansion of wage labor and, therefore, the exploitation of human labor. And, furthermore, a very large part of this expanding “labor market” that accompanies waves of mechanization is underpaid to outright slave-like; with the argument that these are “unskilled” jobs. While this is utterly false!
What is happening;

Robots produce work; but they are not offered for surplus value extraction!

This happens with machines (of any kind): they consume energy and produce work… but mechanical work only has an etymological relationship with labor. Mechanical work is NOT equivalent to value; and, consequently, it does not produce surplus value even if the machine’s operating time is increased. And since it does NOT produce surplus value, it cannot generate profit in the capitalist sense either.

The examples are numerous and right next to us. Let’s take the household washing machine. It consumes energy and produces work (the rotation of the drum) and heat. In what sense does this work have (social) significance? In a specific, very strict, and, above all, mediated way through human activities: that it frees up time from hand-washing, so that this human time can be allocated elsewhere. To (waged) labor, for example, or to consumption. If the owner of the washing machine, instead of washing by hand, sits for two hours and watches their washing machine, there isn’t even the (social) significance of the work of that particular machine. However, it would be absolutely wrong (a fallacy) to claim that the household washing machine “produces value” during the two hours of a wash cycle. No one becomes richer by having their washing machine “work” 24 hours a day – something that should happen if the mechanical work (of the washing machine) produced value! No. The washing machine will produce work (rotations) and heat 24 hours a day; but no value.

The household refrigerator also produces work (cooling) and heat. On a 24-hour basis, in fact. In what sense does the work of the refrigerator have (social) significance? In a specific, very strict and, above all, mediated by human activities: that it frees up time from the daily search for food, or food raw materials, or cooking. And again, this freed-up time constitutes “value” only if it is allocated elsewhere. An empty refrigerator (for example during holidays) continues to produce work (cooling) and heat on a 24-hour basis; but no value.

One machine (the refrigerator), which operates 24 hours a day, does not produce “greater value” than another machine (the washing machine) that operates only 2 hours every second, third, or fourth day! (Quite the opposite, a person who works 10 hours a day produces five times the value compared to working at the same rate for only 2 hours…) Both machines consume energy and produce work and heat. From the perspective of value, however, both produce zero! The valuation of their work is social, directly linked to the economy of human time, human labor, human leisure/consumption, and human rest (on behalf of labor and consumption according to dominant standards). It is a retrospective and conditional valuation; certainly not inherent, not structural to the mechanical work itself.⁵

The installation of a machine (a robot) in a production position that was previously done by live labor, involves on the part of the employer an investment (sometimes high) in fixed capital. To the extent that such installations are made systematically, they drastically change what Mr. Marx had called the organic composition of capital; the ratio, as we might say, between the employer’s expenses for the purchase, operation and maintenance of machines in relation to his expenses for hiring human labor (wages) and supervising it.

Because what appears at the end of each production cycle as “profit” for the employer is the realization of the surplus value that was extracted from living labor (through the sale of goods, whether products or services, and their conversion back into money) minus expenses, the change in the organic composition towards increased machine expenses reduces the profit rate. For a significant period of time, the installation of machines leads to a declining trend in the profit rate, since it must be taken into account that mechanically produced goods will be sold at prices slightly (or significantly) lower than the same goods that would continue to be produced elsewhere with human labor, in order to gain larger market shares.

This was analyzed by Mr. Karl in 1865: generalized mechanization (in each of its major waves) leads to a generalized fall in profit rates. To avoid such an outcome, highly mechanized sectors must “appropriate” surplus value from those sectors with relatively low mechanization. This happens through various means which we cannot explain here; we would stray from our topic. However, it is absolutely certain: surplus value “circulates” throughout the entirety of capitalist production and is shared among a large number of capitalists, starting from the “bottom” of the labor hierarchy—that is, where labor is brutally undervalued—and moving upward.

This is how it happens: in phases of relatively generalized mechanization of certain sectors, waged labor expands into old or new sectors, and indeed into sectors that aggressively exploit living labor above all. Thus, the nuclear reactor (high concentration of fixed capital/machines) and its highly paid technicians and operators coexist, in the same social system, at the same time, with the expanding sea of low-paid or poorly paid saleswomen in every kind of shop. Likewise, the robotic factory and its relatively highly paid programmers/operators coexist, in the same social system and at the same time, with the sea of part-timers, the poorly paid in services, the extorted overtime in sectors of “low organic composition” production; even with open labor in mines of strategic raw materials in Africa or in the fields of southern Europe.

These two extremes of the capitalist chain and the transfer of surplus value segments are inseparable!!! The more intense the investment of fixed capital (expensive machines) on one side, the more intense and widespread the labor intensity is on the other, further away, elsewhere. It cannot happen differently. That’s why universal robotization of the entire capitalist production is impossible! Not because it is technically unfeasible. But because it would have the same result as “Midas’ touch”: it would reduce the profit rate so much that it would make “capitalist investments” generally unprofitable (for the bosses)…

let’s say… but don’t robots replace human labor?
(the re-construction of the “unskilled”)

Surely yes. Here and there. At the same time, wage labor is expanding even further, and (not at all paradoxically) in cheap forms, that is, wild and aggressively undervalued forms.

Let us take, as an example, not robots but computers; information machines. What kind of living labor posts are mechanized/automated by them? Here things seem somewhat unclear. If a post includes only “routine activities” that can be directly automated, then its full automation arises, and the replacement of the worker by the machine. Otherwise, if only a part of the duties—”activities”—can be directly automated, the transformation of the post arises, with new duties mainly concerning the handling of the machine. If the new handling actions and/or the surrounding environment can be adapted and analyzed step-by-step in order to lead to a new series of automations, then a series of transformations arises, whereby living labor is gradually incorporated into the machine. This is not, of course, some natural evolution of things. Control, supervision, and analysis of the knowledge and movements of a machine operator or of a semi-automatic system on the production line are the key responsibilities of production supervisors, managers, and directors. Any automations that are imposed in practice are those that are necessary, feasible, and at the same time cost-beneficial to implement.

In this way, as an expanding piece of knowledge and/or physical activity is incorporated into the machine, living labor appears to be marginalized and to revolve like an ignorant “beggar” around the intelligence of machines. Speaking in the bosses’ terms: labor becomes de-skilled. That is; it is undervalued. If all this is true, then in the case of automation, it does not necessarily and solely result in some “disappearance” of certain “middle-skilled” forms of labor. At the same time, many forms of labor, as they gradually become automated, are shifted toward the spectrum of “manual” jobs of “low skill,” and therefore of lower wages. Therefore, this “disappearance” of “middle-skilled” labor occurs to some extent due to the replacement of labor by machines. But much more so, there has been a gradual disappearance of “middle-range” wages since the 1970s. In this case, the characterization of the “disappearing” labor as “middle-skilled” has mainly to do with the fact that more jobs were relatively well-paid, both in factories and in services, from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s. Due to labor competition.

However, the classification in terms of “specialization” is misleading! In what sense is the cleaner “unskilled”? A “hyper-specialized” Google manager is unlikely to know how to clean his own house. And it is certain that he is unable to work even basically “productively” for a day in a car wash. Obviously, he would be kicked out with kicks, as useless, if he went to work in the warehouse of a supermarket or on a fishing boat.

What happened from the early 1980s onwards is that, taking advantage of the gradual introduction of new machines (into the organization of labor), the bosses demolished the entire structure of “specializations” and corresponding “wage stratification” that had been built since the end of World War II and beyond, making sure to retain as few as possible positions for “high-paid” workers (labeling them as “specialized”) while generalizing the sea of “low-paid” workers (labeling them as “unskilled” or “low-skilled”). It was not, therefore, an inevitable development due to technical changes; but rather a political, that is, a “warlike” response by the bosses to the widespread workers’ resistance of the 1960s and 1970s.

This “escapes” even from the mouth of Mr. Haldane, in the speech we referred to earlier:

…There is evidence that in recent years, in a number of countries, the share of labor [i.e.: the percentage of total wages relative to total national income] has shown a decline over the past decades…
…In a number of countries there is evidence that real wages do not follow productivity growth… If real wages in the US had followed productivity from 1970 until today, the average worker would be earning 40% more than now. If wages in the UK had followed productivity since 1990, the average worker today would be earning 20% more.

However, if “real wages have NOT followed the increase in labor productivity” for 40 years now, this “delay” is NOT due to the new machines and their magical or smart capabilities!!! It is entirely and absolutely due to the ideological, political, and psychological mechanisms and blackmail that employers exploit. Having so far killed workers’ refusal to comply.

It is logical and easily understandable. If any forms of wage labor were paid based on the social needs of today’s citizens and not based on some arbitrary stratification by criteria of “specialization,” then it would be, from a wage perspective, irrelevant to characterize a job as “unskilled”! The garbage collector is socially just as necessary (if not more so) as the neuroscientist or the astrophysicist. However, the construction (and constant reconstruction) of a hierarchy of “specialties,” which necessarily requires a narrow, highly paid apex and a broad base of undervalued human labor, is a policy of class warfare (on the part of the bosses), which could be “supported” as much by robots and typewriters as by diplomas and degrees; as much by employer preferences as by the greenhouse effect or migration; by whatever, ultimately, the bosses and their demagogues choose to exploit.

However, this pyramid, which is by no means random, unmistakably demonstrates the fundamental point of this reference here: namely, that the informatization and robotization of various areas of manual/intellectual labor imposes the construction and control of a vast sea of poor workers. It is not the new machines themselves that do this (they do other things; certainly not this!). It is their capitalist exploitation.

Because, otherwise, instead of hearing the (for our obedience) threat that robots will drive humans out of jobs, we would hear this: fortunately, thanks to robots, the daily human working time will drop to half, 3 or 4 hours a day, and at the same time lower wages will increase significantly!!! A beautiful future…

But no… The future is bleak, so better to sit wisely, each in his own cave… Did the owners of the large American fast-food chains not just last year threaten their striking workers demanding a doubling of the minimum wage, from $7.25 to $15? That they will fire them and replace them with robots?

Rorre Margorp & Ziggy Stardust
cyborg #08 – 02/2016

1. Original English title: Why machines cannot create value· or, Marx’s theory of machines. Published in a collection of texts with the general title Cutting Edge – Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution, by Verso editions, in 1997, simultaneously in London and New York, under the supervision of Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael Stack.
   In Greek it was published by “antischool” editions in May 1998. ↩︎
2. The exact same words as the Times’ editorial, 200 years ago… ↩︎
3. The Luddites were a movement of textile workers, in England, in the early 19th century. They destroyed mechanical looms of various owners because they believed that the machines would drive them from their jobs. The movement evolved into an extensive uprising against machines from 1811 to 1816, and was eventually brutally and bloodily suppressed with military violence. ↩︎
4. For example, former American president Obama, in his farewell speech in Chicago, did not fail to mention the dark threat of machines. The relevant reference was published in the New York Times on January 12, 2017, under the title “A Darker Theme in Obama’s Farewell: Automation Can Divide Us.” The article was republished translated into Greek by Kathimerini on January 28, 2017, with the title “Robots threaten employment.” ↩︎
5. With the concept of value in (capitalist) political economy, misunderstandings can easily arise due to ignorance. We do not mean it either as “moral value” or as “emotional value”. But with the two concepts given by Marx, use value or/and exchange value. ↩︎