The Terminatrix from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Don’t believe the hype: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not help us in the slightest until there is a major reform of the economy. All it will do under capitalism is create widespread poverty and misery.
AI replaces human workers with bots. I know people doing highly skilled jobs including teaching English as a foreign language, who have been thrown out of work – replaced by machines who are held to do the job more efficiently and are cheaper for bosses to deploy.
The replacement of workers by machines is nothing new. The philosopher Karl Marx wrote in 1844 that “capital replaces labour with machines, and the rest of the workers it converts into machines.” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Essay on Estranged Labour). Capitalist ideologues call this “progress” because sometimes the unemployed workers can find new gainful employment, they believe. But despite odd contrary examples, the new jobs employed after a machine has replaced you have tended to be more mundane and overly-specialised – pushing a button for a living, and at a lower rate of pay relative to the amount of profit that has been produced. Capitalism therefore has always had an in-built tendency to widening social inequality.
Whilst not strictly a new thing, the tendency to displace workers through AI is new in that it is much more extreme with wide negative ramifications: 1) It will trash the economy creating widespread poverty 2) It will deepen the ecological crisis.
So, regarding (1), Marx observed that ‘value’, i.e. ‘economic value’, including the value embodied in profit, is derived from labour, and pretty much exclusively from labour. Machines do not create profit, though they can be useful aids in a different form of society. But the capitalist eyes his balance sheet and sees one of his biggest costs is labour. The capitalist has thus always sought to replace the worker with a machine who doesn’t have a family to feed or aspirations to fulfil. Yet, in the long run, sacking the workforce will cause his rate of profit to fall, because there is little new living labour generating profit. The machines are only transferring their own cost-price into the value of the commodities they produce, but this cannot generate much profit, unless the capitalist overprices that which he sells (though that tends not to be a durable strategy in the long run). Therefore, the upshot of an over-reliance on machinery will lead to economic collapse because the rate of profit dictates how much capital can re-invest in production, which lays behind any sense society might one day become a dynamic entity. The impressive feat of having created artificial intelligence will lead to scarcity and want. Progress under capitalism is a great big myth.
Regarding (2), creating all these machines has a big carbon footprint, not only in their manufacture, but also the power they need to use. An AI revolution is incompatible with United Nation’s obligations to work towards “Net Zero” which requires a 60% reduction in humanity’s current carbon footprint, not its expansion. In the context of an economic dereliction, messing with the climate in this way is doubly dangerous.
This blogger does not believe AI will ‘turn on us’, i.e., go malevolent. I do not believe the machines have independent interests and would therefore turn on humanity. Rather the problem is something we are doing to ourselves – the capitalist’s quest for a quick short-term profit has economic repercussions which will also have a negative environmental impact. So, I’m with the Luddites. Now, listen to this brilliant piece of music!
In his analysis of the commodity (Capital: Volume One, Chapter One), Karl Marx distinguishes two different aspects to the commodity. It has both a use-value and an exchange value. Its ‘use-value’ simply means the commodity is prized for its capacity to satisfy a particular human want. It is valued in this sense because of its usefulness. But commodities are also prized in another way as well – they can be exchanged for any other commodity on the basis they share, in varying degrees, different quantities of exchange-value. So, to take an example where the quantities of exchange value broadly match, an apple can be exchanged for a pencil or a packet of cigarette rolling papers.
The reason why this has emancipatory implications lies in considering what happens if you need that pencil or those cigarette rolling papers, but you do not posess the apple in the first place. Obviously then, you go without. If you cannot afford something, you do not get it. Therefore, the human freedom is, in some sense, curtailed. The product may exist, but you do not get it unless you have an equivalent amount of exchange-value with which to obtain it, usually a quantity of money. So, for example, supermarkets throw away around a third of their quickly-perishable foodstuffs whilst the United Nations estimates 10% of the world population is hungry or malnourished. This is not a moralistic criticism: the supermarket management, now matter how benign they may be, really cannot just give away that food because then everyone would be demanding it for free, in which case they would not be in business. The criticism is levelled at the law of value which governs all economic transactions in a capitalist society. This economic law is inhibiting freedom.
What is worse, as market conditions deteriorate, wages have less purchasing power. So, the level of unfreedom increases in capitalism – ‘progress’ is very mixed, to say the least.
To change the law of value, society would need to be producing directly to meet the needs of the individual consumer, rather than producing goods for sale. The only way this can be done is via the mediation of a social plan. Using powerful online technologies, society could adapt its production to what is reasonably requested, and distribute the common bounty without the need for money, or any other token of exchange-value. It is only in this way, humanity will become largely free and happy.
It used to be imperialism. Marxists worried that the rise of Donald Trump to power would unleash a massive new imperialism including nuclear war. Yet the world has no stomach for that kind of thing nowadays (thank God). Then Austerity 2.0 was launched with an attempt at “going green” with Greta Thunberg as its figurehead. But ordinary people were reluctant to give up half-decent lifestyles they thought they were entitled to, after a hard day’s grind. Environmentalism didn’t work for the capitalist class. But then, hurrah hurrah! Something new came along, and every single capitalist class in every country has pounced on it with relish: Coronavirus.
Through Corona, all the ingredients are there for capitalism to make a profit during slump conditions, following unprecedented falls in their rate of profit. Through Corona, you have (i) a cheapened labour force – people are now desperate to work even for crumbs to avoid the prospect of homelessness that the Government is not-so-subtly threatening them with. Today, the UK Government even demanded 250,000 out-of-work people, out-of-work caused by their shutting down of many economic sectors – do volunteering for our ‘beleaguered’ NHS. These new volunteers, unskilled in any medicine, would doubtless be used to do the cleaning and cooking terrible food, admin, and bureaucracy. The thing about volunteering is that it is unpaid. In other words, it is cheapened-down labour to the point of classical slavery.
ii) Cheaper Raw Materials. With the cessation of modern production (e.g. factories, transport, metals), worldwide governmental policies have completely devalued the raw materials that go into production. Therefore, any new raw material is bound to be cheaper. Thus, for example, petrol at the local garage is now 20p cheaper per litre than it was two weeks ago. People, ordered by text message, to stay at home, hardly need petrol, so it has slumped in price. But this is a big boon for the remaining companies. One may ask if Western and other leading economies have so decimated production, why are they focussing on the lesser remaining companies such as pharmaceuticals, supermarkets, and healthcare like the NHS that cannot generate wealth in such staggering ways as existed in prior history. The answer is that investors have realised that traditional manufacture no longer returns a decent rate of profit. In order to make any rate of profit at all, they are hinging themselves on companies with a lower organic composition of capital, that is to say, the new favoured companies are more labour-intensive, with a lower technological base. They are also scarcer of labour, hence you find the hospitality industry shutting down – off-licenses good, pubs bad, because the latter relies on service-sector labour which costs a bit and doesn’t return much.
iii) New Markets. Particularly through the decimation of the hospitality sector (pubs, cafes, restaurants, hotels), travel abroad, and the general banning of going out per-se, elites have created a literally captive market. This market, whilst it has little money for nice things, has some expenditure power for supermarkets and online news sites and media entertainment. So, there will be more expenditure on these things (that, as aforementioned, take a lower organic composition of capital to create). Avoiding pubs, restaurants, cafes, hotels, puts the money into different pockets, for sure, but when those pockets have done less to deserve the cash, it creates a higher rate of profit for eager investors.
The newly emerging Corona Capitalism will be a hellish place to live. There will be little culture, no socialising, and only mundane jobs, if there are jobs at all, rather than perhaps, all-round slavery with Statutory Sick Pay your only reward.
All this over some curious virus that kills less than flu annually, and also leads to symptoms milder than the flu for most people. Coronavirus could have been coped with sensibly. Corona Capitalism is more likely to evoke The Furies.
The social panic attack regarding Corona virus was bad enough when it started at the beginning of the year. China was placing large parts of its territory under lockdown. As the virus spread and time went on, Italy is now on “Total Lockdown” with no outside travel permitted, even to the gym, unless you have ‘permission’. Now, the USA has banned all travel from 26 European countries as well as Asian and others, many countries have banned assemblies of over 500 people, stock markets are Crashing like a palace of ice under the Sun of investor’s newfound worries over the sensibility of relying on cheap debt.
In the UK, school trips abroad have been banned even though kids would tend to prove the most resilient against the virus, and the government, following a recommendation from the Chief Medical Officer, has decreed Thou Shalt Not Go To The Doctor for ANY fever or persistent cough, (even non-Corona related), which is likely to lead to thousands of non-Corona deaths, and therefore is worse than Corona itself.
Let’s be clear: Corona is a slight problem. It can be severe, even fatal, in the elderly where they already have underlying health problems. Corona can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. In response to this threat, an intelligent solution might be to make hand gels and other anti-bacterial measures freely and readily available. These things would be simple, effective, wouldn’t break the bank, and would not harm, like the restrictions being imposed upon liberty that the panicky-response is otherwise taking.
Meanwhile, if you are not in an at-risk group, Corona hardly presents a threat at all. Symptoms are like a mild flu and can be mitigated with normal anti-flu medicines until the body has healed itself. It’s awkward to blame the general public for panicking given the whole thing emerges from the political class in search of a reason why they lead, and egged on by media who intensify social fears not to sell papers (they hardly do), but because it is in their nature to reflect society at any time, it just happens now that society is in a mental freefall.
Over 4,000 people worldwide have died from Corona (only in a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s back way), and doubtless more will follow. My own speculation is that the peak will be about 1m before new tweaked anti-virals and a vaccine is developed. Yet that solution could be made more distant in a weakened economy where there becomes less money to invest in the necessary science.
It is important to keep level headed, so we can rationally restrain the authoritarian tendencies of government in these circumstances. For that reason, it is also important to critique hogwash and balderdash explanations for the problem. In a way that makes me itchy about my political sympathy with Marxism, the German magazine Marx21, has published an interview with Rob Wallace who is supposed to be an expert on answering concerns about Corona and explaining from whence it came.
Billed as an “Evolutionary Biologist”, it doesn’t seem that Wallace has many qualifications, else he’d be advertised as a “Dr” or what-not. Similarly I have a GCSE in French, though my lingua francaise is pretty merde. Wallace’s arguments echo much I have heard elsewhere, which is really a hatred of mass production.
Thus Wallace blames ‘agribusiness’ on the start of the pandemic, saying it is when multinational corporations invade other people’s countries and steal their land, and deforest it, that virus is unleashed. One difficulty with this thesis is that the pandemic broke out in Wuhan, China, which has suffered no foreign invasion! Nevertheless, Wallace is convinced whatever business “did it”, has put “profit before safety”, even claiming “agribusiness is so focused on profits that selecting for a virus that might kill a billion people is treated as a worthy risk”.
This is conspiracy theory territory. It simply doesn’t make sense that a profit-seeking company would desire to kill their customers quickly. Furthermore, the outbreak seems to have started in local markets rather than a battery-hen farm. But Wallace gromits on, merging every disease over the past 100 years, and blaming it on ‘centralized Capital’ (whatever that is intended to mean). Thus even the Spanish flu that erupted in Europe towards the nigh of the First World War is lumped together with Corona, and moreover, the reason why it spread is lumped together with the reason why Corona has spread: mass travel! However, Spanish flu was cultivated in very unique circumstances: during the war thousands of malnourished soldiers were lumped together in muddy, unhygienic trenches, with wounds abound, and there was very little healthcare around. These are circumstances quite different to our nice warm and clean residences today, yes, even in China, and partly explain why Corona will probably not be as bad as Spanish flu. Also, today’s easier travel arrangements (as they were until recently) allow easier spread of diagnosis and treatment and access to healthcare, not just negatively exposure to the virus itself.
Wallace’s conclusions however, are the worst part of it all. And this is where the “Rise of the Idiots” theme comes in most starkly. He wants agribusiness to end and for people to go back to the land and farm rurally for small-scale communities. Thus “Marx21” is publishing a piece arguing for the return to feudalism. The idea this will make us safer is nonsense. From the 1500s onward, till around the year 1800, when mass production was starting to take off, life expectancy throughout Europe hovered between 30 and 40 years of age. You’re more likely to survive Corona today than you were a life in the mud back then. Sadly however, society today is at a kind of crossroads. The New Economic Crash, muddled with an irrational panic over fairly mild diseases, is providing fertile ground for those that wish to smash society to pieces. For those that wish to transcend, I’m all up for it, but sadly the most politically influential arguments in currency today are arguing in a backward direction.
The early history of the 20thC panned out much along the lines Karl Marx anticipated. The human bloodbath of World War One exposed capitalism as a dreadful system, and a great many political struggles took place from outright revolution in Russia to lesser fights in Germany and Britain’s women successfully won the right to vote. In Britain 1926, millions of working days were lost to the capitalists by a colossal wave of strike action. The legacy of all these battles is still felt today, albeit with a touch of nostalgia.
The degeneration of the Soviet Union into state-capitalism was very costly. It made people think revolutionary ideology was dangerous – nevertheless, struggles persisted in all countries for several decades, particularly after the Right was discredited through a reaction to all the policies of racism of the imperial powers, the worst of which was of course, the Nazi Holocaust.
But the knock-on effects of all the defeats, the failure of new intellectuals to match up to the stature of a Marx or Lenin, was gradually taking its toll. The working class were increasingly losing – but nevertheless, they kept up the struggle as if their lives depended on it. But from the 1970s onwards, workers found they faced a new threat. No longer was it just the capitalists and their state they had to fight. A curious new strain of thinking had grown up in left-wing circles, which we now have come to know as ‘political correctness’.
Instead of your trade union being an unequivocal friend in battle, now they were issuing speech codes and telling you off for a joke deemed to be ‘offensive’ to a minority. No wonder trade union membership began to falter from the 1980s onwards in the imperial countries – workers were losing their allies on the politically active left, particularly those allies that were now bastard students.
A weakened left stood no chance against the onslaught of Margaret Thatcher during the mid-eighties Miner’s Strike in Britain. However, in earlier times, such defeat at the hands of police who were literally beating up striking miners, could have been fixed. In earlier times, state violence merely suppressed one protest at a time. But people would regroup, learn from their own mistakes, get stronger, and go on to win. What was unique about the precarious position of miners in the 80s was that the left was also against them too, despite crass lip service paid to the cause. The unions and the Labour Party were constantly trying to correct bad manners and such among the workers. It was no surprise then that Margaret Thatcher won a landslide in 1987.
Fast forward to the period 1990-2016, workers are subdued in all the imperial countries. Political correctness without many speaking out against it, has become a form of mind control. The working class in this period resemble beaten down drones, struggling to survive, often behaving like rats fighting over a piece of courgette that has fallen into a urinal. In this period, workers even snitched on their cohorts for breaching a code of conduct – it was the only sense of power they could get. Their own character, never mind the surplus value they were producing, was also now being torn away from them by a capitalism in an acute crisis.
However, nothing stays the same for long, thank god! The 2016 European Referendum in Britain showed workers revolting to the extent they wanted to shut down that aspect of Imperialism known as the European Union. In the same year in the USA, Donald Trump, the populist candidate, gained the Presidency.
Obviously these developments are very complicated and more analysis is required. But it seems there is a new populism out there, workers are finding ways to circumnavigate right and left in a desire to rescue their own character and attachments. Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, remain steeped in a barren landscape – the old ideology of the right, so this blogger has no doubt these repulsive creatures will fade away. Nevertheless they have done a service of at least putting a light at the end of the tunnel. The struggle henceforth will be entirely about how much input we can inject into populism and preferably steer it in the direction that all of humanity wants.
Numerous misinterpretations prevail. This blog attempts to clear up two of these: the environmentalist interpretation, and the ostensibly ‘materialist’ take. No blog of around 800 words could do Marx’s ideas justice – these are a few ideas that are intended to spur debate.
Firstly, the environmentalist interpretation holds that capitalism is destructive to the environment and must be reformed to enable a simpler type of existence that is more harmonious with the desires or interests of the planet. But Marx’s concern is only for human welfare – this depends on a functioning planet, yes, and also some concern for animals is appropriate to the extent they enrich human life. This is Big Anthropocentrism. Capitalism does degrade the environment, even to life-threatening levels as we are beginning to see with the growing frequency of extreme weather events constituting a new trend. And yes, part of the issue is indeed non-human species depletion or extinction. Today Marx would be horrified at the conversion of Africa’s big game into just another resource, or the undermining of the sustainability of coral reefs.
But this is because Marx the humanist is worried about things that concern us, rather than some kind of inherent non-human moral value floating within such entities. The solution to capitalistic environmental degradation is a new human society where our relationship to nature is considerate and rational rather than solely profit-oriented, that doesn’t preclude doing this or that where appropriate. Moreover, with concerted effort, capitalism can sometimes mop up ecological disasters, so the environmentalist critique is non-revolutionary, whereas Marx wanted to transform our whole relationship with nature so as to remove the powerful alienation that prevails under capitalism.
Because Marx wrote so much about economics, and academia has failed to link this to his earlier focus on alienated human relationships, some have claimed that the essential Marx was all about developing the productive forces, go for economic growth whatever the cost. This is erroneous firstly because it silences that most petulant of productive forces – labour. Although Marx clearly thought the good society massively develops machinery and the such, his main concern was on the freedom of the individual worker and their own self-development that capitalism negates. Capitalism reduces the individual member of society to an appendage to the machine and crushes them both mentally and physically. Thus, the emphasis on developing the productive forces is first and fore mostly about liberating labour from the drudgery of profit-driven society.
Secondly there seems to be a semi-conscious attempt to interpret Marx as a vulgar pro-growth materialist in order to let capitalism off the hook – to say that alienated human relationships and their impact on everyone are irrelevant to his overriding concern with fixing or ameliorating the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Thus, Phil Mullan’s recent book Creative Destruction that I reviewed here takes a very narrow interpretation of the oeuvre only in order to suggest ways capitalism might overcome some current barriers to growth. The role played by the theory of the falling rate of profit in Marx’s overall outlook is totally neglected.
The centrality of the theory of the falling rate of profit in Marxism is the final proof that the bourgeoisie would undoubtedly cease to be a revolutionary force in every country they reign, and that capitalism would have to undermine its own moral and intellectual foundations to persist. In other words, the quality of human life would necessarily deteriorate as long as capitalism persisted, not only in terms of the material standard of living but also in terms of the quality of human relationships in society at large.
Marx’s understanding of the consequences of his theory of the falling rate of profit upon the quality of human existence is borne out by subsequent history. Two world wars later and perhaps a third on the horizon, with only 36 minutes of peace known to the world since the end of World War Two, racism and brutality, the increased role of the state in social affairs, increased homelessness in the ‘advanced’ countries and massive destitution everywhere else, show capitalism has not fulfilled the claim it originally made to be an ‘Enlightenment’ society heading towards a new golden age. The falling rate of profit is not important because we want capitalists to make lots of money – who cares? – but because the consequences of it upon society are dire as the ruling class offer apology after apology and quietly drop the claims to liberty and equality they once made. Nowadays everyone hates everyone else, partly because economic life is so frustrating, and, filtered down, you get the new trend of horrendous school shootings in the USA.
To conclude, Marx was fundamentally opposed to capitalism because he was the most astute and consistent humanist that philosophy has ever produced.
The latest developments in technology point to an increasingly mechanised work process. The abilities of robots to perform tasks, and even to learn on the job, coupled with the way in which we are never away from our smartphones and other smart tech, seem to point to a future where machines are central, and humanity peripheral. Highly developed AI has won games of chess – and even beaten top players in poker – which shows the magnificent heights to which our creations can attain. In human culture, there is much fear, or conversely, celebration of the new machine age. From fear, we have movies such as The Matrix trilogy, The Terminator franchise, the recent Alien spin-offs where it seems that an android sets the whole debacle going, to warn us off putting too much faith in technology; from the celebratory side we are told that artificial intelligence is just a tool to help us with things like medical care and connecting people all over the world. Both these sides miss the fundamental problem with what is going on.
There is a new level of domination going on, but it is not out of machine’s malevolence, but the way production is organised. To that extent, it is not entirely new, nevertheless a quantitative shift can become a qualitative shift it we are not made aware of what is taking place, and it is that which this blog seeks to address.
The market develops by extracting surplus value from workers that is partly represented as ‘profit’. This ‘profit’ certainly helps business owners lead luxurious lifestyles whilst workers still effectively battle like rats over a piece of courgette that has fallen into a urinal, but that inequality is not the main problem. Profit also gets re-invested in new technology, to speed up production, make it more efficient, and to increase the productivity of labour. More gets produced, often to a higher quality and in less time. Thus, we are told, society ‘progresses’. But also involved in this is the stripping of the worker’s creativity. Value he or she has produced, once the surplus is re-invested in machinery, comes to turn his work into a series of just pressing buttons and supervising machinery – it requires less conscious process, and has thus become less creative. The labour from the past cycle is now embodied in a machine that leaves little room for creativity, hence you have a domination of ‘dead’ over ‘living’ labour. This is a process that has existed since the dawn of capitalism, and hence is nothing new, but what is new is that the level the process has developed into – seemingly, machines using algorithms to make judgments (including on the stock market), does show that high-tech capitalism leaves even less room for human productive-expression in the commodity. This self-relegation of the human species gives rise to the culture of fear over new technology where we cheer the sexy Sarah Connor played by Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) in Terminator: Genisys, for smashing things up. It also gives rise to the celebrationists – who it turns out, tend to be those with a vested interest in the status quo, or are simply brain-dead.
Of course, machines can never become self-conscious so as to pose a direct threat to human life. A good argument from the philosopher John Searle asked us to imagine an isolated room in which a man handles Chinese symbols he doesn’t understand. In “The Chinese Room” the man, let us say his only language is English, receives Chinese symbols through a hole in the wall. He doesn’t understand what any of these symbols mean, but has a set of rules for how to process them. So, he looks at his list of rules, and selects a different Chinese symbol to pass back through the hole. This is effectively what ‘syntax’ is all about. You have an input, a rule for processing it, and then an output. There is no conscious involvement, simply a rule-following procedure is sufficient for syntax to take place. Therefore, syntax is quite different from the world of semantics (the realm of meaning). All computers and robots, no matter how advanced, only still operate at the level of syntax, they have never, and can never, develop semantics. Without semantics, a being cannot develop its own wishes and desires and needs, and therefore can never pose a deliberate threat to any person. They will always remain our tools.
Nevertheless, although they really are just tools, this doesn’t justify AI celebrationism. As said, the incoming high-tech machine age poses a problem for the majority because it represents such a weight of domination of dead over living labour, and thus the end of labour as in any way a creative enterprise, as experienced at the individual level by the majority in society. The solution to this does not consist in the smashing up of machines (although that is morally admirable), but in the reorganisation of the mode of production. Instead of producing for profit, we need to produce to meet people’s needs instead, and have full social democratic control over this process, invoking new models of participatory democracy. A new post-capitalist mode of production does not see the surplus product re-invested in machinery, unless so desired by the freely-associating direct producers themselves. In that way, advances can and will occur, but only as a result of democracy rather than businessmen operating behind the scenes wondering how to extract more profit. If machinery only advances because it is democratically willed, then the alienating consequences of said machinery disappear. They really do become just tools, then.
Finally, this is no pipe-dream – humanity will necessarily be compelled to face these issues. Just as more of the surplus product is re-invested in high-tech machinery, so too many workers get laid off because their jobs have been replaced by machinery. This immediately is a source of protest. But moreover, with fewer people in employment, the capitalist ends up seeing his own rate of profit decline, because the source of profit always was labour, not the machines. Eventually he has to shut down the enterprise and try and recoup a scrap from a fire-sale. Expanding these principles worldwide, the most high-tech capitalist economies breakdown and collapse. This forces people to address the underlying logic of what was already going on, and wasn’t exactly experienced as a holiday camp in the first place.
Measured in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which is a superior measure to GDP, global output in 2017 is forecast to be $126.7 trillion. Assuming a population of 7bn, in which 50% of the population work (a generous estimate), then everyone’s wages throughout the entire world ought to be $36,200 per year. Not bad, huh? But the mean average wage of a world worker that conflates the difference between a Luxembourger (the highest paid) and someone in the Third World, is only $18,000 at 2012 estimates (and it’s doubtful wages have risen much since then). So, where’s the extra money gone? Where is the other 50%? Not in wages!
Naïve people might think the missing 50% goes into paying for health services, education, welfare, or paying off national debt. Wrong! All these things come from taxes which are taken from the wage. They are not taken from the missing 50%, they are taken from the accounted-for 50%.
So where is the missing $60 trillion, each and every year, at current levels of development? We know that $32 trillion of it resides in off-shore tax havens. But that’s just a total, and doesn’t account for $60 trillion per year, every year. Obviously, some of it goes on elite hobbies such as the art market, yachts, racehorses, and squandering ¼ $1bn on footballer Neymar, etc. But such ultra-luxury consumption still couldn’t explain the size of the missing trillions.
The missing trillions, given the number of years this situation has gone on, are actually not trillions.
They are quadrillions.
Here is what a quadrillion looks like written out:
1,000,000,000,000,000.
Quite big, huh?
There is $1.2 quadrillion invested in derivatives alone. Other investments such as real estate, industry, etc., pale in comparison, merely at the level of x trillion. But yeah, the largest chunk of society’s surplus product is invested in speculative finance.
When right wing economists tell you we all need to work harder and create a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, it is worth bearing in mind that we already work hard enough thank-you, and perhaps a cybernetic future in which we all go around wearing VR headsets is a bit too much to stomach. The problem isn’t a lack of wealth, it is the way it is distributed. And this mode of distribution flows from a particular mode of production in which the surplus product becomes privately rather than socially owned.
When elites tell you ‘there isn’t enough money’ to fund this, that, or the other, we should now question what measure of wealth they are using. If they are talking about funds raised from taxation of the working class, sure, there isn’t enough money. But what if society, acting as a collective entity with purpose, took back our missing quadrillions? Perhaps if the surplus product, which is all entirely derived from the total work of the world, was in our hands, instead of a minority parasite blood-sucking vampire class, i.e. placing the surplus product under the democratic control of society, maybe something useful could be done?
Star Trek Voyager’s Seven of Nine: Being liberated from the Collective corresponds to making a theoretical break with the priorities of bourgeois society such that she can now explore her humanity
Star Trek’s ‘The Borg’ are a good metaphor for understanding some fundamental aspects of social relations under capitalism. This does not mean people are like drones, quite the reverse. Breakdowns in the metaphor occur because our limited existences created by the capitalist mode of production are distortions upon human nature rather than its total annulment. And people’s massive discomfort with this state of affairs means they seek liberation from the Borg Collective which doesn’t happen with the Trek drones unless they are temporarily disconnected from the Hive Mind. In reading this blog, you are temporarily disconnected from the Hive Mind (chiefly the opinion of authorities), and I will set out arguments through which you may come to achieve full humanity.
The Borg expand through assimilating humanoid life-forms in the galaxy and beyond, rather like the expansion of the world market gobbling everything up. In the assimilation process, your individuality is crushed and you are made to serve the Collective (society). The Borg are incredibly successful because they are efficient and constantly perfecting technology to further their programme of expanse. What the Borg fail to assimilate, they physically destroy. The Borg represent the ideal dream of how capitalism attempts to remould society, yet the ways in which the Borg are successful come at a terrible cost: the crushing of individuality and the end of the liberty of the individual.
In contrast, the humans in Star Trek are free, their internal conflicts are resolved usually through discussion rather than force. The Borg on the other hand suffer no internal conflict, they are already ‘as one.’ But how do the humans in Trek become free? Why do they volunteer to do things rather than nothing at all? Because labour has become life’s prime want.
Under capitalism, labour is coerced out of the individual, disguised as a ‘free exchange.’ Yet the worker quickly comes to understand the selling of their labour power was anything but free. They had nothing else to sell, nothing else to live from. In work, there is an obsession with ‘increasing productivity,’ work is experienced as uncreative doldrums, it is unrewarding, undertaken under tight supervision (including by CCTV), the products of labour are owned by someone else (the capitalist), there are poor bonds with other workers, and there is no rational set of ideas why we are all doing this in the first place. Work is reduced to the means to the end of survival in a dog-eat-dog world. It is not something desired by the individual, no-one goes to work looking forward to it and with a whistle in their heart.
Labour becomes life’s prime want by removing all these inhibitions to its unleashing. We shouldn’t have to ‘sell’ our capacity to work – means of production should be free to utilise by all. The obsession with being ‘productive’ needs to be cancelled out – how productive you are ought to depend on your own will. Rather than production seemingly for production’s own sake, the worker now chooses when and what to produce according to personal will, hence it becomes creative and rewarding, and there is no-one to take the product from you without your consent (e.g. as a part of consciously determined human relations). There is no supervision, except perhaps in an advisory capacity. The free worker now enjoys good quality bonds with his fellows, giving rise to coherent ideas why we do what we do.
With labour now as life’s prime want, capitalist society now looks shameful and embarrassing. It was Borg-like because it prioritised efficiency and productivity over individual liberty and choice. What’s worse the fake left-wing politicians of capitalist society must now feel incredibly embarrassed – all they did was to take capitalist slogans and suggest their programmes could do it better, as opposed to operating on the terrain of critique, thus developing a superior notion of human moral value.
Capitalism is Borg-like, but the individual worker even under this system is never quite like a drone. Rather in a society where all sides have accepted ‘there is no alternative to the Borg,’ the individual worker’s aspirations become expressed through religious or fetishistic forms. Thus 75% of Americans are still religious in the 21st century. 25% are also on some form of psychiatric medication or another. These aspects are not the main problem, they are symptoms of the problem, like flowers growing on the chains. They would be superseded with genuine humanised spirituality and a deeper sense of our social interconnections after we take action to remove the chains. By contrast, the Borg regarded in this way are a poor metaphor for the human condition under capitalism because they have no delusions. Ironically it seems it is the capacity to be delusional that is a big thing currently separating us from a race of advanced machines. It is better to be a human with delusions than a robot without them. Furthermore, unlike the Borg, we have strong interpersonal contacts such as a family life and enriching down-time. It is only when considered in the sphere of work which takes up most of our waking lives that the human condition under capitalism can be considered Borg-like. So, let’s widen the distinction between humanity and the Borg further in the interests of full liberation by changing the way we work. We shouldn’t have to live as a poor advertisement of ourselves.
Nb. Since writing this blog, my views have changed. A revised review of the book now appears at http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/reviews-and-culture/monsters-vs-zombies-review-of-phil-mullans-creative-destruction.html Nevertheless I have chosen not to delete this older version since it is still useful in stirring debate and more importantly, was a ‘stage’ in my theoretical development, albeit a negative one dominated by emotion and ‘clearing out.’ That isn’t anything to be ashamed of. Revolutions in practice often contain reactionary and untrue elements – even the widely acclaimed French Revolution saw many participants believing libels against Marie Antoinette that she was having sex with her sons. The challenge then is to overcome the first negativity with a more promising and reasoned ‘second negativity.’
Phil Mullan, business manager and chief economist at the magazine spiked-online is, by his own admission, ‘obsessed with economic growth.’ This goal, alongside others, is also precious to Marxism, and Mullan lifts some of Marx’s arguments to make his case that we are currently living through a ‘Long Depression’ that began with the economic downturn in the 1970s. He makes a convincing case that GDP in Western nations has shrunk in relation to the levels of the post-war boom. Consequently, rises in living standards, which Mullan the humanist cares about, are held back. Appearances of dynamism in things like the stock market are essentially parasitic upon the real, productive economy where value is created. If that is seizing up, then finance is just another bubble like the dot.com bubble waiting to burst. Another Crash like 2008 is imminent in the context of the persisting Long Depression. The escape from the protracted depression, says Mullan, lies in increasing productivity for which it is essential to demolish zombification trends.
This review is divided into three parts. Firstly, I look at Mullan’s take on Marxist crisis theory to preliminarily clarify the issues at stake. Secondly, I probe Mullan’s proposed solution of a new industrial revolution from within capitalism. Finally, I sketch an alternative model of economic growth that I hope salvages what I see as positive in the book, whilst criticising other aspects.
Mulling Marx
Capitalism has transformed the world immeasurably in terms of creating an abundance of material wealth. This process, however, has never been smooth. Capitalism is prone to economic downturns that occur roughly every ten years. So, growth occurs only in the form of ups and downs. Some downturns are deeper than others, sparking an economic crisis where the system has to destroy some of its own wealth before it can re-accumulate. This doesn’t mean capital literally burns its own commodities (although that sometimes happens.) What becomes important in a crisis isn’t a physical destruction as such, but the destruction of value, the social substance whose body is the physical commodity and itself represents a definite amount of abstract human labour in a congealed form. But why can’t value just grow and grow without periodic crises?
The mechanism for its growth is active (rather than idle) capital, i.e. capital engaged in the production process. When capitalists deploy their money in production in order to gain more, what they seek is the highest rate of profit measured in percentage terms. There’s no point in investing if all you get back is the same, so capitalists are motivated all the time by the possibility of expansion and take risks in order to get that. Capital within the production process takes the form of a ‘constant’ capital (plant and machinery etc.,) and ‘variable’ capital (the amount spent on wages and employee perks). Capital grows as a mass of value when it is able to extract a ‘surplus’ value from the worker. But the mass of value is unmotivating to capitalists compared to the rate of profit. The quantity of the surplus divided by the value embodied in the constant and variable components of capital gives us the rate of profit. In order to increase the rate of profit, capital needs to increase the surplus value in relation to the constant and variable components. There are a number of ways it can do this. It can, for example, cut wages or other employee perks, or intensify the labour process with speed-ups. However, these things are socially unpopular as well as limited in application. More commonly, and especially during a period of growth, a capitalist will technologically innovate in order to increase the productivity of labour. The consequence of this is that more is produced in the same amount of time yet the sale price of the commodity remains temporarily unchanged. So more value is harvested by the capitalist. But when rival capitalists catch up with the entrepreneur and deploy similar technology – and they have to or go bust – then the price of a singular one of those commodities falls as less labour-time is embodied in it. If you sell all of the new increased number of commodities, you only get back the same amount of value as was previously embodied in the lesser number. So, the new situation is that you have spent all this money on increasing technology (part of the constant capital) yet the total product is fetching the same. Therefore, constant capital has increased whilst the surplus value is back to where it was before. Thus, in the ratio of surplus value divided by the constant and variable capital now shows a larger measure in the denominator. The rate of profit has therefore fallen. If the rate of profit falls too much, then employees get laid off and constant capital also needs to be destroyed in one way or another (usually as a written off asset), and this is the economic crisis. Mullan puts it like this:
“The profit arising from the new value created by labour in the production process tends to decline relative to the rising amounts of capital invested in fixed assets and materials. This means that the profit rate measured over all capital deployed – in employing people as well as in fixed assets and other inputs – will also tend to decline. This tendency of the general rate of profit to fall follows as a direct consequence of the development of the social productivity of labour since this is dependent upon increasing amounts of capital investment.”[1]
Given that any further development of the productivity of labour (i.e. producing more with less labour input) is reliant on a healthy rate of profit, if the rate of profit falls too much, then productivity also stagnates leading to a general economic malaise. This is what has happened since the 1970s. Mullan says the annual productivity growth rate in Britain is now down to 1.1%, all things considered[2]. This is not exactly an economy that is unleashing the human potential.
Note, the Marxist explanation of crisis doesn’t mean that each and every crisis is attributable to these reasons. Crises can also occur owing to a natural disaster such as an earthquake or tsunami. The theory is therefore just one possible explanation that stands in need of empirical verification. One’s suspicion’s get raised when conditions are favourable to capital accumulation such as a more muted level of class struggle. When the crisis still takes place in those conditions, it is probable it can be explained with this theory, though it still needs to be empirically proved.
The chapter on this profitability problem is the strongest part of the book. However, there is no place in the book where Mullan explains the distinction between value and use-value. This omission is important because a reader unfamiliar with Marxism may believe that the declining rate at which labour productivity advances implies a falling amount of value in the world. It doesn’t. If the amount of labour-time deployed in a society remains constant, then the amount of value produced in that society also remains constant regardless of whether the quantity of use-values is going up or down. The amount of value in the world is limited by the size of the working population and the length and intensity of the working day. Contrary to commonly held belief, despite mountains of cash reserves, capitalism doesn’t actually increase the amount of value in the world, except to the extent it has drawn more people into production, increased the length of the working day, and increased labour’s intensity. Other than those things which can only be increased to a certain point, labour under capitalism does not produce extra value owing to productivity increases. As Marx says, “The same labour, therefore, performed for the same length of time, always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity.”[3] And also: “Take a certain working population of, say, two million. Assume, furthermore, that the length and intensity of the average working day, the level of wages, and thereby the proportion between necessary and surplus labour, are given. In that case the aggregate labour of these two million, and their surplus labour expressed in surplus value, always produces the same magnitude of value.”[4]
There are places in ‘Creative Destruction’ where Mullan seems to be unclear about this point. He says “world output per person was US$467 in the year 1 AD, falling slightly to US$453 1000 years later, and rising to only US$615 by 1700. That’s an average annual growth rate over 17 centuries of 0.02% – effectively zero for influencing people’s life experiences.”[5] It needs to be clarified that the extra value produced per head in the advancing centuries is not because capitalism has some magical value-increasing spell. The value of output per head can only rise if labour becomes more intensive or the working day is lengthened. Indeed, it is these factors that explain the discrepancy between 1 AD and 1700 AD, with bigger leaps since then. Industrial society most definitely does increase labour intensity and lengthen the working day. No rise in the value of output is determined by productivity. Nevertheless, productivity growth does lead to an increase in the quantity of use-values available to society. That is not the same thing as value, but it does justify why productivity growth is important for increasing living standards. Productivity growth disperses the value of an hour of socially necessary labour-time over a greater number of use-values. The number of use-values has increased but each use-value is now the bodily form of a lesser quantity of value.
The Weak Must Perish!
Whilst capitalism is crisis-prone, this doesn’t mean it collapses of its own accord. It has counter-acting tendencies that automatically activate when production is breaking down. Through these counter-acting tendencies, the system destroys some of its value through, for example, writing off assets, and is then able to regrow. One way of conceptualising the crisis was captured in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’. There, the animals build a windmill, only for it to be burnt down the next day. Then they rebuild it and once again it is destroyed, and so on. The process of the accumulation of capital is much like this – it grows up to a certain point, then self-destructs, only to inflate again later, etc. Each post-recovery peak is slightly lower than the previous peak. It doesn’t exactly correspond therefore to a society in which the economy is genuinely progressing. Although the mass of use-values rises, in value terms the system is just jumping up and down on the same spot.
There are other counter-acting tendencies in capitalism such as intensifying or extending the working day that effectively increase the surplus in relation to capital investment, or slashing the wage bill which decreases variable capital. It is worth noting that with more women in the workforce now, a family unit conceived as a single entity now works for longer than in the 19th century. Back then, workers scored a victory with the 10 hours’ bill, but now in Britain a woman and her husband will often be found working 14 hours a day in total, excluding any overtime. Of course, gender equality is an important achievement of the Women’s Liberation movement, my point is only significant for noting that capital has effectively increased the length of the working day.
A counter-acting tendency that Mullan finds particularly appealing is that of ‘creative destruction.’ This is when the unprofitable companies go bankrupt and their assets are sold off cheaply (devaluing the constant capital) to a more profitable company who then is able to keep production going, or even elevate it to a higher technological level. The process of creative destruction is a healing, purifying mechanism for capital. By destroying some of the constant component of capital that has overaccumulated, a new round of production is able to get going. So ‘creative destruction’ is what it says: both destructive and creative.
However, Mullan’s originality as an author on the crisis consists here: he argues that the ‘normal’ processes of creative destruction are being held back by the state. Mullan argues the state is giving too many subsidies to unprofitable companies to keep them afloat, when really it should let them die. The state is propping up a zombie form of capitalism, says Mullan. If instead the unprofitable companies are left to die, then the state could invest its money on driving forward newer production at a higher technological level. Note, Mullan doesn’t think the job can be left to capitalists because they are too concerned with short-term profit whereas the high-tech stuff is risky and costly. In the absence of other collectivities in society then, Mullan wants the state to take a commanding role in rejuvenating the economy and he thinks this will create real progress. He has conceded this will mean the state borrowing a few extra trillion to fund this progress.
His ideas for progress involve employing the youth (who have suffered higher rates of unemployment since the 2008 Crash) in tasks such as building new aircraft made out of the new compound graphene which is lighter than the current metals. Furthermore, he wants more investment in driverless cars, quantum technology for, among other things, faster computers, and virtual reality. Production in these areas will create ‘decent jobs’, he believes. He says people who don’t want to go down this route of a high-tech state capitalism have a ‘loss of belief in progress.’ Whilst he recognises he holds a minority view, he thinks strong leaders will emerge that promote these ideas and ensure they have democratic approval.
Author, economist, and business manager Phil Mullan
Sadly, Mullan’s optimism is delusional. Firstly, the level of destruction he is proposing is so high, people are unlikely to go for it. “There are no pain-free routes out of the Long Depression. The processes of creative destruction will mean economic ruin, adding to areas already severely affected by deindustrialisation.” [6] Yay, economic ruin! To be fair, Mullan believes such ruin will just be a short-term part of the transition to a high-tech state capitalist society and also the people affected will receive welfare benefits as they learn the new skills required to become a quantum computing scientist. So, we are invited to sing ‘Kum-by-ya’ as millions get laid off.
The second criticism concerns Mullan’s notion of ‘decent jobs.’ Is there such a thing? Even if the fellow designing a quantum circuit board experiences this as rewarding because he is deploying a high level of skill, the production of enough quantum computers for the world requires hundreds of thousands more low-paid assemblers on the factory line. They are unlikely to feel particularly rewarded.
The third criticism is that Mullan is only tinkering around with one particular counter-acting tendency, that of ‘creative destruction.’ With the fundamental social relations of capitalism remaining intact, the new high tech state capitalism will still be crisis-prone. Indeed, with such a high level of constant capital, when its Crash comes, it will be incredibly severe, making 2008 look like a tea party. What’s worse is that if the employer is the state, all hell could break loose. No matter how much representative democracy you have, you will find the state qua capitalist-in-recession is going to be quite vicious in attacking variable capital when the crisis breaks. Note Mullan is recommending his model for all the Western economies. So, you have North American, European, Japanese and Australasian state capitalisms all crashing down. I’m sorry, but this is just a recipe for war. Mullan, who argues the Manhattan project to develop the atom bomb pushed science forward[7], will surely come to regret the recommendations he has made here.
It’s probably best for the time being that we stick with zombie capitalism, until such a point arises that revolutionary humanist theory has gripped the masses such that they are well-equipped to change the world in the interests of human liberation. Even though living standards may only be rising at 1.1% under zombie capitalism, this is little different to what it was in 1860 (a period Mullan thinks was ‘dynamic’ and ‘enlightened’). For the time being, we should stick with it rather than go down the Mullanite route of playing with fire. Ultimately, we need a radically different alternative, so it is to that I now turn.
Changing The Mode of Production
Mullan’s explanation for why he now backs capitalism (albeit rejuvenated), makes about as much sense as a chocolate teapot. He says:
“There are still some on the radical left who argue for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. This had meaning when the working class existed as a political force. But the working class’s demise brought that era of possibilities to an end. The question remains of how the existing system of production can be organised, or transformed, or transcended in such a way as to advance the best interests of humanity. Once we have escaped the Long Depression, the resulting phase of economic expansion would not be forever. Economic growth would at some time hit limits, just as the post-war boom did. Working out how to overcome the limitations of a profit-driven economy is not today’s priority.”[8]
But some of us don’t want to live in either zombie capitalism, nor the 1950s. Mullan’s problem here is premised upon a misinterpretation of what the best bits of the Enlightenment were. He assumes its message of ‘progress’ dictates we stick with capitalism. In actual fact, many different traditions emerged from the Enlightenment which is unsurprising if you realise that the most dominant theme in the Enlightenment (as a diffuse body of philosophy) was that we have freewill and can choose our fate. Mullan’s commitment to capitalism is therefore a choice. It is not the case ‘there is no alternative,’ it all depends on what system we think has the most going for it. The truth-value of the ideas is therefore the most important thing, not the status of contemporary working class politics. If we focus instead on truth, and circulate those ideas, who knows what it might animate in the future? Indeed, ideas often have a ‘trickle down’ effect. The positive moments of the 20th century, although rarely ‘orthodox-Marxist’, were influenced by his raising of the stakes. Mini-socialism, e.g. the British Labour Party or social democracy in Europe, would not have happened without the effect of Marx trickling-down. The task then is for intellectuals to constantly seek truth, and refresh and renew truths discovered historically. Therefore, the contemporary status of working class politics is logically irrelevant to whether or not we decide to pursue Marxist ideas and attempt to circulate them. Mullanism is also unlikely to be implemented directly, but tragically a trickled-down Mullanism might pervade in the short-term, i.e. more Trumpism – a pro-capitalism that has disregarded the humanist bits in Mullan’s book. We have a mammoth responsibility to the future and therefore it is necessary to have the best ideas possible so that even if they are not directly implemented, at least some progress could occur in their trickled-down form. For these reasons, the rest of this section is dedicated to a Marxist alternative to the arguments put forward by Mullan. The reader is invited to decide at the end which vision he or she prefers.
Zombie capitalism really represents capitalism on its last legs. This doesn’t mean that one day it will spontaneously collapse – as Mullan notes, the system is highly resilient. What it does mean however, is that its failure to durably increase living standards for all, its failure to turn the increasing social productivity of labour into a shortening of the working day, its failure to make labour rewarding and creative rather than burdensome and monotonous, its failure to overcome brutalised and alienated social relations, its failure to overcome its crisis-prone nature, the persistence of famine and war, and the general sense that human beings are not in control of their own affairs – yeah, it seems capitalism is a pretty messed-up system. Mullan’s attempts to reform the beast, even if they worked on their own terms, wouldn’t solve many of these problems, but as I have argued, they wouldn’t work even on their own terms – high-tech state capitalism would end up being even worse than its zombie form. So, what we need is a different mode of production. Before we can work out how to get there, we need to probe a little deeper into the fundamental basis of capitalism. If we analyse that, then we can work out how to change the whole thing.
Various Marxist categories deployed in this review – e.g. capital, constant capital, variable capital, surplus value, wages, use-value and value – have as their basis commodities. Commodities are the basic unit of wealth in a capitalist society. Capitalism specifically is about the production of commodities. Any attempt to change capitalism into something else must therefore tackle what is specific to commodity production. Revolutions that have failed to change commodity production into something else have themselves always eventually failed.
The commodity has a dual character – the use-value side, which is the way in which it satisfies a concrete need, and its value side, i.e. how much it is worth, which can be expressed in terms of money or indeed any other commodity. Hence it is possible to say an apple is worth the same as a pencil, or each are worth 20 pence. Value is a representation of how much socially necessary human labour has gone into the production of the commodity, as an amount of time. Capital (privately accumulated mass of value), is the most dialectically developed commodity, but the fact it is also on its last legs, demands from us we understand both it, and the simple commodity.
As a privately accumulated mass of value, capital is therefore an appropriation of the labour-time of others. The nature of capitalism and all the attendant problems follow from this private appropriation of the labour of society. The problems are based therefore, not on personal character traits, but the very fact that persons are not in conscious control of their affairs. Even the capitalist isn’t free because he has to work under certain economic laws in order to survive as a capitalist. The private appropriation of labour has lowered the status of all human beings.
Hence value, from which capital springs, has to be regarded as an estranged form. It is a social substance that has become a threat to our very wellbeing. Thus, we need to get rid of it and turn the product of labour into just an article of use that is stripped of the value form.
To get rid of commodity production therefore requires that the first task is simultaneously to seize back the appropriated value that has been taken from us, and also, in order to prevent new value being taken from us, stop labour existing in the form of labour-power, i.e. as a commodity. Labour-power is a unique commodity because it is incorporated into a human being who is conscious. Thus, it is the only commodity that hypothetically can commence the chain reaction of getting rid of all commodities. To refuse point blank to sell your labour-power is therefore key, but it cannot be done alone. Workers of the world must unite as a giant collective and initiate a worldwide general strike at the same time as expropriating the expropriators, taking back what is rightfully ours. One of the slogans of the revolution is therefore “I AM A MAN, not a commodity.” This slogan immediately raises the dignity of the individual which is, as we shall see, the ultimate key to undo all commodity production. But this is only the first step.
Expropriating the expropriators certainly makes everyone a little more wealthy, but more importantly some of what the capitalists had expropriated from us exists in the form of constant capital. Therefore the collective taking back also involves taking the means of production into social ownership. The post-revolutionary society is now at the start of the lower phase of communism and can start to work towards the task of undoing commodity production. Labour has already self-emancipated in the sense that the commodity labour-power no longer exists. Furthermore, it has got rid of capital in all its forms.
That now permits the communist mode of production to begin to take shape. The working population now produces directly for society and individuals are compensated according to how many hours of labour they have put in. This constitutes an assault on the capitalistic law of value, and therefore an assault on commodity production. Whereas under capitalism the wage represents the value of the goods needed to reproduce you as a worker, i.e. chiefly your ability to regenerate yourself in order to resell your labour power the next day, the new compensation is a moral standard, i.e. a fair share in the social bounty. Value isn’t being measured but the amount of what you do is.
Nevertheless, there is still the problem that the products of emancipated labour still represent abstract human labour, i.e. they have economic value. The new products of labour aren’t strictly speaking commodities, but it would still be possible in the mind to think “1 apple = 1 pencil.” Really for value to disappear completely, such a thing needs to seem absurd, just as ancient religions seem absurd to the skeptic today. The persistence of value in the mind is a hangover from capitalism that will fade when the new society is metaphorically sober. Some logical steps will help the sobering up process occur. When you collect what you need with your labour certificate that says how much you are entitled to, you are not making a trade. You are not exchanging a commodity (money) for goods in a supermarket. You are simply collecting (or ordering via the internet or virtual reality) your goods. Thus, the products of labour are no longer strictly commodities, although they still bear value as a hangover. But what happens if some individuals start accumulating things in one way or another? – they would be amassing value which could become a threat to individuals within the collective. The problem wouldn’t exist if these objects were just use-values, but remember they still bear value. We didn’t just go through the risky business of emancipating ourselves from wage-slavery just to have someone re-accumulate value and thereby possibly seek to employ us. The new society therefore develops a constitution containing several features. The two that are pertinent here are ‘1: No individual is to sell their labour to anyone else. 2: While we have this problem whereby the products of labour still bear value, no member of the commune is to exchange their goods for anyone else’s. You can give the products to someone else (e.g., a child), but you are not allowed to make a trade. Our commune’s exchanges with other communes will only take place under strict control of participatory democracy.’ This policy enactment to be agreed by the communal participatory democracy should be sufficient to buy us enough time whereby the value embodied in the product of labour has finally withered away. But more developments that spontaneously arise from the new society ensure its victory in finally ridding the products of labour of value in order to complete the broader human liberation.
The equalization of different concrete labours represented in the fact that now 1 hour of brain surgery = 1 hour of smart phone assembly in a factory, in relation to the quantity of products you get back, raises the level of dignity of all labours. Far from being an underpaid oppressed creature, spending some time assembling the smart phones, (and rotating who does that), makes the experience far more pleasurable and rewarding. You are now an equally valued member of society. Knowing you are doing something vital and precious to the collective society, it follows the happy individual is likely to show more initiative and creativity. Meanwhile the dignity of the brain surgery has not decreased. If they save a child’s life, they will likely receive gifts from many members of society. Furthermore, training for skilled labour is compensated with a generous student package. So, they are still rewarded and prized by society without that desire impinging on the new fairness.
Meanwhile, the urge to technologically innovate also gets a boost in relation to the sluggish rate of technological progress under capitalism. The latter mainly only innovates when a company wants to gain the market edge. And when it isn’t profitable to do so, innovation slows. But under communism the thirst for new tech knows no bounds. Communism innovates on the basis of two motivations: i) because it is inherently rewarding work ii) to develop the productivity of labour that allows for even more creativity to be enjoyed by workers and a shortened working day.
As the lower phase of communism develops and happier people with more rewarding work, more products to enjoy, and tech that has become beneficial, human solidarity jumps light years. It develops to such a high point that eventually it becomes possible for society to successfully jump into the higher phase of communism. Herein, labour time ceases to be the measure by which you get your goods. People now put into society what they can, and take out what they need. For an analogy, it is like a family in a capitalist society. Unless it is dysfunctional and requires a written rota, family chores are usually shared nowadays without ‘exchange’ needing to take place or a sense of ‘what do I get out of it.’ You just do the cooking, someone else does the washing up, someone does the cleaning. Under the higher phase of communism, humanity becomes one giant family. But note, it is impossible to jump from capitalism straight to this phase. We are so used to putting a price on everything that takes place, human relations are too estranged and you cannot expect the milk of human kindness to be substantial enough, even after a revolution, to accomplish the goal. But this Marxist road-map shows the logical steps needed – revolution then reasoned evolution towards the good society.
You can buy ‘Creative Destruction: How to Start an Economic Renaissance’here.
[1] Mullan, P. (2017) “Creative Destruction: How to Start an Economic Renaissance” (Policy Press), p.124
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