The current economic crisis is more than a cyclical recession, depression, or even Great Depression. This crisis is a stage in the final stages of capitalism. In the wake and undertow of capitalism’s demise, billions of people worldwide are suffering.
Society in transition, as one economic system comes to an end and another begins, is extremely unstable. All political activity must be guided by an understanding of both the opportunities and dangers created by this instability and the leap or revolutionary change from one form of human organization to another, from one society to another.

Understanding the ultimate and underlying causes of the changes in the economy arms us and provides the foundation for political strategy and activity. In this article we will review the roots of a process that began over sixty years ago, and in observing how this process has been unfolding – the process of cause and effect – we will understand that the massive changes experienced so far have set the stage for even greater changes to come.
We are on the verge — in fact have already begun to experience — a dramatic leap in societal disruption caused by a new generation of electronic means of production. The automation of the factory floor and the replacement of unskilled and semi-skilled human labor in manufacturing and industry is almost complete.

The next stage, robots replacing humans in service and professional jobs, has already begun. Minimum wage, temporary and part-time workers in the service industry — already part of the new class created by electronic technology — will lose what little they have and flood the ranks of the permanently jobless.

Technology and Jobs

The central relationship of capitalism is that between capitalist (owner of the means of production) and worker (whose labor is the only means of survival). Capitalist pays worker; worker buys products. This relationship is constantly being affected by changes in technology in production. The spinning wheel, the steam engine, and electricity all created new conditions of work, new jobs, and new relations between capital and labor.
The capitalist class is revolutionary, constantly innovating as each capitalist scrambles to survive in a competitive market where increased productivity and lower labor costs are key to success. Such competition led to the changes in the means of production that drove the expansion of capitalism from tiny manufacturing centers in England through the stages of heavy industry, imperialism and this era’s globalization. These early stages of innovation were labor saving, expanding the labor force and markets.

Competition drives capitalism to introduce new technology even when the consequences of that new technology create conditions that make capitalism itself untenable. The introduction of electronics into production is labor replacing rather than labor saving and thus challenges the fundamental relationship of capitalism, that between worker and capitalist.

Crisis and instability today

Today’s jobless “recovery” from the recession only benefits corporations and the financial sector and even for them it is a futile attempt to hold on to something that is no longer viable, a temporary and unstable respite from the inevitable end of capitalism.

This so-called recovery will never produce full employment, because the private sector will not and cannot provide humans with jobs to produce what robots and computerization can produce cheaper and more effectively. In May of this year, for example, the private sector added only 41,000 jobs, fewer than March or April, not even enough to provide jobs for estimated 100,000 new entrants to the labor force each month.
Earlier this year the New York Times reported, “Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 – the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.” The article quoted Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics, “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.” ( “Despite Signs of Recovery, Chronic Joblessness Rises”, Feb 20, 2010)

History

Computerized automation of industrial production has fundamentally challenged capitalism. The process of development has been uneven; cause and effect not immediately revealed; and even now when the transformation of society is evident everywhere, many serious observers of society dismiss the seminal importance of computerized production.
In the 1950’s Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, said the “automatic machine” was the equivalent of slave labor and that any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequence of slave labor. He was prescient in anticipating the social impact of the electronic technology (cybernetics) which has caused widespread permanent unemployment, driving down the value of labor-power and consequently driving down wages; and creating slave like conditions for workers in minimum wage, temporary and part-time jobs. These objective conditions are creating a new class.
In the 1970’s American workers began to feel the severe impact of the new technology as the major industrial giants such as auto, steel, and rubber closed plants and reopened new ones with labor replacing technology. A GMC advertisement aired during the 2010 NBA playoffs of a Sierra being assembled robotically showed how completely robotics have replaced human labor in industry. (See: Automation and Robotics News, collected and compiled by Tony Zaragoza, http://academic.evergreen.edu/z/zaragozt/arnewsarchive.html; “No Humans, Just Robots,” http://singularityhub.com/2010/02/11/no-humans-just-robots-amazing-videos-of-the-modern-factory/)

The crisis to come

ATM machines replace bank tellers; self serve check out at supermarkets replace cashiers. These are the harbingers of the future when Wal-Mart, Target and every big box store will be introducing totally automated inventory management systems.
As described by Marshall Brain in his Robotic Nation internet series, mobile pick-and-place robots will locate every product through RFID tags. They will be able to restock from warehouse and stack items on shelves. All maintenance, customer assistance, shopping and check out will be automated. He predicts that the transition will take about five years, eliminating ten million jobs.

And that is not all. At least 50 percent of jobs today are in fast-food restaurants, retail stores, delivery companies, construction, airlines, amusement parks, hotels and motels, warehousing and so on. All are prime targets for robotic replacement. Brain projects that taken all together about 50 million jobs will be lost due to automation by mid-century. (Marshall Brain, Robotic Nation, www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm).

Political implications

Computerized production and robotic automation frees us from backbreaking labor and opens the opportunity to fulfill our unlimited potential for creativity and social development. Under the economic laws of capitalism, however, where jobs are the nexus to all that provides for our health and well being, we are faced with destruction and misery rather than freedom.
To resolve the jobs crisis, some call for a new New Deal, which was intended to save capitalism by stimulating demand to kick start investment and hiring. WWII, not the New Deal, created the conditions that ended the Depression and catalyzed the post war expansion.

Now, neither war nor a New Deal will create the conditions for the private sector to hire human labor that robots can do cheaper and more efficiently. The private sector, while demanding bailouts and using its control of the State to feed its insatiable demand for greater corporate welfare, will not be providing jobs.

The struggle for survival of the jobless is not the struggle of worker against employer, but a struggle to demand that the State provides what the private sector is not providing. None of the practical and economic problems of the jobless and the part-time, temporary and minimum wage workers can be addressed except in the political struggle over which class the government will serve.

The government intervention in the economy in the interests of the capitalist class and private property opens the door for a political struggle in the interests of the people. Bail out the financial sector? Or bail out laid off workers and foreclosure victims? Nationalize in the interests of private property? Or in the interests of the people?

Vision of the future

The ability of the computerized, robotic, electronic means of production to provide abundance to satisfy all human needs without human labor is incompatible with capitalist relations of production. Thus, society is experiencing tremendous instability and is in the process of revolutionary change.

The ruling class and the State, intertwined and entangled, face the challenge of holding on to the wealth and power that they now have, while preparing for something new, a revolutionary change to a new form of private property. They are moving toward fascism in an attempt to stabilize an inherently unstable situation.

Confronting them is a revolutionary class created by the new means of production. The demands of this new class for food, clothing, housing, education, peace and health care are revolutionary demands. This social force is capable of bringing about the reorganization and restructuring of society in the interests of the world’s people, so that the means of production are communally owned and the abundance is distributed according to need.

This will not happen automatically. It must be consciously fought for. Thus, revolutionaries must arm the class with a vision of the new society, and with the knowledge of its class interests to prepare for the difficult stages it must go through in its quest for the power to direct the revolutionary restructuring of society made possible by the new means of production.

July.2010.Vol20.Ed4
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