Automation flowchart

The rich care enough about our opinions now that they can't just blatantly put us to death, they do so in some ways through policing, the military, exploitation of the third world et cetera, but at a certain point under UBI the underclass will not need workers at all which is when we see outright exterminism.

They're still gonna want consumers tho

At a certain point the absurdity of paying people to consume will become too incongruous, especially considering the resource crisis we're likely to face in the coming years. The rich will simply cut out the workers entirely and take the world for themselves with their robotic slaves.

The idea that recycling capital will create profits is key to Fordism, where the car manufacturer claimed that paying his workers better will help them buy his own cars. Nowadays the economy is much more complex, especially given most western nations' trade deficits to China.

I don't see why mini-shifts won't work just because your chart claims that.

It made no mathematical sense even when he claimed it, complexity be damned.

Automation does not create new jobs. Read Marx. It does, but only ever less jobs than were there in the first place, otherwise it would be impossible for the automation to be a sound investment for the capitalist, the machine would not have reduced production costs but made them go up

what do you mean by that?

mass production can create jobs in other areas of the economy as a mass produced product becomes part of society. Automation is directly associated with mass production. The thing is that modern automation does not increase production output, capitalists don't need that it just decreases hiring costs.

Ford meant this as a way to expand his consumer base. the only way for a company to accumulate more capital without adding more value to the system as a whole is to atract more consumers. Consumers may come from an increasing population, economical inclusion or getting clients from the competition.
UBI does not fill any of those conditions, it keeps currency cycling with a bit of the profit staying with the companies over time, so people will gradually get poorer (this already happens today). It's litterally capitalism drinking it's own piss to survive.

If company A pays 3000 workers doing mini shifts it needs to pay for 300 worker plus the machines. company b on the other hand get's the same amount of product with 30 workers and the same amount of machines. It's not hard to see who will prevail in the long term.
This strategy can work if there is a government enforced 100% employment rate, but i don't think this is happening in the modern world.

wouldnt this basically just grind porky to death in the long-run anyway?

While recycling capital with a corporate tax to pay for a UBI will not generate profit it will prevent loss due to civil unrest and a revolution of starving workers, it could be seen as the modern day "bread and circuses" , the upper class could probably see the value of spending a small portion of their profits to prevent a mob from forming that would take all of their profits (and possibly hang or shoot them).

yes that's why it will never happen

This flowchart is exactly why socialists should support the government offering to subsidize automation through reimbursements

I would point out that this only applies to the system as a whole and is part of why it appears so weak. Certainly it is possible for companies to profit in this setup but only at the cost of other companies, by managing to capture a larger share of the consumer base than you pay in UBI taxes while forcing your competitors to take smaller amounts would certainly work.

Of course this becomes a question of what happens when you have a singular entitity that pays for everyone to eat and at the same time collects that same money for the food. It seems to me that you'd be forced into socialism either by a handful of "investors" dying or 99.999% of the population dying so the "investors" can continue to retain their holdings.
Either way you immediately enter FALC afterwards.

Can you elaborate?

if you have 100% employment you can't find a replacement for anybody by definition, everybody is able to demand the full proceeds of their labor, there can't be profit, porky dies, this is why porky will never do this

It wouldn't work because: a) his employees were a minority of his consumers, and b) profit is accumulated by paying workers less than what they produce, not by handing people money and then having them give it back (profit is extracted at the point of production, not in circulation).

Anyone else think inspiring conversations about automation and its future effects with normies is a really good way to get them to think about capitalist relations in a more accurate way? I notice this even has that effect to some extent on many fascists and turbo-capitalists. It just seems to have a strange ability to get people to understand to some extent, complicated concepts in a simpler way.
Yet I don't see leftists talking about this as much as I'd expect. Do you guys bring it up to people? I mean it even has the benefit of looking like you just want to discuss a potentially interesting topic about the future of technology and society (which you kind of do).

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Sure, it's pretty essential IMO, along with climate change, automation/inequality is a topic simple enough for even normies to understand, and maybe critical enough to convey to them the seriousness of the situation.

we see this on occasion

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I don't understand what you are thinking here. A company makes use of machines, resources, and person-hours. It pays for person-hours. Suppose that the structure of taxation and regulation works in the way that paying for X person-hours for doing a specific job is the same amount in sum, regardless of how these hours are split up between people.

Imagine a union-party movement enforces that almost all jobs must be offered in terms of amounts of person-hours, not open positions (with very few exceptions, like astronaut), and it's up to the people offering to do these hours to individually decide what slice of that they want to do. And to prevent the bosses from circumventing this by only hiring people willing to do 50 hours per week, the movement pushes towards an increasingly formalized hiring/firing procedure. So that a smaller group of people willing to work rather long can't block job access for a bigger amount of people who'd work less per person, unless the 50-hour freaks have better qualifications AND these qualifications are relevant to the job – and disputes over that are to be handled by a jury made of ordinary people.

I admit I don't believe something like this is going to happen next week across America. The point is: This would deal with the automation issue and it would still be capitalism.

I bet he's the kind of person who claims that landlords provide something for society.

Pretty much at all periods in history 90% of humanity is a bunch of low Autism Level individuals that are only incentivized to care enough about their lives to fulfill the basic necessities, and besides this, contribute nothing to their communities or societies. Creating a one party system and associating yourselves with these people is not how you make progress in society, providing incentive for the intellectuals to grow and learn and create and contribute is. If capitalism doesn't work, I am not sure why its created an information based economy which generates the highest amounts of income in the whole world -before automation has even kicked in on a serious scale-. You may not realize it but the people who are actually heavily invested in their careers and the people who still haven't been born yet are always motivated by this system to learn and earn and live as well as possible, and through doing this, pay taxes which upkeep the working society they live in. There is a huge disconnection and subversion at the top levels of our bureaucracy that prevents people from effecting where tax dollars go, however, which is absolutely a problem, but its not a problem with democracy. Imagine what America would look like if we weren't in the middle east for 2 decades for literally no reason at all, imagine if the 2-3 TRILLION dollars we spent blowing up farmers actually reciprocated back to the working citizens that earned it? I do not think its capitalism which can fail, its people who do not become politically involved and see how they can impact a capitalist society positively provided that they aren't being overwhelmed with brainwashing ideology telling them to victimize themselves in one way or another and wake up everyday saying "I can't". I would argue that the whole process of arriving at the point where mass automation is even considerable has meant that capitalism has worked to some extent. Automation on the level you're imagining, meaning that its reached the point where quite literally every service job in every way has been replaced by machines will require tons of maintainence and investment, which could only happen in a highly successful capitalist economy under a massive corporation thats in bed with the government. I think the whole idea of automation on that scale is whimsical and we probably wont even see it by the end of the century. If capitalism fails its because it has been subverted at the top, or nearly all levels as we see happening in the west, and not because it is flawed at the core. Automation is merely the product of science and engineering and computer technology progressing to extreme levels, because the people who designed these systems were incentivized to do so through living in capitalist societies.

It might be possible but you are getting too deep for flowchart level arguments.
The flowchart is anticap propaganda

Here's the thing, he believes that it is easy to be gainfully employed with full benefits and that people who aren't are just simply lazy. He has no idea what real life is like. If you ask him about his life he will leave out huge important details. Most "successful" people do, I've even seen it here.

Stopped reading here, if such a union party existed there'd be very little to stop them if they wanted to take power. Especially if it's as powerful as the one you describe

The Solution is State Subsidized Co-Op organizations, and Labor Based currency, not debt based.

Muke, the purpose of telling the story with the union-party movement was like the purpose of drawing the caricature of somebody's face. A caricature isn't simply at odds with reality, it makes something more clear by exaggeration. You can be a retard about it and say the picture is wrong because no human being has ears as big as that, you are missing the point.

boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/208920823
I posted a 4/pol/ thread about this flowchart to see what they post about it.
This isn't a call to "raid" or whatever, just seeing what arguments they may reply to it with and possibly have an open conversation about the topic.

You might be retarded if you seriously believe this.

Lot's of straw men fallacies & false equations.
Rating: F-

>Capitalism failed
Look up Modern Monetary Money. The government spending money into existence is how money comes into being. The government doesn't create money through taxation; that's how it destroys money. Either one is just controlling the money supply. Giving more money to poor people will boost the economy because they will spend the most of what they get. Even if the money started hyperinflating, the wealth distribution is so obscenely uneven (esp in the US) that it would still be an improvement in the short term, and the falling rate of profit would kill capitalism before the long term problems of hyperinflation kicked in.

Good thread idea, anyway. We are in the endgame boys. Shit's about to crash and burn.

What the fuck man. I just don't want grandma to slowly die of cancer for years.

Here's a short and famous paper on the subject.
delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf

I think he is making an actual point, though it's not obvious. Basically, one could argue that this situation is irrelevant because by the point that a working-class moment became conscious, militant, and powerful enough to force this concession, they would already be able and willing to overthrow capitalism altogether. Zizek has made this argument about the Pikkety tax.

oh ok

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This is a really great job, nice work!
I work in AI and chatbot programming, and I know that most CS jobs will be replaced by Bot, in time Sales jobs will also be gone. as soon as they Refine Voice for Bots, as well as speech comprehension. What need is there for a Human, if the Bot is not capable of making the same mistake many times. With new Patches and ML, it will constantly improve itself. Not only will the Company lose the overhead cost of Labor, but its Efficiency will also Sky Rocket. The Only Labor they will really need is the Bot Developers.

You can go down the Line of Most popular Jobs in America, and you will see that MOST of them can and will be replaced by Robots and AI. 10-20 years, and the Markets will be saturated.

As you bring out, many naysayers are saying that new jobs will be created, but this is simply not the case. As it is today, many office employees spend more time on their Tweeter than they do working their Hourly Job. There is not enough work to do now, Technology has already improved Efficiency economy-wide. When AI Hits, companies will have to carry employees, only for charity and good PR. They will simply not be required anymore.

Make no mistake, the Speculators or the bankers will not be harmed by this AI-Bob-Apocalypse, they will benifit.. Since Profits will soar for a while.. Until Demand falls behind supply.

This is to say anything about the modern state of our Economy, Interest skyrocketing, Middle Class shrinking, Decent paying jobs disappearing in many industries. Most Americans don't have more than 1 months income on hand, at any time. A job loss or a reduction in hours can be the difference between a roof, and the street.

I think that a partial solution is a move away from Debt Based currency, and towards Labor based currency, on the Blockchain, utilizing MMT as an Economic vehicle, and implementing Nationwide Co-Op subsidization Grants.

daaryanworldview.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1041&action=edit

This is a really great job, nice work!
I work in AI and chatbot programming, and I know that most CS jobs will be replaced by Bot, in time Sales jobs will also be gone. as soon as they Refine Voice for Bots, as well as speech comprehension. What need is there for a Human, if the Bot is not capable of making the same mistake many times. With new Patches and ML, it will constantly improve itself. Not only will the Company lose the overhead cost of Labor, but its Efficiency will also Sky Rocket. The Only Labor they will really need is the Bot Developers.
You can go down the Line of Most popular Jobs in America, and you will see that MOST of them can and will be replaced by Robots and AI. 10-20 years, and the Markets will be saturated.
As you bring out, many naysayers are saying that new jobs will be created, but this is simply not the case. As it is today, many office employees spend more time on their Tweeter than they do working their Hourly Job. There is not enough work to do now, Technology has already improved Efficiency economy-wide. When AI Hits, companies will have to carry employees, only for charity and good PR. They will simply not be required anymore.
Make no mistake, the Speculators or the bankers will not be harmed by this AI-Bob-Apocalypse, they will benifit.. Since Profits will soar for a while.. Until Demand falls behind supply.
This is to say anything about the modern state of our Economy, Interest skyrocketing, Middle Class shrinking, Decent paying jobs disappearing in many industries. Most Americans don't have more than 1 months income on hand, at any time. A job loss or a reduction in hours can be the difference between a roof, and the street.
I think that a partial solution is a move away from Debt Based currency, and towards Labor based currency, on the Blockchain, utilizing MMT as an Economic vehicle, and implementing Nationwide Co-Op subsidization Grants.

This is gibberish and doesn't address the problem in any way. For starters MMT and blockchain are basically at odds with each other (no one will use an inflationary cryptocurrency over a stable or deflationary one), and secondly subsidising co-ops is going to do nothing to solve problems created by structural unemployment brought about by automation.

Thanks for the input everyone
New version judge it please.

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Looks good, I suggest not abbreviating FALC and adding whitespace margins to the text inside "Companies grow by…" and "Capitalism failed", so it looks more neat.

I intentionally abreviated falc to force people to look it up

OP has a good point about most of what he says.

HOWEVER he is missing the fact that Capitalism SUCCEEDED in being able to liberate so many people from drudgery. Count your blessings.

The real question is that with UBI will people be moral enough to maintain their world, or will they become spoiled and have too many children and generally trash the place?

The left already experimented with giving free money to blacks, they trashed the cities that whites built and now blame us for all their problems and, despite the bad we have done, we have also done the most good for them and gave them EVERYTHING they have.

I hope somebody can see these words for what they are and give me some kind of logical answer, because my answer is that humanity is not mature enough to have a fully automated society.

Needs more context anyway. Here's the first result on Google, the second gives an article in Wiki about the FLAC audio format.

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In the "let the starve" section, it's also worth pointing out that it's something that will rapidly effect the entire population: while it will initially just be certain sections of low skilled workers that are pushed out of the workforce, as automation advances (and real AI comes into being) the higher skilled/more intelligent sections of the workforce will be pushed out as well. Eventually this would start to effect the ranks of the bourgeoisie themselves, as high level managers are replaced and algorithmic finance and trading does away with most of the speculators (already happening). Blockchain and blockchain related technologies even offer a way for capital to effectively own itself, as share ownership can be tokenised and "owned" by a wallet on a decentralised chain without a human having access to that wallet (say, if an owner dies without giving anyone else the key). This autonomous capital will tend to out compete human investors as it would be able to reinvest more of its capital, since it doesn't have to support a human parasite.

Anyone who thinks they'll survive this process (without revolution) is fucking delusional.

Way to miss the point. What OP is talking about is a situation where people cannot survive because they no longer have work due to automation. Hard to "count your blessings" when you're dead.

LMAO. OP (along with other people in this thread) has already demonstrated that UBI is a complete non-solution.

Holy non-sequitur, Batman!

Reality doesn't give a shit about humanities "maturity" (or lack thereof), automation is something that must inevitably happen as a result of capitalism existing. It will happen whether you want it or not. The only question is whether we can survive the process.

Capitalism Didn't liberate anyone from drudgery, most jobs are still dull as hell and will only get worse as machines take up more functions see >2856370

People won't start breeding and becoming unresponsible, If decent QOL levels are mantained population will probably decrease. People with Civilized/fullfilling lives tend to have less children.

Fuck off Zig Forums and stop with this bullshit historical revisionist racism. Black people were never treated with dignity in the US and never achieved a good living standards. There is way more behind the decaying state of black neighbourhoods than "muh dumdum niggers". If you can't see this autistic facade you are retarded or unwilling to learn.

Fucking rightwingers and hiperindividualistic ideology. Morality, fun, or whatterver individual autism you blame society's ills on are consequences of a shitty system, not the cause.

when i google "falc meaning" it shows i get a good answer, well fuck.

Include a link somewhere on the flowchart, google isn't exactly biased in favour of communist results.

Nah here is a better one

Attached: Capitalism Vs Automation Final.png (1152x642, 102.96K)

This version is no good. It makes the extremely common mistake of separating 'capitalism failed' and 'FALC'. FALC is what happens after automation makes capitalism unworkable. After capitalism fails, we'll be in a world fundamentally different to anything that's come before - a world of stunningly high material wealth and stunningly low labor requirements. The kind of social relations and values we come up with to live and thrive in such a world will not - cannot - resemble anything we've had in the past. In such a world, something resembling FALC is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Indeed, the only way to escape FALC would be to destroy its material basis entirely - through something like an unrealistically extensive nuclear war or an unmanageably rapid climate change scenario.

The point is, 'FALC' isn't separate from 'capitalism failed', it's the only thing that can follow it. Non-FALC outcomes derive from the 'major crisis' item (ie, the chance that a major crisis sparks an uncontained nuclear war), and the 'growth stagnates' item (ie, the chance that this stagnation lasts long enough that the climate becomes unmanageable).

The only two options are 'FALC' and 'civilization fails'. Aka, "Socialism or barbarism".

good point, Guess i can change the position of things a lttle and get an arrow with "revolution" from capitalism failed to falc.

thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/mmt-minsky-marx-and-the-money-fetish/

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Shit forgot the background

Attached: Capitalism Vs Automation The last one for fucks sake 2 (1).png (1146x660, 103.91K)

Reminder that previous automation revolution DID create jobs for humans, but horses were shit out of luck.

Attached: Humans Need Not Apply.mp4 (1280x720, 7.79M)

Here’s the thing. White Collar Jobs will be automated faster than blue collar ones. This is because Software, while sometimes expensive to build, is dirt cheep to produce. However for blue-collar jobs robotics are incredible expensive, so expensive that labor is cheeper. archive.fo/XtG0c

youtube.com/watch?v=DMonlRsJ5hY

Technicians and tradies will be the last people to lose their jobs, since to automate these positions you need machines with almost the full range of human capabilities, in order to perform non-standard tasks and function in variable environments. Amusingly enough, this isn't true of most high end positions, which as you pointed out, can be replaced with software fairly easily (and there is incentive to do so, as these people tend to get paid fairly well). Personally I think this is hilarious and look forward to laughing at all the yuppie motherfuckers who lose their jobs while thinking their positions are secure.

We’ll never have full automation until self aware machines come online. However the amount of jobs will fall off a cliff. Ironically no one is proposing the easiest solution to this problem. Reduce the workday from eight hours to four.

This flowchart is good, but it raises an uncomfortable question: If automation is the path to communism, why isn't it at the core of modern communist praxis?

I mean, there are plenty of ways an individual communist could accelerate the deployment of automation - they could study engineering, lobby for more R&D money, make propaganda in favor of automation, and spur automation by driving up the cost of labor through union agitation. Lots of those activities would even secure funding and support from capitalists.

Despite all those options, communists today only do union agitation, and half-heartedly at that. Instead we seem to spend the majority of our time and effort debating questions that have only tenuous connections to the topic that should be at the core of our praxis. Why? Why all this focus on marginal political questions that we have no control over? Why all this focus on ideas, ideology? Aren't we materialists? We've identified a concrete change in material conditions that is incompatible with capitalism. Why isn't that the near-exclusive focus of our efforts?

My guess it people would feel too uncomfortable with that arrangement – lobbying to have their jobs removed and leave a gap between that point and some kind of UBI. They're more inclined to just try to uphold their means of living rather than seek revolution of some sort. Not that many people that are that ideologically committed.

I doubt they need to be self aware at all, just intelligent enough to perform whatever task they are designed for. I think there's two mistakes people make when discussing this subject: a) that high level general intelligence is required for full automation (rather than lots of interacting narrow intelligences), and b) that general intelligence necessarily has to be sentient/self reflective.

I agree with this. In fact I think it should be a central demand of any communist/workers movement. Not only would it save the proletariat from destitution in the short term, it would accelerate the falling rate of profit, destroying unprofitable enterprises and forcing massive consolidation of capital, as well as forcing companies to invest more of their profits in automation in order offset the rising costs of labour. It's basically the ultimate transitional measure.

It should be, unfortunately the contemporary left is infected with social democratic conservatism, looking back to an idealised past as the fascists do, instead of heading for the exit.

I'm literally doing this at the moment, and think more communists should consider doing the same.

Union agitation can be part of this process if we push for reduced hours along side higher pay (say, a 20 hour week for the same pay as a forty hour week). This would of course require a dramatic increase in radicalism (and probably novel forms of organisation).

If the four-hour workday is implemented, wouldn't the bourgeoisie be expropriated already? If you're making changes this big, why not just go ahead and invest those funds directly into automation instead of implementing shorter work days while still retaining the capitalist ruling class?

That's a bit like saying "If the eight-hour workday is implemented, wouldn't the bourgeoisie be expropriated already?". It's worth remembering that work-hours were once upwards of 12 hours, before it was reduced by action on the part of the workers movement.

Because the revolution hasn't happened yet? I'm talking about an action to bring about a revolutionary situation, not something to do once the bourgeoisie have been expropriated.

Could it reasonably be expected the bourgeoisie would just let themselves fall from their seats of power like this, though? Surely you would think this change is a whole lot more drastic with automation being such a real prospect, and that going from twelve to eight is a lesser margin than eight to four. Don't you think they would know this, and at a time in history where they have more power than every before, try to stop any change that would unseat them?

For starters I'm not suggesting that the reduction happen all at once, and secondly, of course they will try to stop us! I'm not proposing that we ask nicely, but rather forcefully shorten the workweek through industrial action (weekly general strikes on a certain day for example). You create a situation where the alternative to making concessions is worse for capital than simply giving in. This will be an easier sell for the vast majority of people than "hey guise, let's overthrow the state LOL", while at the same time creating a situation where revolution starts to become viable.

Yes, especially if you sell the four hour workday to the bourgieous as an alternative to UBI (muh inflation) or a societal collapse caused by 50% unemployment.

Sure, that's a fair assessment of where workers' heads might be at, but it's not what I asked. I asked why communists aren't making automation the center of their praxis.

I agree that 'automation at all costs' is probably a hard line to sell to workers, but I'm not sure that matters. I mean first of all, nothing communists say is popular with workers outside of extremely specific limited circumstances anyway. The only real difference is that 'full automation' is an objectively more correct line than the equally unpopular shit about imperialism or neoliberalism or what have you that we currently spout on street corners.

Another reason why I'm not sure the popularity of the (objectively correct) line matters is that workers are only tangentially necessary to its success. If you convinced a bunch of billionaires and bureaucrats to pump a few extra billion into industrial automation R&D, you would be concretely advancing the communist cause without having to even talk to a worker.

A third and more cynical thought is that the popularity of the 'full automation' line among workers is a distantly hypothetical question for communists in the first world. They're overwhelmingly a bunch of mid-to-upper class arts students playing with ideas on campuses - at least, that's been my experience. Why can't we just shift our praxis and pick up a bunch of equally middle-to-upper class engineers who can help us actually accelerate the onset of communism?

I like this turn of phrase.

Holy shit, same here, and for the same reason!

OK, so I'm obviously not alone in thinking that we need to make automation a central pillar of communist praxis. Why aren't we organized? Why doesn't our perspective even have a unified name? Why is our perspective so hard to find in leftist discussions?

Do I need to kick this off? Start an automation praxis general thread? Found the Secret Brotherhood of Communist Automators?

All socialists/communists support automation in the service of the working class, that's blindingly obvious, we only oppose it in the short term because the machines are owned by the oligarchs.

But that's a patently unworkable position.

Automation is the path to communism, not an effect of it. Automation drives profits to zero and catalyses the transition to communism, regardless of the machines' ownership. If you oppose automation until it can serve the working class, you're opposing the cause of communism until after communism's arrival. It's an absurd position. It's like saying "I support rain, but only after the plants have grown. I oppose rain in the short term, since it only lands on seeded soil."

This is foolish, you don't need to convince billionaires to invest automation because they already have to do it in order for their firms to survive. If you want to make capitalists invest in automation at a higher rate, you need to increase the price of labour power. To do this we need a more militant labour movement (and new strategies that take into account the nature of late capitalism).

Middle to upper class?! What are you on about? The overwhelming majority of students in developed countries are basically proletarian with some petite-bourgeoisie thrown into the mix. You're using class in a really liberal manner here.

Left accelerationism is a thing.

Just use this thread for now, it's better to keep discussion focused rather than starting multiple threads that die.

Here's that social democratic conservatism I was talking about. You're opposing liberation because some people get hurt in the short term. It's like opposing revolution because, *gasp*, people die in revolutions! It's a completely untenable position anyway, automation will happen whether you want it to or not, all opposing it will achieve is poverty in the region that opposes it.

Think of US history. There was a time capitalists could literally buy and own people. Child labor. Capitalists hiring goons to shoot union organizers in the early 20th century. During some supposed "golden age" for labor in the 50s and 60s race relations were much worse than today and OSHA didn't exist. The boss class is weaker than ever, all we have to do is to organize based on economic bread-and-butter issues and not allow children of the boss class as members of left-wing groups instead of making them the leaders, for fuck's sake.

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While labor organization is very important, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the only thing we can do is increase the cost of labor. Decreasing the cost of automation has the same effect from the opposite direction, and there's no reason why we have to completely ignore it in the way we have been. Billionaires and governments simply aren't investing as much money into automation as they could be. There's plenty of room to agitate for more R&D, more investment, more venture capital put into actual automation vs deregulation a la Airbnb, etc.

While you're right that billionaires are already taking the poison pill of automation, I contend that there's plenty of opportunities for us to encourage them to down the whole bottle.

We went to different universities, I guess. After half a decade of irl activism, including engaging with communists from overseas, I could count the number of first-world communists with actually proletarian origins I met on one hand. The rest were petit-bourgeois or bourgeois (ie, middle-to-upper class).

was a thing. Hasn't been a thing since like 2015. Died because Srnicek, Mason, etc failed to propose any concrete activities that could advance the perspective. Accelerationism's rotting husk was then colonized by Land et al, to the point that if we went around calling ourselves 'Left Accelerationists' all of our time would be wasted saying shit like 'no no, we're not the ultrafascist methhead burnout accelerationists, we're actually –'

God damn, this line gave me some straight-up PTSD flashbacks of my activist days.

Nice picture, now go ahead and construct your argument with words like a big boy. What part of
do you disagree with? Considering that it's the same argument being put forward by the OP's flowchart, I'm also curious to know why my post triggered you but the OP didn't.

i haven't slept last night, maybe aphter I get up, but in summation, your view is callous and cruel to the people really suphering right now under automation, and your only solution is to go phull steam ahead and phuck them harder. the problem with this besides the inhumanity is who are these people going to look to phor help even iph revolutionary conditions are met? it's going to be the people who at least said they would try to help them, ie. the phar right, iph we don't get out there and show them why they can and should trust us to bring them a better phuture by struggling phor them.

my ph key is broke sorry.

You're absolutely right. It's callous as fuck. However, it's also the path to communism. If my goal was to 'be nice to the poor benighted workers in the absolute short term', I'd not advocate for any of this. But my goal is communism, and automation is the path to communism. Your moralizing is actively harmful to the goal we presumably both share.

Ha, now we get into it! Who will people look to for help when automation engenders a breakdown of capitalism's self-reproduction? You're absolutely right, they won't be able to look to people like me, who brought the whole mess forward. In fact, they won't be able to look to anyone for help - not me, not the MLs, not the anarchists, not the fascists. Why? Because all of our political formations are rooted in capitalism. After automation makes capitalism untenable, people are literally going to have to figure out for themselves how to make society work under radically changed material circumstances. None of the political prescriptions - guesses - established under capitalism will stand up to the process of real-world social development.

So in answer to your question, who are these people going to look to when capitalism irreparably breaks? Themselves, you fucking liberal. They're going to look to themselves. The revolutionary self-activity of the (former) working class is the process by which people, finding themselves unable to reproduce the capitalist social order, construct a new social order that conforms to the new material reality they find themselves in. Neither you nor I nor any fascist boogeyman has any control over that part of the process, and you're fucking deluding yourself if you think you do.

Accelerationism doesn't mean doing the opposite of your intended goal in order to bring it about, ffs. Why don't you actually read something rather than posting idiot memes.

True enough, I'm proposing it be revived by actually developing praxis, primarily rooted in reducing the workweek, but also through technological means such as open source software/hardware and cryptography - something I believe to be important for 21st century labour organisation (seriously, I have no idea why we've conceded this field to the fucking lolberts).

So we'll be accelerationists while calling it something else. What matters is ultimately what we do with it.

The status quo is already cruel and callous, slowing things down isn't going to help anyone: it just draws out the misery. And for the record, I'm saying this as someone who has spent over a decade of my life alternately doing menial and being unemployed (the main reason of gone back to uni - I lost my job), I really hope these kind of jobs disappear - they're fucking hell on earth.

Should be: doing menial labour

(sage for correction)

bumping good thread

I think by now the thread died
Reposting the last iteration of the chart just in case someone missed it.

Attached: Capitalism Vs Automation The last one for fucks sake 2 (1).png (1146x660, 103.91K)

Thanks for your work though, I saved it and want to post on Reddit just to get visibility for the idea. Or maybe you'll do it yourself?

do it my reddit account is banned on all leftist subs

One last thing I want to emphasize before the thread dies completely.

The idea that increasing the cost of labor is the only thing we can do to speed automation isn't borne out by reality, I think. Just take a look at the Silicon Valley thread:

The cost of labor is an important factor in why the capitalist class doesn't feel the need to spend this money on automation R&D, but it isn't the only one. An equally important factor is the raw human inefficiency of capitalism's concentrated wealth. Capitalists are people, they fund the shit that comes to their personal attention. With concentrated propaganda effort, we could make automation the 'hot new thing' to invest in. It'd be reasonably easy, I think - just a matter of amplifying the pro-automation part of the discourse and talking shit about investments that don't push forward automation. I can't imagine convincing capitalists to pump even more money into something profitable they already puts lots of money into will be harder than, say, convincing them to buy boatloads of worthless bitcoin.

On the economic front, capitalists follow government subsidies. Especially in the US government there's a lot of money floating around, lots of it already earmarked for military R&D, that could be redirected to labor automation projects. Convincing Congress to pay Boeing to eliminate human labor from Army logistics will be easier and will help the communist cause more than ineffectually yelling at them to stop paying Boeing at all. Hell, you wouldn't even be limited to communist propaganda points in your arguments. If the US government pours an extra $10 billion into automation R&D because the Republican voter base 'somehow' became convinced that fully automated factories were the only way to beat the Chinese, it'd be fine - increased automation is the goal.

Obviously none of these tactics should replace bread-and-butter worker organizing. It's complementary. We can and should be increasing the rate of labor automation from both sides - increasing the cost of labor 'and decreasing the cost of automation. The benefit of working to decrease the cost of automation is that the government and the capitalists would be happy to help us. They're already motivated to automate, we should be making sure that they're putting as much money into it as they can. On top of that, the first world Left as it exists is in a much better position to decrease the cost of automation than it is to increase the cost of labor. A bunch of petit-to-bourg university students are much closer to capitalist and government purse-strings than they are to the shop floor.

I didn't say it was the only thing we can do, I'm just extremely skeptical of the idea that a bunch of communists can convince the bourgeoisie to invest more in automation, especially given that it's against their interests. Automation in capitalism happens largely in spite of the personal interests of the bourgeoisie: they generally only do it when they are pushed to do so by market forces. Not to mention that communists advocating for rapid automation is liable to give them pause: we don't exactly have their best interests at heart.

I'm fairly sceptical of the efficacy of government lobbying as well. This the trap that the remnants of left accelerationism fell into, and they haven't don't much with it either. You have to keep in mind that you'll be one tiny voice amongst many louder (and wealthier) voices, who's interests are directly opposed to yours. Not only will you have to compete with rent seeking scumbags lobbying the government for overpriced projects (lol Boeing), but you'll be in direct opposition to the conservative (and social democratic) "MUH JOBS" crowd. Just look at the trump administration's opposition to solar energy, and direct support/subsidization of coal - an industry which is presently dying.

I suppose such an approach could work if we're talking about creating general cultural changes starting a grass roots level, rather than trying to directly convince government/business. Kind of a forced version Landian "hyperstition" - triggering the belief in a phenomenon in order to give rise to it (which is what arguably happened with renewable energy).

Aside from that (and labour organising), I see the only other real option being the direct development of certain technologies themselves. Obviously this is limited to certain people and certain technologies (unless you have a spare billion or so stashed away), but working on (and fund raising for) say, information technologies that undermine intellectual property rights (open source software and hardware, anonymous file-sharing, various other P2P tech etc.) could go a long way towards both undermining the rate of profit, and speeding up the adoption of new technologies (part of the reason for china's rapid development is their historical disregard for IP). Check out some of the projects Protocol Labs are working on, if you want to see examples of the sorts of things I'm talking about (IPFS is especially interesting).

Protocol Labs:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
ipfs.io/
filecoin.io/ (yeah, it's blockchain, but unlike most blockchain bullshit this has actually uses)

I'm sure you're aware, but this is a gross oversimplification of capitalist interests. While automation is against their long-term, collective interests, they are powerfully, even existentially motivated to increase it in the short term. Automation reduces the profit rate in the long term, but promises super-profits to the first adopters. This is fortunate, as it means that even a single capitalist's defection in pursuit of super-profits ratchets the entire industry's level of automation upward.

The rate at which automation proceeds can be thought of as the balance between capitalist fear and greed. I submit that convincing a few capitalists to defect in a prisoner's dilemma is an easier propaganda task than resolving the proletarian collective action problem we've been mired in for the past 200 years.

Who said we had to propagandize as communists? I care about getting more and more extensive automation to bring about the material conditions for communism. I don't give a fuck about repping the communist brand. Posting is free, we should be making fascist arguments for automation, neoliberal arguments, Republican arguments, Democratic arguments, whatever. The fascists aren't above using sockpuppets to build false consensus around their narratives, we shouldn't either. If it works, we should do it.

This is more true of traditional Leftist appeals to government, imo. Our goals let us play things much smarter. Plenty of companies would jump at the chance to get the R&D necessary to secure a market advantage subsidized by the government. The accelerationist game should be helping to ensure that more of those subsidies get through. Boeing sucks up a lot of money in rent-seeking, but it also does R&D. Any dollar that we can shift from other projects to automation is a win for us.

…were swayed by extremely dubious promises that haven't really been fulfilled and don't seem to have noticed. This is politics, we're not obligated to be honest. By securing subsidies for automation, all we're trying to do is aim the government cash faucet onto a different section of the bourgeoisie. With or without our intervention, none of it would go to employing anyone anyway. Politics is fucked, I'm pretty sure we could get away with telling people that automation would bring jobs back to America. Hell, in some cases it might not even be wrong.

Well yeah, I was mostly thinking about this in terms of redirecting some of the Left's existing propaganda apparatus away from the manifestly unproductive shit it currently spews in favor of points that might actually help communism.

Forgive my ignorance, but how will these techs do any more to bring down IP than BitTorrent, the WWW, etc? In any case, I'm not sure that making IP sharing easier will necessarily lead to a reduction of the amount of legal force put into its maintenance. If anything, the advent of existing P2P technologies are what led to the DMCA being as strong as it is. On top of all that, you seem to have a worse version of the problem you ascribe to me - nobody with means is going to help you, and everybody with means is going to try to suppress you if you get it off the ground.

When I talk about automation, my endgame here is along the lines of Seed Factories, en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories , a surprisingly attainable tech that would fundamentally change the relationship between labor and wealth. By making orbital solar power cost-effective, they'd also end up creating the kind of discontinuous leap in civilizational energy capacity that forced reconfiguration of social relations historically (eg plant energy -> agricultural revolution, fossil fuel energy -> industrial revolution).

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that we could speed along the development of seed factories with some concentrated propaganda and recruitment effort. There's relatively little R&D necessary. The incentive is definitely there: the first company to build one will make Bezos look like a hobo in the few years before capitalism breaks down entirely.

Some good points in this post, I'll respond tomorrow night (I've gotta sleep soon).

Still has that rubbish that companies reducing work per person WILL be outcompeted by others because you say so.
0/10

Hey, I really like it. Some comments though:

- I think "What to do with the unemployed" should have another arrow leading to "They should just get better skills!". Since that's a common ancap argument. The reply would be that engineering etc is also being automated.
- FALC is not the only answer! I would just delete all the FALC stuff - keep it at "capitalism has failed".