Can robots and information technology lead to a “post-capitalist” future

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Humanoid robots work side by side with employees in the assembly line at a factory of Glory Ltd., a manufacturer of automatic change dispensers, in Kazo, north of Tokyo, Japan, July 1, 2015. Japanese firms are ramping up spending on robotics and automation, responding at last to premier Shinzo Abe's efforts to stimulate the economy and end two decades of stagnation and deflation. Picture taken July 1, 2015. REUTERS/Issei Kato - RTX1IU6W

Humanoid robots work side by side with employees in the assembly line at a factory of Glory Ltd., a manufacturer of automatic change dispensers, in Kazo, north of Tokyo, Japan, July 1, 2015. Japanese firms are ramping up spending on robotics and automation, responding at last to premier Shinzo Abe's efforts to stimulate the economy and end two decades of stagnation and deflation. Picture taken July 1, 2015. REUTERS/Issei Kato - RTX1IU6W

There seem to be two contrasting approaches to the possibility of robots displacing more and more jobs in the future.

One is that this is an inevitable outcome and we must prepare for a dystopian future like that portrayed in the film Elysium. There the 1% have created a space planet in a protective enclosure where they can live a life of luxury based on robotic production on earth. A robotic security system is used to keep out the declassed mass of poor scavenging an existence on earth.

Professor Stephen Hawking joined the debate last week. “If machines produce everything we need,” Hawking wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, “everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared – or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

The other view is that robots will inevitably become more productive and useful and take over all the drudgery of meaningless work. This will in turn free people to live full lives of leisure and creativity.

However, both sides ignore the nature of the social system we live under today.

Capitalism is a system of generalised commodity production. Commodities are produced to be sold at a profit. The purpose is to make money not useful goods. Capitalists succeed if they are able to get at least the average rate of profit as a consequence of producing and selling their commodities. Competition drives the capitalists to increase the productiveness of their capital through the intensification of the exploitation of labour and nature. The introduction of new technology often aids that process by making labour more productive. But it is introduced only if it makes labour more profitable, that is if it produces goods more cheaply and those goods can be sold at prices that returns the average rate of profit or better.

But production is limited by sale. I discussed why there are limits of the market under capitalism last week. However, all capitalist economic theories assume an unlimited ability to increase production. That is why pro-capitalist economic theorists and commentators are forever surprised when generalised crises of overproduction emerge in the system again and again.

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Elysium can’t actually be a capitalist society. Who would buy the commodities being produced? The elite consumption of the 1% can’t be enough on its own to replace the consumption of billions of people who would have no means of purchasing the commodities.

It would be a type of technocratic slave or feudal economy that simply fed the serfs or slaves and appropriated the surplus. But why bother feeding them if the robots made robots and made the luxury items needed by the rulers? No society like that could tolerate for long. Society would have broken up through economic and social crises and class struggle long before such a horror could be established.

The 2008 international recession was the most recent generalised crisis of overproduction. Paul Mason, the economics editor of Channel 4 in the UK and a Guardian columnist, noted its impact: “The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession. It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart.”

Paul Mason believes that this crisis was the beginning of a deeper and more profound period of crisis in the system of capitalism. His article is headed “The end of capitalism has begun.”

A book by Mason exploring the themes of this article in more depth is called “Post Capitalism”. In it he writes: “The 2008 crisis was just the tremor in advance of the earthquake”. To salvage the fortresses of international capitalism, central bankers around the world pumped an incredible $12 trillion into the system, primarily through the form of quantitative easing (p.13).

I agree with Mason on the depth of the crisis and the need for an alternative. The capitalist system was thrown into reverse on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The recovery from that crises has been weak. There is a real possibility that a new a greater crises will hit the system as part of a new world downturn over the next few years. None of the usual mechanisms the capitalists have used in the past to drive a recovery seems to be producing the results they were hoping for.

A new downturn will mean that capitalism has few tools left to fight it. Essentially the capitalist rulers threw money at the problem. Government’s printed money, ran budget deficits, maintained low interest rates and so on. But if the economy turns down again – as seems to be happening – they can’t just repeat the previous trick without collapsing the value of the US dollar and destroying its role as the world currency. That would simply deepen the crises into one of a severity likely to be greater than the 1930s.

Robots can’t change that reality. In fact, although robots may increase the productiveness of an individual capitalist and his or her chance of survival, ultimately new technology undermines the system itself by accentuating and reproducing the periodic overproduction crises.

Paul Mason’s book on Post Capitalism argues the information revolution which is an important aspect of the new technology will inevitably lead to a “post-capitalist” society. His arguments are summarised in the Guardian article that is worth studying.

Mason argues that “information”, once it has been produced, is essentially costless to reproduce and, therefore, can’t be made to fit a capitalist model. This allows for a post-capitalist mode of production based on free ownership and cooperation to emerge and replace capitalism.

In my view, Mason overestimates the importance of information technology and its potential to change society on its own which clouds his judgement from the beginning.

The thesis that information is becoming abundant is not new. Marx wrote in 1863 that it was one of the many contradictions that exists under capitalism. “The product of mental labour – science – always stands far below its value because the labour-time needed to reproduce it bears no relation at all to the labour-time required for its original production. For example, a schoolboy can learn the binomial theorem in an hour.” (Theories of Surplus Value Volume I, p.353)

Capitalism uses every mechanism possible to turn information into a commodity to sell. That has been much of the reason for the prolonged negotiations around so-called trade agreement. These agreements are not actually much about trade which has few restrictions on it anymore. The capitalists have instead been using these agreements to beef up intellectual property laws, patents and copyright to protect their monopoly control. In addition, usually “information” is locked up in material commodities and cannot be separated easily.

These laws are then backed up by the legal, political and military might of the greatest powers on the globe. Kim Dot Com is discovering this to his discomfort despite his personal wealth.

Some industries may ultimately disappear. The production of music CD’s could be displaced by digital downloads and streaming. Maybe the LP stages a comeback for genuine quality music. But when some industries decline, others have grown in their place. One area of recent expansion in capitalism has been the fast food industry. McDonald’s NZ has 10,000 staff and is one of the biggest companies in the country.

According to Mason the key features of this new post-capitalist system are: “First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.”

It is not at all obvious that the system we live under has reduced the need for work. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the world waged working class hit 1.6 billion in 2013 and exceeded non-waged labour for the first time in human history. Average work weeks in advanced capitalist countries remain largely unchanged. But under capitalism overwork for some and under work for others remains a constant feature.

And Mason’s caveat that “The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences…. “ undermines his whole thesis.

Technology can eliminate labour from the productive process. But the current “social infrastructure” i.e. capitalism, based on production for profit, is the barrier to progress.

As Juliet Schor explains in her article entitled “Debating the Sharing Economy”:

“…these new technologies of peer-to-peer economic activity are potentially powerful tools for building a social movement centered on genuine practices of sharing and cooperation in the production and consumption of goods and services. But achieving that potential will require democratizing the ownership and governance of the platforms.

“The sharing economy has been propelled by exciting new technologies. The ease with which individuals, even strangers, can now connect, exchange, share information, and cooperate is truly transformative. That’s the promise of the sharing platforms about which virtually everyone agrees. But technologies are only as good as the political and social context in which they are employed. Software, crowdsourcing, and the information commons give us powerful tools for building social solidarity, democracy, and sustainability. Now our task is to build a movement to harness that power.”

We can agree with Mason that capitalism needs replacing. But what with?

Mason also says, “it will need the state to create the framework” for the changes needed.

What does he want this state to do?

He wants a universal basic income. He demands that the state stop privatisations. He wants companies to act more responsibly through “law and regulation.” He would “suppress or socialise” monopolies. He wants “public provision of water, energy, housing, transport, healthcare, telecoms infrastructure and education.” He would also “socialise the financial system.”

This all very worthy and sounds very familiar. It is a programme to try and make capitalism work through fundamental reforms to weaken the power and control of big business over the economy. It is a revived form of what was promised in the past by traditional social democratic or labour parties.

The problem has been that big business controls the state that Mason wants to use to introduce these changes and does everything to ensure it controls any party that wants to govern a capitalist country.

If a party wants to challenge capitalist control and carry out the type of reform programme outlined by Mason in his book it will require a massive confrontation with the 1% who run the show today.

The programme of privatisation, deregulation, and commodification of essential services was not some weird aberration in Thatcher’s Britain that can be turned around by a few wise heads getting together on the net. It was a global class programme to benefit the 1%. It has been enormously successful. That 1% is now more powerful than ever before. It will be harder than ever to achieve a fundamental change of course from those now in power. Every aspect of the existing state apparatus has been transformed to ensure it only hears the voices of the class that owns the means of production and exchange.

It will require a social and political movement based on alternative power in society to challenge that control, transform the state where it can be and build a new one serving the interests of the majority where needed. The only class with the numbers and social cohesion to be able to provide that power that has no interest in maintaining capitalism is the working class.

Paul Mason seems to have been demoralised by what he sees as the defeat of the left and working class movement. He writes that “over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.”

He is looking for a new agency of change in the “networked individual”. But under capitalism the networked individual may be a Bill Gates or a factory worker in China. Who is the more likely agent of change in this system?

Mason often seems to miss the bigger picture. For example, he notes that “In 2014, 30,000 shoeworkers at the Yue Yen factory in Shanzhou staged the first big strike to use group messaging and microblogging as organisational tools.” He seems more impressed with the messaging than with the strike.

The left project has not collapsed all over the world in the last 25 years. That was true for many advanced capitalist countries – especially in the Anglo-Saxon world Mason is part of.

But the working class is mobilising in their millions in China, India and Latin America. In Latin America, there are political alternatives developing that pose the need for a “socialism for the 21st Century”. That is the road we should be following rather than the dead end of appeals to the existing state structure or middle-class techno-libertarians to save us through a utopian “post capitalism” devoid of social content.

“Post capitalism” already has a name – socialism. We need to rediscover socialism’s original attachment to radical change that seeks to put democracy at the centre of economic and political decision making. The technological changes that are happening, including those allowing a more democratic means for people to collaborating politically and economically through solidarity social networks, makes socialism more possible today than ever before.

Technology can give us new levers, but the working class, not the 1%, needs to take control of those levers to restructure society in such a way that economy works for the big majority.

John Lanchester made this point very well in a wonderful book review in the London Review of Books headed “The robots are Coming”:

It’s also worth noting what isn’t being said about this robotified future. The scenario we’re given – the one being made to feel inevitable – is of a hyper-capitalist dystopia. There’s capital, doing better than ever; the robots, doing all the work; and the great mass of humanity, doing not much, but having fun playing with its gadgets. (Though if there’s no work, there are going to be questions about who can afford to buy the gadgets.)

There is a possible alternative, however, in which ownership and control of robots is disconnected from capital in its current form. The robots liberate most of humanity from work, and everybody benefits from the proceeds: we don’t have to work in factories or go down mines or clean toilets or drive long-distance lorries, but we can choreograph and weave and garden and tell stories and invent things and set about creating a new universe of wants. This would be the world of unlimited wants described by economics, but with a distinction between the wants satisfied by humans and the work done by our machines. It seems to me that the only way that world would work is with alternative forms of ownership.

The reason, the only reason, for thinking this better world is possible is that the dystopian future of capitalism-plus-robots may prove just too grim to be politically viable. This alternative future would be the kind of world dreamed of by William Morris, full of humans engaged in meaningful and sanely remunerated labour. Except with added robots. It says a lot about the current moment that as we stand facing a future which might resemble either a hyper-capitalist dystopia or a socialist paradise, the second option doesn’t get a mention.

Despite my disagreements with some of his arguments Mason’s conclusion in his Guardian article still rings true except I would count his proposals as among the utopian dreams:

“We need more than just a bunch of utopian dreams and small-scale horizontal projects. We need a project based on reason, evidence and testable designs, that cuts with the grain of history and is sustainable by the planet. And we need to get on with it.”

We need socialism!

33 COMMENTS

  1. We need socialism!

    Like a hole in the head (thanks for the laugh though).

    Socialism has been tried and failed. Marxists, Leninists, Maoists and all sorts of ‘caring’ anti-capitalists have had their turn. They have all had terrible results. Anybody who has studied twentieth century history knows how these state-run, centrally-planned economies turned out and the massive degree of authoritarianism needed just to stop people in these workers’ paradises from fleeing to the capitalist countries. None of their economies could hold a candle to the West until they started opening up trade (e.g. China, Vietnam).

    Let it go, Mike. It’s over. To paraphrase ‘Sir’ Michael: “We won, you lost, eat that!”

    P.S. Since you’re a Chavista (because who likes civil liberties and a functioning Venezuelan economy anyway?)

    Murder rate 1998 (Election year) : 4,450 murders
    Murder rate 2012 : 21,692 murders

    Source: Venezuelan Violence Observatory Annual Report

    Current inflation there is running at 68%…

    Wow! What a roaring success your buddies regime was in Venezuela…

    What a pity the voters didn’t learn from Cuba.

    • Link please?

      As for murder rates, “The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1992 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.5 in 2013, is still among the highest in the industrialized world”. (Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Homicide )

      As for economic woes, need I remind you where the Global Financial Crisis started? And need I remind you of the multi-billion bail-out by US and UK tax-payers when big corporations in both countries went belly-up?

      Does that mean that the United States is a “roaring success”? High murder rate and bail-outs required to keep big corporations afloat. Yeah, what a stirling success.

      • Basti boi is wrong.

        It is not socialism, because socialism failed (That is correct).

        Capitalism failes Not because central command and control of price manipulation ie the fed has failed (just as in USSR).

        But because the ego that typified capitalism in the 80’s is no longer a driving force of new recruits.

        The difference between socialism and post capitalism is status still has value in currency.

      • Not as high as Venezuela though Frank. Venezuela has been turned in to a basket case economy where even toilet paper is in short supply.

      • Regarding the five-fold increase in the annual murder rate, starting from Chavez’s election up until 2012, here is the link which includes the figures above: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/venezuela/9769897/Venezuela-murder-rate-soars.html

        This article, with updated figures, (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/30/venezuela-homocide-rate-2014_n_6395960.html ) points out that Venezuela’s murder rate (WHO figures) stands at 58 per 100,000, which is over 12 times higher than the USA rate that you quoted.

        • The UN put out a report in 2010 detailing how the 2008 financial crises through 100 million people back into poverty and 10-15 %, that’s 10-15 million died directly through police and military interventions and lose of retirement plans, and indirectly through suicide from forced redundancies and housing market jitters.

          That’s pretty much what happens when it is proved Wall Street cronies snort coke all day, every day.

          Goose hasn’t proved its point? And basti boy is still wrong

    • Another member of the National Party Social Media Team strikes again!

      I’ll just note that both examples of Cuba and Venezuela are places that have suffered from extreme interference in their affairs from the US. The information is widely documented and easily found for anyone who wishes to become better informed.

      Since Bastiat’s mission is a blindly partisan attempt to defend one particular perspective I imagine that becoming informed is of no interest.

  2. I disagree with Hawking’s. He doesn’t take into consideration that the machines are evolving at a rate faster than humans.

    High frequency trading robots are responsible for over 60% of all trades made on every global market exchange. These bots troll social media (Twitter especially because it was invented for High frequency trading) , collect data such as likes and views then make trades based on that data. Some bots have been programmed to write there own articles, post to the net, then mine data in which to make trades. This Bloomberg article from 2013 has more detail.
    http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-06-06/how-the-robots-lost-high-frequency-tradings-rise-and-fall

    But this machines on there own recognizance are funneling investments into amongst other things technological R&D in, smart cars, smart phones, apps, automation of the work force. These activities don’t just benefit the machine owners. They benefit the machines as well – http://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/092114/strategies-and-secrets-high-frequency-trading-hft-firms.asp

  3. If I hear you correctly.

    1. The robots aren’t the problem its who owns them and who gets to benefit from them.

    If two competing taxi company bosses buy a fleet of selfdriving cabs they can vastly concentrate their individual wealth at the expense of the drivers, who now become jobless and poor . Social disaster.

    If a taxi cooperative buys a fleet of self drive cabs and the profits are evenly distributed every driver now has more time to work fewer hours and go fishing ,biking, or writing a play.Social utopia.

    So the essential problem it appears is not technology itself , but the ownership of that technology.Whether its individually or collectively owned.

    2. The greatest political challenge of the next 20 yrs is now how to wrestle the state back from the control of big business in order to own, regulate and control automation to act for the wider good of all citizens.The socalisation of Automation .New s.o.e.s.

    3.However, even if a socialist citizens/workers campaign to recapture the state was successful and we were all leading utopian lives , traditional socialism does not save the planet from overconsumption ,overpopulation , gobal warming, deforestation, species extinction,fishery depletion ,sea level rise.and other aspects of planet wide ecocide.

    4. My critique is that socialism of its self (with or without robots) is insufficient to provide true utopia. This I believe requires a modern fusion of both socialist and green politics.

  4. @ SAM. Socialism did not fail. It was tried but failed to fruit because capitalism sucked the life out of it and turned it into a caricature. Marxism by distinction is very much alive and running rings around every pathetic attempt to account for capitalism’s failures including “egos” floating around in your imagination.

    Maybe it was Bots that wrote the VW software to ‘defeat’ emission compliance? Some evolution. Putting Bots in charge of the casino economy only equates to “junk in, junk out”.

    Mike Treen is right to point to the fallacy that technology is independent of social class relations – today, that of capitalism facing terminal crisis.

    Mason is a ‘demoralised’ Marxist. He writes the proletariat out of history and substitutes celebrity journalists and politicians. He argues that automation is supplanting human labor power and thus reducing value creation to zero. Capitalists will not survive zero value production (no profits!) nor will the proletariat (no wages!). As Treen points out, Marx anticipated this trend. Long before zero value production the destitute proletariat would rise up and seize the machines and harness them to produce use values for all.

    Michael Roberts has also written a critique of Mason as a utopian thinker. Essentially a re-run of the utopia that intellectuals (geeks) will find a technical fix that will make capitalism ‘post’. He challenges the assumptions of technical fixes such as robots and artificial intelligence (AI). https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/paul-mason-and-postcapitalism-utopian-or-scientific/

    The main point we should take out of this debate is that technology (which is the past accumulated labor of workers) under capitalism serves the interests of capitalists, a dying class. It only become liberating when capitalists are removed by the proletariat. A techno transition to postcapitalism without the seizure of power by the world’s workers is a dystopia of market chaos, wars, collapsing civilisation and ecological destruction. Capitalism has to be overthrown so this brilliant technology can be put to use under socialism to save humanity and nature.

    In this social revolution the geeks (hackers and whistleblowers unite!) will play a vital role in the vanguard of the proletariat!

    • Marx was pretty early in the capitalist cycle. He couldn’t have foreseen the the Internet and the speeds of communication. His police state predictions would have been more severe.

      Information is corroding the ability of policy designers to plan properly. Information is hitting planers at any believable pace Planers default mechanisms is to form monopolies, amalgamate, efficiencies ect ect. Building models based on the capture and privatisation of information, such constructions are fragile at odds with sharing information freely. This is where removing the ego centric thinking to a certain kind of group ethical ecstatic that brings people together and drives the new wave of app entrepreneurs to fix social problems rather than to create in built obsolescence.

      Consider when you remove the need for wages you remove the need for status. Status still has value in currency so it’s not socialism. But once you have no need for wages you do things for status. Kind of like selling apps to google.

      Where in a post Freudian era were the ego is not as centric as pervious eras. Woman in uniform, changing drinking patterns. We’ll have the universal ed. post Freudian in terms of lust and ego gratification. If you remove these from the equation you have a new set of perimeters driving new uni graduates. We have these blooming values spreading around New Zealand where there values are displayed on the net. Thats not socialism because that failed.

      I see it in the raw character of new recruits as there graduation ceremonies and life in general hit YouTube and Facebook. Graduates communicate to share experiences, jokes via social media. This is different from the way we have tried to make changes in the past. Again. Not socialism, it’s post capitalism.

      It doesn’t change the fact Graham Hart touches himself even though he’s got a billion dollars. Maybe he’ll give a billion dollars away in philanthropy to be a good human being. That’s the kind of stuff we are moving away from to a frictionless economy of free information.

      • Sam your method is impressionism, you take surface appearances (behaviour in relation to information, status etc) and string it together to form a world view (eclecticism).
        So the post-capitalist collective user of information is competing with the old planners who ultimately rely on the police state.
        But this is only a surface form of the underlying class antagonism of capitalism.
        Marx long ago saw the changes that capitalism underwent with the invention of the telegraph, but this did transform capitalism itself.
        While the telegraph as a means of communication sped up the circuit of capital (banks and stock exchanges could move capital across the whole world rapidly) this increased the exploitation of labour by capital.
        Since then the development of telecommunications has increased the speed of circulation of capital many times over, but today’s internet does not exist outside of satellites, cables, and power supplies that are owned and operated by capitalist monopolies who exploit the labour power of workers, students, and intellectuals who have to sell their labour power to live.
        Therefore it is insufficient for new technology by itself to replace social relations of production. Under capitalism technology is a force of production that cannot function except alongside that of labour power which transforms information into commodities.
        Students can joke about the reduction of their ‘ego’ to a commodity by Google and Amazon, but the marketing of their ‘ego’ is no joke.
        The TPP proves that we cannot challenge the monopoly of IP without overthrowing the world police state of capitalist imperialism.
        The free collectivity against the ‘ego’ (bourgeois subject) is not arrived at by imagining a post-capitalist personality free of bourgeois subjectivity.
        Such a change in ‘self’ will come only with the transformation of exploitative social relations in production into free social relations.
        Capitalists like Graham Hart cannot buy their freedom by acts of charity since his profits are still made from exploiting human labour power.
        His freedom will have to wait for the revolution that frees us all.

        • Media moguls tried sticking up pay walls in the early 2000’s but there business model totally failed because the information is so abundant on the free side.

          Once it use to cost $1000 just to copy one bible. Now for a fraction of the cost you can replicate sound bytes billions of time over the net.

          Moguls are increasingly disparate to control these new means of production. The Motion Picture Association of America expeditiously sends in swat to arrest Kimdotcom for a crime there is no law for in a jurisdiction America has zero business in. These disperate measure has not haulted or lessened file sharing. There is no solution to this problem in the physical realm.

          This isn’t just new norms. It is a new human experience. We are witnessing the rise of a new human being.

            • 38 minutes! Could you please next time attach a summery.

              Groups of kiwis are already acting outside the system to create there own trading routs [1] alternative forms of currency, and power stations [2]. When energy is priced at or near zero, human interactions are also priced at zero, the ideas of sexual conquest is priced at zero.

              There are communities making there own economies partly based on craft beer.

              TBH, who really cares if Keys and the 1% want to retreat to there gated communities. We don’t need them any more.

              There is nothing to fear about the revolution. It will be bloodless

              • Its true that the new society emerges out of the old but not at the level of networks of individuals.
                Marx shows that a new ruling class has to unite politically to clean out the old ruling class that resists change by destroying society and nature (forces of production).
                The ruling class does not retreat to gated communities, it occupies, bombs and destroys everything challenging its survival.
                As we look around the world where people are fighting back to win the most basic of democratic rights to live and defend themselves they are being starved or killed. This is the revolution coming up against the counter-revolution.
                The revolution cannot be peaceful because the counter-revolution never is.
                The revolution is not to be feared because we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

                • You’re basically saying humans are lazy and we don’t won’t to improve ourselves.

                  Production is going up (irrespective of wages) when we work, we are more tolerant and cooperative of others and there communities. In fact we are finding different forms of work like improving ones sanity and improving the infrastructure. Traditional jobs may not be boosted by an autonomous society but people still do things. It demonetises stress.

                  Moving towards a Universal Basic Incom (UBI) would strengthen the ecological arguments. One of the problems UBI advocates face is unions say we must go for job creation and not worry about externalities. One of the great advantages of a UBI is you could shift labour to doing more work – reproductive work in terms of caring for our communities, frail relatives and so on (woman’s work) It would enable people to say no to really exploitive jobs.

                  UBI is becoming mainstream and apart of the reason is in America there are driverless trucks being tested. In New Zealand truck driving is pretty much the last remaining well paying job for a guy with minimal education.

                  We have to look at the indirect positive effects.

    • Why don’t you set up some Socialist collectives and outperform the Capitalist alternative and provide the hard evidence for the view that Socialism beats Capitalism?

        • I’m not making a claim that the Daily Blog is not an effective blog and can’t compete against other types of blogs. Why would I waste my time doing what you suggest when it seems it is just merely a way for you to wish I didn’t point out flaws in people’s thinking here?

          • If it is proved the Venezuela president and his cronies are snorting coke every day, all day I can kinda see you’re point? :p

          • I’m not making a claim that the Daily Blog is not an effective blog and can’t compete against other types of blogs. Why would I waste my time doing what you suggest when it seems it is just merely a way for you to wish I didn’t point out flaws in people’s thinking here?

            Right, you’re too lazy to set up your own blog and simply bludge off Martyn’s work to post your ideas.

            But you have no hesitation in telling others to set up their own collectives, businesses, tv stations, newspapers, etc?!

            Notice the subtle hypocrisy, Gosman? (Think carefully. The answer is obvious.)

      • You have no idea goose. Human behaviour doesn’t change. Every system has with in it capitalist or socialist tendencies. Even Adam smith recognised this.

      • Why don’t you set up some Socialist collectives and outperform the Capitalist alternative and provide the hard evidence for the view that Socialism beats Capitalism?

        Actually, Gosman, we had something similar to that here in New Zealand. That is, until those thieving pricks Douglas, Caygill, Prebble, et al, conducted a mass sell-off of our state assets; privatised many services; and introduced user-pays.

        The majority of New Zealanders did not want Telecom sold – yet your lot did it anyway.

        You have a fucking nerve telling us to set up a collective when collectively owned assets already existed.

        No wonder your nasty little party (ACT) languishes under 1% and requires life-support from the Nats – you’re not to be trusted.

        Thieves, the lot of you.

        • You’re using other people’s money for your ends. That to me is not you setting it up. If you want to achieve your goals of collective ownership don’t force other people to pay for it.

          • No one forced anyone to set up our electricity production and network system. It was a necessity carried out by our forebears. Your “forced payment” meme is delusional and a re-writing of history to defend your thieving of peoples’ property.

            In effect, your ACT ideology justified theft of public property.

            I thought you Libertarian types respected property-ownership? Hell, you elevate it to the eleventh commandment, practically!

            • Did the government of the day put the investment in electricity and other areas to a referendum? Simply because a government does something does not mean it has the assent of the entire population as you well know.

              • Risks have never been this high which undermines investment.

                Hey goose. Don’t take this the wrong way. I find it difficult to follow what you say in this thread and others you post in.

                Reading your comments reminds me of some friends I use to know who talked like they where on recreational drugs and talked like maniacs and back stabbed each other while stacking a new TV on top of old broken but previously working TVs much like a child complains to his mother.

                It may help your cause if you answer your own question to some degree. So that people can assess quicker what your point is. And improve your thumbs down situation.

  5. Yes we do need Socialism. For those who weren’t yet born during New Zealand’s egalitarian period I can tell you, life was pretty damn good.

  6. The Labour Party has replaced their MPs with robots.
    If that failed experiment is anything to go by, the future is bleak.

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