Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1997 02:57:54 +0200 (MET DST)
From: rolf.martens-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Rolf Martens)
Subject: Re: M-G: Automation does not mean unemployment in non-capitaism


Dieter Dambiec wrote the below, on 23.10 

- and a few comments


Of course, automation doesn't mean unemployment, in a society
that can organize production properly, that is, a socialist
society. And of course, the workers should be all *for*
automation too, in capitalist society too. What they should
do is demand the biggest possible part of the returns from
that increased productivity that automation means.

In the below, there are some passages that seem to imply that
the level of production "must remain constant". Perhaps it's
not really the writer's intention to say so. But this absurd
theory one lways hears today from the bourgeois media. It's
typical of today's "green" arch-reactionary ideology.

>On October 2, 1944, an estimated 3000 people crowded onto a cottonfield 
>outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, to watch the first public 
>demonstration of a mechanical cotton picker. The onlookers could hardly 
>believe what they saw: each machine could do the work of 50 people. 
>
>For the first time since slavery - the hands and backs of millions of 
>blacks were no longer needed. For the next 25 years, more than five 
>million black men, women, and children migrated north in search of work. 
>Nicholas Lemann aptly called it "one of the largest and most rapid mass 
>internal movements of people in history."
>
>Then in the 1950s, a second technological revolution began in the 
>manufacturing industries of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York. 
>Hardest hit were unskilled jobs in the very industries where black workers 
>were concentrated. According to Jeremy Rifkin, president of the U.S. based 
>Foundation on Economic Trends, "Between 1953 and 1962, 1.6 million 
>blue-collar manufacturing jobs were lost."
>
>This capitalist drive to automate and relocate manufacturing jobs split 
>the American black community in two distinct economic groups: a skilled 
>middle-class and an unskilled underclass. The second group - the losers in 
>capitalist automation - is a permanently unemployed part of America whose 
>labor is no longer required and who live a miserable existence, often as 
>welfare recipients or as part of the underground economy of drugs and crime.

That "whose labour is no longer required" stuff is what the present-
time bourgeoisie are saying. This presupposes a *constant* level of
production. If and when more is to be produced, of course those
people's labour *is* required too. And in earlier stages of capitalism
at least, the level of production did rise.

>But automation does not have to mean increased unemployment and crime. In 
>Germany, for example, the work week is now on average 37.5 hours per week. 
>Workers are increasingly taking home less money in return for extra time 
>off. Germany is also the world's leader in vacation time: six weeks of 
>paid time off a year. 
>
>Although Germany's unemployment rate is higher than in the U.S., the motto 
>in Germany is that it's "better to share the jobs between more people." 

Hopefully, that's *not* the main motto. It should be: "With better
technology, all the more can be produced. And we want a share of it."

>The same goes for France, where a much-debated proposal calls for 
>companies nationwide to move to a four-day workweek, cut wages an average 
>of five percent, and take on 10 percent more workers.

That's not a good direction at all to move in. One should demand
cuts in work time with *no* wage cuts. Otherwise, it *is* "sharing
unemployment", which is bad and not good.
>
>These changes would benefit ordinary workers, even though they fail to 
>touch the exploitive core of the modern economic system. While Progressive 
>Utilization Theory (PROUT) propounder P.R. Sarkar and many other social 
>observers claim that capitalism will always have unemployment, he 
>supported modernization in industry and agriculture by introducing the 
>most appropriate scientific technology. 


In earlier days of capitalism, before the "green" anti-development
and anti-industry bourgeois political trend of the last 2-3 decades,
unemployment could be quite low during certain periods too. Today,
there's a policy of systematically furthering unemployment and
not developing production. It no doubt has to with the sinking
rate of profit but is also a wilful thing on the part of the
bourgeois political leaders, who fear for their entire system
if workers get "too many and too strong".

>Yet, according to Sarkar, modernization and rationalization in a PROUT 
>economy will not lead to increased poverty or unemployment. "In PROUT's 
>collective economic system," he said, "full employment will be maintained 
>by progressively reducing working hours as the introduction of appropriate 
>scientific technology increases production."

I don't know what this PROUT system thing is, but it sounds like
another bourgeois phony. *Socialism* is the real thing to strive for.
The present rulers of the world must be overthrown.

>According to American socially responsible business journalist Alan Reder, 
>"American capitalism is the meanest form of capitalism on earth." It is 
>mean because it often treats its workers as disposable commodities. But 
>Sarkar would argue that, ultimately, any capitalist society is mean, 
>whether it's called France or the United States, because it cannot 
>guarantee full employment to all working-age members of its populace. 
>
>>From a Proutist perspective, automation in a collective economy will have 
>a liberating effect on people, it will increase opportunities to spend 
>more time to be with family and friends, for sports, arts and for various 
>intellectual and spiritual pursuits.
>
>In such a society a black cotton picker would not lose his job to bigger 
>and better machinery. He would not be forced to move north, either. 
>Instead, he would keep his job, work less, and have more time to read and 
>play basketball with his children. 

Yes, so it will be in a socialist society.

Rolf m.



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