Critical support to a corporation

Anything to develop those productive forces baybee

I saw this coming a mile away bro we're all secret neo-cons itt bro capitalism won sorry guys give it up shut the organizing down

imagine - john lenin, lets go

Nahhhhh cmon

why does automation decrease profits

less workers = less people to buy ur s***?

Real

Imagine not having this as your smart phone

one of the worst parts about hacks like elon is that they turned a generation of socialists into luddites

despite advances in computing, automation/AI etc. being essential to a modern socialist society

Mao version harder

That's why you gotta take the PAUL COCKSHOTT pill.

towards a new socialism was an interesting read fs

As Marxists, we hold on to the labor theory of value. This comes with two main conclusions:

1. The more time it takes to produce a commodity on average, the more expensive it will generally be. We call that the socially necessary labor time.

2. Workers produce a certain amount of exchange value. However, when making the sale, the capitalist will generally not give all the earnings of the sale to the worker. As a capitalist, he will hold some back of this earning: Some go back into the company (reinvestment), some go to the state (taxes), some go to the financial sector (debt, dividends) and what's left over goes into the private accounts of the rich and powerful, the bourgeoisie. Ultimately, this means that profits are the surplus value that the bourgeoisie has extracted from his workers. Basically, the capitalist makes money by not paying the worker what the worker is truly worth.

Now, back to automation: Why would you automate a task? You automate because machinery does not need wages, does not need breaks and can do things faster than humans can do.

If you automate a process further, you will be able to produce more products in a given period of time than your competitor. If you manage to produce a chair in 5h, while everyone else takes 10h, you can make twice as many chairs as them in the same time. If we assume that demand doesn't change, this means that you are eating into the profits of your competitors. In the short-term, you are increasing your profits, while they are losing out on profits.

You lower the average time it takes to make that product. Your competitors must be able to lower their average labor time as well to keep on competing with you.

However, by automating this task and putting pressure on your competition, a few things happen:

1. The amount of labor time needed for the task sinks. Remember that profits are directly tied to the surplus produced by the worker. By introducing more and more automation, the ratio of labor done by the worker for every product decreases, while the ratio of fixed costs to keep up the machinery and tools increases. There is less opportunity for the capitalist to skim the surplus from the value the worker produces. The capitalist has less opportunity to extract and exploit his workers - he can cut corners on wages, but he cannot corners on his machinery and technology if he wants to keep up.

With every increase in automation, his ability to extract the surplus value produced by the worker decreases. With this, his chance to make profits also generally falls. The less labor is inside the product, the less profit he can make.

2. Now remember that the other capitalists have to catch up. They will also try to automate as much as their competitors do. The entire industry will try to automate, and that will drive down the labor surplus inside the entire industry.

You can see this easily if you look at electronics: Imagine how much the newest iPhone would have been worth in 2000 - a fortune. But how much is that new iPhone worth now? Not as much in comparison.

With every increase in technology, the "standard" of what one hour of labor within that industry produces increases. One 1 hour of a machine producing a good might have given you 5 GB storage in the past, now 1 hour of a machine running might give you 5 TB of storage. The bar inside the industry raises, or put differently: The socially necessary labor time to produce a storage space with 1 GB sank, therefore making it less valuable in the market.

At the very same time, however, the barrier to compete has increased: It gets harder and harder for capitalists in said industry to compete, since they must spend more money on machinery than before to be able to keep up with the competitors. They must spend more and more on machinery, rather than on humans, which - as stated above - cuts into their long-term ability to exploit workers.

@Come_to_BR

3. Because the barrier of entry increases, the market tends to monopolize. The bigger capitalists are able to eat up the smaller capitalists. For example, the barrier of entry for semiconductors is so huge that the world has a massive shortage of semiconductors and nobody is able to just open up a new factory to produce them.

The monopoly comes with its own set of problems. The entire notion of "competition", which was supposed to be one of the core improvements of capitalism, falls flat. They can simply abuse their market dominance rather than focus on improving their products, and eliminate small time capitalists.

4. Lastly, the more is automated, the less wages are paid for workers and the more unemployment increases. Since the wages sink, the less products the capitalists are able to sell to consumers. Since unemployment sinks, the less s*** capitalists have to take from the workers, because there is a reserve army of unemployed waiting to take your crappy job from you once you complain since they are off even worse.

This is why capitalists like Gates or Zuckerberg support things such as universal basic income: They need consumers to be able to remain capitalists, and they probably don't want the unemployed masses to revolt against them.

Combined with the point in #3, you might get a monopoly of big-time capitalists dominating the state and feeding the population via UBI, while most small-time capitalists have turned into workers and parts of the workers have been automated away. At that point, it won't really look like capitalism as we know it anymore, but maybe a new form of economy we haven't seen yet.

So these are the major consequences that can come with automation.

eh I dont think so most of his fans that are into the science aspect are more upper middle class folks that are naturally against socialism, the ones that are more working class I noticed are more into the "hustle" culture aspect of becoming a billionaire lol and if Musk didnt exist, it would be just replaced with another ass wipe

nah i mean im def exaggerating talking about "a generation"

but also im not talking about elons supporters, im talking about his detractors

like today I read a comment on a diff thread where a guys like "fuck elon and any other nerd that cares about AI"

like the first part is cool but criticizing technological innovation in the abstract doesnt make sense, the real problem is the fact that this innovation cannot be effective in a capitalist system yfm

I get the food grown and worked for by the serfs. When they don't make the quota I let it slide sometimes. Why am I the bad guy here? I reinvest my money by giving the serfs thatch roof houses and tools. How am I the bad guy here. I do more than most lords would ever do.

had a interesting conversation in a BF4 server tonight

when will gamers finally realize the culture war is just smoke and mirrors for the real thing that is killing creativity, which is capitalism

It’s funny because everyone hates in micro transactions and yearly releases and stupid practices like that but they won’t attribute it to the system that encourages it

Still crazy how much of an impact gamergate had on politics if you rly think abt it

It was the beginning of the anti-sjw wave

crazy this is legit from 2006-2007 (verified via reverse search archives), you would think this came from a Jordan Peterson-adjacent twitter user. The US really been doing the same s*** for almost multiple decades and yet every year it feels like the exact same recurring discourse is still hot in the public culture war

jordan_peterson_bibliography.jpg

"Al Gore's Recent Crusade"