Let The Robot Do It

“No more of such vague formulas as ‘The Right to Work’ or ‘To each the whole result of his labor.’ What we proclaim is the Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!” -Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

When it comes to economic prosperity, the word on everyone’s mind is jobs. Jobs will bring us prosperity, jobs will get things back to the way they were (or at least the way we imagine them to have been) back when America was great. Republicans want jobs. Democrats want jobs. You want a job (or maybe just a better one). I want a job. Jobs have become an even more valued, more mythic goal than growth when we talk about our economy. Sometimes we cut taxes to try and create them, sometimes we hike them up. Sometimes we slash social programs so that people are forced to find jobs, sometimes we expand them so that people have the tools to get the jobs. Every politician seems to be trying their damnedest to create jobs, so why don’t we have them? When we are going to dig deep enough within our reserves of political innovation to finally strike gold and have them all come tumbling out- glorious jobs!- onto a struggling populace thirsty for work?

And what if they don’t? What if the jobs just aren’t there anymore?

What I think this whole concept of job-creation fails to account for are the historical and technological conditions under which labor operates in our era. We’re constantly looking over our shoulders in the US to a more prosperous and equal time when employment was high, everybody seemed to have a place in society and we didn’t feel as though our whole world was going to be yanked out from under us at the whim of a downsizing employer. It’s strange to think that for all the progress we’ve made in the past few decades- progress in industrial production, in communications, and in medicine to name only a few areas- we seem to be less sure than ever about our personal futures. Why? If our lives are on the whole becoming more difficult as technology marches on then what has been the point of this progress?

Nowhere is the contradiction more apparent than in the mechanization of industrial and manual labor. There was a time, when the process was still nascent, when the idea of mechanized labor was a good thing, a triumph of technological progress that could free humanity from the need for brute labor, and allow us to pursue more edifying activities like artistic or intellectual expression. The idea seems far-fetched now, to say the least. Mechanization has changed from being a utopic trend to a dystopic trend, where large swaths of humanity who have lost their place in a changing society are left to suffer and, ultimately, expire, as they are incapable of “contributing their fair share.” A Social Darwinian ethic has taken root which rationalizes the suffering of the unemployed as the natural outcome of technological progress.

Ultimately, this change from a positive view of mechanization to a negative one is not the result of technological progress itself, but the social relationships that those technological achievements serve. Critical to the utopic view of mechanization was its contextualization within a concept of society as a whole, that it was possible for these tools to bring everyone forward. And critical to this view of a connected and cooperative society was the inherent worth of every individual, and their consequent well-being. The only reason that mechanization should scare us is if we think that those who do not work (not can not or will not, but do not) do not deserve to live fulfilling lives with their basic physical necessities accounted for.

To be certain, mass manual labor hasn’t been driven out by mechanization alone. Outsourcing by multinational industries to underdeveloped economies where laborers have less bargaining power to assert their right to decent working conditions and a just wage has done significant damage to the American workforce, who accrued power through unionization, primarily on the factory floor. A lot of work is still being done by hand, its just being done elsewhere for the time being.

Still, while much has changed since the era where mass manual labor in America was a reality, much has also stayed the same. People still go hungry without food and thirsty without water; they freeze without shelter and without medicine their sicknesses will kill them. Our capacity to provide for these necessities in pure physical terms has increased manifold, but due to the methods of distribution dictated by capitalism we still face widespread malnutrition, homelessness, and disease as these issues are left to the whims of the market.

The “C” Word

The fetishization of jobs is a contradiction that actually demonizes technological progress as edging out the human element of our workforce and, more, generally, our society. And make no mistake, this contradiction is a contradiction of capital. The original thesis of capitalist development has been inverted. Where we once believed that the competition inherent to capitalism would produce the optimal results for the human beings that compose a society, we now believe that the results produced by capitalism are inherently optimal and that society must change to accommodate them. If capitalism robs people of their livelihood by rendering their labor irrelevant, then this is not a failure on the part of capital, but of human beings. People deserve to suffer and fail within the system if they cannot prove themselves worthy contributors.

This ethic is dehumanizing in the fullest sense of the world. No longer is the focal point of our social relations the well-being of the individual subject or society as a whole, but the success of the logic of capital in and of itself to produce “growth,” which we are assured will, through obtuse channels of wealth, result in the best of all possible worlds. How did we come to a point where concrete human experience is secondary to the logic of abstract economic relationships?

Phobia towards the “free rider” is a long-documented phenomena within the American psyche, and it has likewise long been a tool to rob people of a feeling of inherent self-worth by sublimating them to a society which places a near-religious value on growth and efficiency. Furthermore, trapping people into this mode of thinking relies on appeals to the most vile and bigoted impulses of the exploited class. The idea of the “welfare queen” used to terrify middle- and lower-class voters into supporting, philosophically, the end of broad social programs and the necessary taxation to fund them, is rooted in racial divisions preyed upon initially by Republicans but now more generally by all economic conservatives, including the “fiscally responsible” Democrats. In this article from Salon, writer Ian Haney-Lopez documents the terminology of Reagan’s neo-conservative revolution, which could no longer rely on explicit race-baiting after the successes of the civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s. Instead, Reagan and his advisors (notably Lee Atwater) utilized a coded otherfication of black, latino and other “minority” citizens as being irresponsible and lazy non-contributors to society. Alien figures who could not be trusted to wisely utilize the resources given them by the state, but would instead exploit the state (and thereby the white establishment) through falsifying documents and creating new identities.

Here we find a critical link established between working-class and racial politics, with racial bigotry being activated by politicians as a scapegoat to cast the welfare recipient as a lazy, alien, and (ironically) exploitative figure suckling off the teat of society without any intention of contributing. Human beings are treated as investments, whom the state should only provide for on the condition that they can expect a proper return once they’re “back on their feet.” And this is being generous. The conservative opposition to the welfare state is based more generally on the idea that “shit sinks,” and if individuals should suffer from a lack of basic necessities, then this is merely a from of societal self-regulation, the necessary friction of our order, and to step in would be to upset the balance of nature.

And this is perhaps the keystone of Darwinian capitalism that has caused us to fear mechanization and technological progress more generally: the idea that the logic of capitalism is purely “natural.” That it has no agency or interest, but is an expression of the absolute logic of human development, “pure” and unrestrained from ideological considerations like those inherent to socialism, which we are told must inevitably lead to collapse.

It’s Just Not Natural!

This idea that capitalism provides us with the best of all possible worlds without indulging in dangerous ideological considerations is a seductive one, forged in the fires of the Cold War and grown fat on the successes of neo-conservatism worming its way into the public consciousness. The essential contradiction in it, however, is a presupposed notion of the “best world” as being the one capitalism produces. We have given up imagining a better world for ourselves and instead take the evident order as naturally being the best.

But the truth of the matter is that the idea of the best world cannot be answered objectively- it requires a positive statement of values, and though values are informed by our observations regarding the world around us, they are rooted in human experience, which is subjective. If we accept a world where the value of actually existing human beings is secondary to their potential worth as a financial investment in a system then that is a choice we have made. Capitalism is arbitrary. It produces the most profitable results, and only sometimes (more and more rarely as time goes on) are those results the ones that provide the greatest utility for society as a whole.

What has marched on, regardless of social relationships, is technology, the mastery of human beings over the world around them. We are, on the whole, much less subject to the whims of nature- of famine and starvation, of exposure to the elements and disease- than we were a century ago. America is much more advanced (technologically and industrially) than Russia in the early 20^th century, or China in that same period. We are living in a world where providing food, medicine, and shelter to every member of our society is not a problem of production, but of distribution. The efficiency of mechanization has made it easier in practical terms to fulfill basic human needs, so why should we be afraid of progress?

We’re afraid because the problem isn’t with technology, its with us. Why, if our society should be becoming more generally efficient and capable of satisfying physical needs through technological progress, are we being forced to work longer hours, with fewer vacation days, under more strenuous conditions, and for less real income than a generation ago? Is it because human beings have changed so radically and acquired such strange needs that this is the only possible outcome? While surely capitalism manufactures needs to keep workers in a cycle of constant debt and toil, we are basically the same animals our parents were, and our parents parents before them. By and large we need the same things- and not just in physical terms. We need leisure so that we can explore ourselves, what is important to us, and spend time with those we love. We need to feel that we are part of a society which values us, so that we can feel safe enough to exercise our freedoms in meaningful ways without fear that the life we know will evaporate if we are somehow judged “inefficient.”

So we return to the question: Why fear the robot? Because we fear each other. More than that, because we have been trained to fear each other, and to believe that those we count as “different” along lines of race or religion or class or other vectors of identity do not share our values and will exploit the systems we set up to give dignity and sustenance to those whom the logic of capital leaves behind. A “job” has become a proof of worth for existence under capitalism, a sign that, yes, we are invested in the general well-being as evidenced by our work. The notion is understandable, but it does not hold for our era. Jobs are disappearing, and whether this fact proves liberating or oppressive depends upon how we relate to our fellow human beings, and more basically if we consider their lives inherently worthwhile. Ultimately, such a belief is the only thing that stands between socio-economic equality and the nihilistic faith of market outcomes. If we cannot find a reason to make the robots serve us, then we will end up serving the robots, who in turn serve the logic of a market divorced from human necessity.