Living in Automated Times

We are steadily, inexorably it seems, leaving the world of manual labour.   Even the Chinese are beginning to turn to robotics to replace low-wage workers.  So, how do entire societies live when machines have taken their work?  An interesting problem that invites interesting solutions.

During the Industrial Revolution, working hours increased by 20% as factories replaced feasting. With our post-machine standard of living, we can afford to shed some of the Puritan guilt that has, for centuries, kept our noses to the grindstone.

Today we find a great deal of work-sharing in poor countries. It is the accepted means of making a limited amount of available work go around. Economists call it "disguised unemployment".

If escape from poverty is the goal, disguised unemployment is a bad thing. But if machines have already engineered the escape from poverty, then work-sharing is a sensible way of "spreading the work" that still has to be done by human labour.

If one machine can cut necessary human labour by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to 10, with each diminishing block of labour time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.

Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.

And, make no mistake about it, we are on the cusp of a revolution in social thinking.  18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics - the forces that have been the template of our societies for generations - are rapidly losing their social utility.   They provide few answers for the real problems of the day and of tomorrow - climate change, resource depletion and overpopulation.   They can merely provide responses, not solutions, and, unfortunately, the time for mere responses is long past.

Our old institutions can't offer much beyond the sort of authoritarian oligarchy that is taking hold today and that can only progress to a sort of neo-feudalism leading to revolt and likely chaos.  The alternative is for a revolution in social thinking that leads to a new, orderly society that serves the many, not merely the few.

Sorry, kids, but we can't pretend we're still in the 80s any longer.

The Face of Corporate Feudalism

Democracy is reeling.  Corporatist authoritarianism is quietly ascendant.  Rights and freedoms are now being issued with price tags and, if you can't afford them, you don't get them.

Zoe Williams, writing in The Guardian asks, "When did being lowly become a criminal offence?"

It's a new world order that you probably have not seen and yet it is setting in all around us.  It's the very sort of order that appeals to soulless authoritarians like our own Steve Harper.

Please, follow the link, read the article, and then try to think about how we stop this because, if we don't, it will get worse and that could become our children's "normal".

Update - If The Guardian piece isn't enough to make you think twice about Amazon, check out this report from The Independent an anonymous commenter here brought up.

Canada's Imperial Premiership

You don't have to convince many British Columbians that Ottawa no longer functions as a democracy.   Consent, in the twisted mind of Stephen Harper, is something that is extracted at the ballot box and ceases to have any relevance during the actual term of government.

Because Harper deems our consent unnecessary, he treats democratic notions such as consultation meaningless courtesies to be dispensed with whenever possible.   That much is unquestionable from the way Harper has dismantled environmental and navigation safeguards along the British Columbia coast without our prior knowledge, without consultation, without consent and against our will.  Harper's Canada operates under the politics of feudalism.

The CBC's Greg Weston warns that Canada at large is about to get the same treatment as Harper has inflicted on British Columbia.


As Parliament reopens this week to consider the pressing affairs of state, the Harper government of promised openness and accountability is operating increasingly as though the nation's business were nobody's business.

It's not just huge trade deals with Europe and the Pacific Rim that are being kept under wraps, and well away from Commons debate.

In fact, most of the contentious issues facing the Conservative government this fall will be decided behind closed doors — explanatory memo to follow.

...Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will introduce a second "budget" bill he promises will contain "quite a bit."

The most contentious parts of the actual budgetary measures will be changes to pensions for parliamentarians and public servants to bring them in line with private retirement plans.

True to form, the government isn't saying what other legislative changes it will toss into the mix this time.

One thing is certain: They will be measures the government of openness and accountability would rather not discuss in public.

The Myth of Free Market Capitalism

Criticize supposed "free market" capitalism these days and that makes you a flag-burning, god-hating, Socialist to some.   There are some very wealthy capitalists who spread a bit of their wealth around to fund organizations, like the Tea Party, to get that very message out.  It just sounds so much better when it comes from some old granny sitting on a cheap lawn chair.

What's curious is how these same wealthy capitalists actually work to destroy truly free markets so that they can make even more money.   For them, it's "do as I say, not as I do."   If anything, their corporate ethic is eerily reminiscent of the way business once got done in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union was known for narrowly held control of broad sectors of the Soviet economy.   The state decided how collective farms would be organized, what they would produce and in what quantities.  The state decided most aspects of production and consumption including how resources would be allocated.  We knew this as an incident of Communism.

Barry Lynn explores this in a fascinating essay in this month's Harper's , "Killing the Competition, How the New Monopolies are Destroying Open Markets."  Lynn traces the powerful narrowing of control of American market sectors, transforming small producers into serfs to an insidious form of feudal capitalism.

"...every day, there are fewer buyers; fewer of them.  Hence they enjoy more and more liberty to dictate terms - or simply to dictate.

"...monopolization of our public markets is first and foremost a political crisis, amounting to nothing less than the re-establishment of private government.   What is at stake is the survival of our democratic republic.


One sector Lynn examines is the high tech world of Silicon Valley.

"...today's lords of the Valley ..enjoy the power to choreograph competition among the latest generation of upstarts and then buy whom they please, when they please.   ...the Justice Department complained in 2010 that senior executives at Apple, Google, Intel, Pixar and two other corporations had 'formed and actively managed' an agreement that 'deprived' the engineers and scientists who work for them of 'access to better job opportunistic.'" 

It's the sort of thing we recall from movies about Hollywood.  "Do that and you'll never work in this business again."   Employees live in fear.   If they lose their jobs their employer can see to it they're blackballed.  It creates an inequality between the provider of services and the few buyers that can lead to perverse outcomes.  Lynn interviewed the worker who stood up, leading the class action suit against the Tech Barons.


"Sure the pace was grinding, the hours crazy.  One team, he recounts, worked for 110-hours per week for nine months straight.  But 'everyone believed they were making something important.'

"...his attitude began to sour after Lucasfilm completed a particularly ambitious project.  The very next day, he says, shaking his head, executives came in and 'fired almost everyone.'   These were employees who hadn't had a day off in months. 'People were running around crying.  It was a bad sight.'" 

You can only treat faithful employees that brutally if your other employees live in abject fear of losing their own jobs and have no decent prospects if they bolt.

Another sector Lynn looks at is America's poultry industry where giant megacompanies harness small, independent producers, their suppliers, into a form of servitude that often pits one against the other.

"The concept of such competitions - or 'tournaments,' as the industry calls them - is generally credited to the economist Edward Lazear, who served as one of George w. Bush's top advisers.  ...The idea, first laid out in a 1981 paper titled 'Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimim Labor contracts,' is straightforward.   Rather than pay all workers the same rate for any particular task, Lazerar wrote, why not set up a 'labor market contest,' in which those who produce more also get paid more per task or per piece?  Such a system of reward (ad, for those at the bottom, punishment would, he claimed, increase the incentive to work harder."

This distortion of capitalism institutionalizes inequality between seller and buyer.   There is no open market.   No producer is allowed to know the price his neighbour gets on market day.  He can't judge what the market will bear.   All he knows is what he's told he will get and, if he gets out of line, he may find his once perfect chickens will be graded as inferior.

Lynn's essay is well worth a read.    Check out the latest Harper's.