Luddites and Neo-Luddites.

[Delroy Booth]

I've been doing a lot of research into the Luddites lately for something I'm writing, inspired by the fact that we're currently living through the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprising. Huddersfield was one the the centres of the this uprising, leading some to call it "The metropolis of discontent" at the time, and I've mentioned this before but I personally feel a huge amount of sympathy for the Luddites, in particular the poor buggers who were hung at York in January 1813 for shooting William Horsfall. They were young unemployed men from Huddersfield forced by circumstances beynd their control to do desperate things. There's going to be a ceremony to commemorate the dead at some point in the New Year, and I'll add the details in the events forum closer to the time, if anyone wants to pay their respects.

It does irk me somewhat that the Tolpuddle martyrs have their own museum, but those who died on the gallows in York have been terribly overlooked by both establishment history and the establishment left history. To this day there is no Luddite museum anywhere I'm aware of.

We've had some events, discussions and so on in the Town, and this blog http://ludditebicentenary.blogspot.co.uk/ has been giving a running commentary of key events of the uprising as they hit 200 year mark. Some of the quotes and statements from the Luddites are incredible, and i'm really heartened that someone has taken the time and effort to collate them all and relay them out in this way.

There was also a ceremonial frame-smashing at the Anarchist bookfair in London, filmed for posterity here (The reaction of the little girl in the pink coat in the background is priceless.) Kirklees council wouldn't let them do it in Huddersfield, by demanding a million pound in insurance money to let it go ahead.



Anyway I've been moved to start this thread because esteemed Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman has put up three articles on his blog that reference the issue of technological unemployment.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/technology-or-monopoly-power/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-wages-the-analytics-wonkish/

That's Paul Krugman, bona fide establishment liberal, writing an article that has unmistakable Marxist overtones. Which he even admits to himself -

I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn’t seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism — which shouldn’t be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.
But I think we’d better start paying attention to those implications.

One of the implications that Krugman highlights is how the political focus on education, the idea that businesses are desperately crying out for more skilled workers, and that future economic growth depends on this, is undermined by technological unemployment and de-skilling. What's the point in having a highly (and expensively) educated workforce if all the jobs are de-skilled to the extent that anyone, educated or otherwise, can do it? Pretty much all the jobs I've had since I left uni have been like this.

Paul Mason responded by reaching back in the recesses of his memory to his time in Workers Power and recommend Andre Gorz's Critique of Economic Reason on twitter as an introduction to some of the issues. Now I'm not a huge fan of Gorz's politics on the whole, but that book along with Farewell to the Working Class makes references to these processes. For instance, and this is from memory so forgive the lack of detail, the German auto industry lost 5 million workers during a period in the late 70's early 80's, but productivity went up, and so did profits. Gorz asks the question, what happens to us all when capital no longer needs a large working class to produce commodities? There's a direct corrolation between the decline in industrial manufacturing jobs in the USA over the last 40 years, and the massive increase in the prison population. Something similar happened to the "surplus population" in Britain around the time of the Luddites and the early industrial revolution, this was the era of the workhouse lest we forget.

Gorz's contribution got lost amidst a sea of post-industrial, post-class bilge that was so rife in ostensibly left politics at the time (and all throughout my life tbh), but I think this issue of losing your job because of technology is slowly becoming one of the most important features of latter-day capitalism. From very basic things like self-service checkouts in supermarkets, to more advanced things such as the potential of 3D printing to make manufacturing obsolete, it's an issue pretty much everyone can relate to.

Then we have the case of Boris Johnson, who campaigned for re-election with the policy of introducing a fully automated unmanned Tube network, regardless of the safety implications for passengers, in an effort to prevent strikes and break the RMT. The paralells to the Luddites are very interesting - bosses using machinery to break a strong trade union, croppers and knitters then, tube drivers now. Use of the courts to make strikes illegal. All taking place amidst a backdrop of mass unemployment, a deeply reactionary out of touch elitist Tory government and unpopular foreign wars - just like in 1812.

So what I'd like is for people to add their own examples of "technological unemployment" where people in the future could lose their jobs. It'd help me with some idea's for my writing and I think it could be an interesting discussion. Anyone who has any other books or articles on Luddites and technological unemployment, please share!

Some Resources: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=l2aLyk-kacIC&lpg=PA472&vq=redressers&pg=PA472#v=onepage&q&f=false < This is the chapter of EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class that revolutionised the way in which history approached the Luddites. A must read for anyone concerned with working class history.

http://libcom.org/library/technology-class < This is a report of seminar on technology and class, held by a manchester communist group called Subversion in the mid-90's, which also deals with this. If anyone on here had any involvement in that group or that debate, I'd love to know more about them.

There's also another book, Alan Brooke and Lesley Kipling's Liberty or Death: Radicals, Republicans and Luddites 1793-1823 available via Huddersfield Local History Society. This is the definitive account of the West Yorkshire Luddites and one of the best history I've ever read. Alan's one of the guys smashing the frame in the above video.

 

[butchersapron]

It's really important when looking at this not to fall into the trap of imagining technological development as some sort of autonomous free-floating neutral process - in reality it is shaped and driven by class struggle, the desire of capital to increase the tempo of work, the amount produced by living labour, to reduce that living labour and to take control of the knowledge and know-how of the technical processes of production (and as a result - power) out of those same hands - and this driven by labour's refusal to allow this to happen and attempts to build different uses/developments of technology.

Marx wrote in Capital 1 that

But machinery not only acts as a competitor who gets the better of the workman, and is constantly on the point of making him superfluous. It is also a power inimical to him, and as such capital proclaims it from the roof tops and as such makes use of it. It is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working-class against the autocracy of capital.[127] According to Gaskell, the steam-engine was from the very first an antagonist of human power, an antagonist that enabled the capitalist to tread under foot the growing claims of the workmen, who threatened the newly born factory system with a crisis.[128] It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class. At the head of these in importance, stands the self-acting mule, because it opened up a new epoch in the automatic system.[129]

The operaists and the autonomists took up aspects of that project from the early 60s onward. The key text is The Capitalist Use of Machinery (pdf) by Raniero Panzieri, but the understanding behind it runs through all of the most useful writings form that tradition(s) - right through to the discussions about immaterial labour/the end of work in recent years (see Reality Check: Are we living in an Immaterial world? for a good example). You should try and get hold of The Labour Process and Class Strategies put out by the CSE in 1976 for a good grounding in this view of technological development and what drives it, politically economically and otherwise. I've put most of the chapters on-line over the years. Science, Technology and the Labour Process: marxist studies vol 1 is also useful in offering a broad understanding of the sort of thinking about technology, work and class that has informed most radical (and not loony primitivist stuff) writing on this over the last few decades.

The more orthodox marxists developed the deskilling thesis - most notably put forward by Harry Braverman's brilliant but flawed Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.

Going back to the loons the best of a poor bunch is Rebels Against the Future by Kirkpatrick Sale which basically starts with the luddite rebellion (about which and who he writes very well) then says well the neo-luddites are coming today due to the growth of machines man (seen in that rather technological-determinist way i suggested that it's important to avoid but with Frankfurt school stuff about instrumental reason.

And there is absolutely tons of local histories of examples of machine-smashery all over the country as well.

 

[butchersapron]

...and more to the point today, it's also dangerous to look at work as jobs rather than at the subsumption of traditional areas of non-work to work, to how people are at work when they're not at work, how social reproduction is being taken over by work and so on - that's the road that capital is going down today to escape the threat of labour that i talked about above, that's where the class struggle has driven it.

 

[Delroy Booth]

Going back to the loons the best of a poor bunch is Rebels Against the Future by Kirkpatrick Sale

Just got this the other day! So far it's ok but I'm not very far into it at the moment.

I was looking at stuff the autonomists wrote, although not in any great detail. Thanks hugely for the recommendations. I've been trying to go back as far as I can, starting right at the beginning where possible, and reading some William Morris for example he talks about how work could be reduced to a few hours of a day under socialism. And Morris was hardly some "scientific" Marxist but intuitively understood these issues. And of course there's The Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue which also has some similarities to the stuff I've briefly skimmed through associated with the autonomists. The problem is I've given myself such a massive reading list I'm not gonna be able to get the stuff written in the 60's for a while yet, I've still not read Captain Swing by Eric Hobsbawm yet that's been sat on my shelf mocking me for months now.

Oh yeah and I'm also interested in using some of the things Karl Polyani, the Great Transformation, but again that's at the bottom of a massive pile of books I'm really slowly making my way through, and I've not read beyond the beginning of it yet. I'm unemployed again now so hopefully over christmas I'll get some proper reading done.

The hard part is trying to explain this - "It's really important when looking at this not to fall into the trap of imagining technological development as some sort of autonomous free-floating neutral process - in reality it is shaped and driven by class struggle" to people who think that technology is a force of nature that exists totally apart from politics or class. The "It's just progress, can't be stopped" as if machines that deliberatey undermine labour-power were all invented accidentally. Like some of the older men in the local history groups I meet have a view of history which is basically "the history of things being invented" and takes little or no interested in the social context those inventions took place.

Also, while you're here butchers, what Marx should I be reading on this? There's a bit about machinery in the Grundrisse that I've located, but I suspect there's loads more in Capital that I'm oblivious too.

 

[Delroy Booth]

And also, I found this great quote in the Manchester and Salford Advertiser, from 1835, describing the behaviour of the new bourgeois capitalist class in Manchester at the time

"A Race whose wisdom consists in that cunning which enables them to devise the cheapest possible means for getting out the youngest possible workers the greatest possible amount of labour, in the shortest possible amount of time, for the least possible amount of wages."

This shows that there was an understanding at the time that the desire to reduce wages was an issue of class, and clearly the issue of machinery would've been a key part of this process.

That's why you have to look at all this is a product of alienation I reckon.

 

[Random]

Here's an article collecting some of the discussions about robot journalism, reporting largely based on automation. http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/171817/journalists-debate-value-of-robots/

At the end there's a telling quote from one of the players about how journalists who.can't adapt can blame themselves if they are made redundant by the machines.

The number of permanently employed journalists is dropping fast in the West, and this development, plus bloggish churnalism is one reason for how media companies are still going to be offering more and more content.

 

[ymu]

You forgot to add in the Panzieri link, @butchersapron. Or at least I assume you did - there's a redundant .pdf warning in #2 if not.

 

[butchersapron]

ffs, that post was full of links none of which have appeared. Ta for heads up.

And Delroy, i'll get back to your question shortly.

 

[love detective]

nothing worse than a false PDF warning!

interesting thread, if my baby ever stops crying will hopefully join in with

ps delroy, part 4 in general and chapter 15 in particular (ideally 12,13 & 14 before that as well) are what you're looking for in Capital

 

[ska invita]

It's really important when looking at this not to fall into the trap of imagining technological development as some sort of autonomous free-floating neutral process - in reality it is shaped and driven by class struggle, the desire of capital to increase the tempo of work, the amount produced by living labour, to reduce that living labour and to take control of the knowledge and know-how of the technical processes of production (and as a result - power) out of those same hands - and this driven by labour's refusal to allow this to happen and attempts to build different uses/developments of technology.

In some cases technological development is driven by the desire of capital to increase the tempo/productivity of work, but are you saying that is a rule? I'd guess that technological development has been driven by many other factors, including (off the top of my head) workers' own desires to make their tasks simpler, scientific curiosity, utopianism, and without doubt competition. Not just market competition - you could see the cold war as fueling technological advances on both sides for example.

Competition in the market is not just about increasing the productivity of work (not in-itself a bad thing when you're doing laborious work and new technology makes that easier - the JCB digger for example), but also novelty - new products, which often means solving problems, which can be broadly benefical. From what I know about computer technology, like a lot of US innovations there are spin offs from the military-industrial complex, but there was a lot of utopianism in the Californian tech industry, particularly at the start. I don't think Tim Berners-Lee's motivation was exploiting workers to extract surplus value or whatnot.

Wasn't Marx quite pro-technology? Technology + Communism was going to let us all go fishing in the afternoons I thought...

 

[butchersapron]

Yep, those sections ld mentioned are certainly the key bits for what you are after Delroy - i'd say that chapter 7, first section is important as well for establishing the wider point about how technology is the mediating relationship between us and the material world (the thing through which we alter the world after our own mental conceptions of the world and so on) and if that process is dominated by a particular set of social relations - for example the need to produce surplus value...

Some general thoughts: for Marx technology was a social process, the result of social co-operation. Today with the passage from formal to real subsumption of labour under capital (that is from capital working on pre-capitalist forms of production and relations to capitalist relations being the start point of production - from men controlling machines at work to machines controlling men at work) if that co-operation in technological development (not subjection to technology) now exists in the workplace to such an extent?

A century of planned deskilling and concentration of technical and specialist knowledge in ever fewer hands and heads means means that this co-operative development only really exists socially, whilst work itself becomes ever more individualised, a time where you get used by a few other peoples prior co-operation for you. (A political point directly related to that is the breakdown of work related identities and with it work related social discipline).

And what can't be ignored when we talk of jobs lost is the reconstruction of the reserve army of labour by technology.

 

[ymu]

This thread reminded me of this article, which partially answers ska, I think:

Why more jobs may be bad news for British workers

Recessions are usually job killers, so the way in which the UK economy has created new jobs at a time when growth has been so weak has baffled the experts. Employment is up even though national output has been flat over the past year.

Economists have been searching high and low for an explanation. Is Britain actually doing a lot better than the official data suggests? If so, the double-dip recession will be revised away in due course. Has the UK become less efficient, with more people needed to provide the same quantity of goods and services?

It could be the expansion of part-time work – people working 20 hours week when they would actually like to be working 40. Official data last week showed underemployment in the economy has risen by 1 million since the recession began.

Robin Chater, the secretary-general of the Federation of European Employers has a different explanation: labour is dirt cheap in Britain and that encourages firms to boost output by hiring or retaining workers rather than by investing in new plant and machinery.

Since 2005, Chater says, capital replacement has been falling faster in Britain than in any European country. This is confirmed by official figures for investment as a share of national output, which at 13.9% is the lowest since records began in 1955.

"The UK is turning into an old-style third world country with low pay growth for most workers below managerial level, widening pay differentials and poor levels of capital investment," Chater says.

"This has been partly encouraged by the influx of workers from eastern Europe since 2004 – who have been willing to perform many functions at low wage rates that would have been otherwise automated."

...

 

[butchersapron]

In some cases technological development is driven by the desire of capital to increase the tempo/productivity of work, but are you saying that is a rule? I'd guess that technological development has been driven by many other factors, including (off the top of my head) workers' own desires to make their tasks simpler, scientific curiosity, utopianism, and without doubt competition. Not just market competition - you could see the cold war as fueling technological advances on both sides for example.

Competition in the market is not just about increasing the productivity of work (not in-itself a bad thing when you're doing laborious work and new technology makes that easier - the JCB digger for example), but also novelty - new products, which often means solving problems, which can be broadly benefical. From what I know about computer technology, like a lot of US innovations there are spin offs from the military-industrial complex, but there was a lot of utopianism in the Californian tech industry, particularly at the start. I don't think Tim Berners-Lee's motivation was exploiting workers to extract surplus value or whatnot.

Wasn't Marx quite pro-technology? Technology + Communism was going to let us all go fishing in the afternoons I thought...

Knowledge as a social process means that it develops on the basis of prior investigation and technical know-how embodied in the practical/technical instruments. (That's the general intellect from Marx's Fragments on machines in the grundrisse - roughly anyway). It is not the fruit of one persons labour - that is how it appears in capitalist thievery/mythology though - they expropriate the fruits of social knowledge for their own private profit.

It doesn't really matter what the intentions of people developing technology are - under capitalist social relations they can pretty much only be inserted into society, into production, on the basis of those pre-existing social relations and so be subject to the laws of competition and concentration etc - whilst still being open to more directly open harmful uses.

 

[elbows]

I wont have time to read all the fascinating material mentioned in this thread till the weekend. But as a longer term project I am rather interested in what mileage I can get by merging in some concepts that in recent times are often talked about using IT-related jargon: disruptive technologies, open source software and possibly quite notably open source hardware.

 

[ska invita]

im meant to be working so will write back later, but just to say I spotted this book out now/soon, might be relevant;
In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and Value in the Bad Infinity of Capitalism by George Caffentzis

 

[butchersapron]

im meant to be working so will write back later, but just to say I spotted this book out now/soon, might be relevant;
In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and Value in the Bad Infinity of Capitalism by George Caffentzis

That's exactly the sort of thing i was talking about in my first post -the autonomist tradition stuff (and he was in my house last week).

 

[butchersapron]

I wont have time to read all the fascinating material mentioned in this thread till the weekend. But as a longer term project I am rather interested in what mileage I can get by merging in some concepts that in recent times are often talked about using IT-related jargon: disruptive technologies, open source software and possibly quite notably open source hardware.

Yeah, bung it all in i reckon.

 

[peterkro]

Bit off topic but some anecdotes from myself.In the sixties I was a Seagull (casual wharfie ),sounds bad I know but we worked with and under union members and had the same rates etc.It was at the beginning of containerisation and bonus payments were in the agreements based on loose cargo so we were getting twice or more of basic pay in bonus's,we had them by the balls.It took them a decade or more to crush the union,it's still going on but the union have been on the back foot with privatisation,neo liberal economics et al and have been whittled away for forty odd years.Was once the strongest union in NZ.
Later at the end of the seventies I worked as a spark at Dagenham ( I left EEPTU and joined the TGWU ) again we had them by the balls,nobody except the sparks could start or stop the lines (except emergency stops), there were so many emergency stops the line workers would hit one and stick a match in it and given many had been added ad hoc without being on the plans they would lose millions before the problem was found.I guess most people know about the resistance in the car industry especially Fords.I left when they brought in computerisation of the controls whereby they wanted to have line workers look at a screen find a faulty trip switch,contactor whatever and swap out the faulty one with a new one.Complete deskilling,we tried to fight it but by that stage home ownership was on the cards for a lot of reasonably paid workers,so with a mortgage,discounted Cortina on credit etcetera most of the older workers wouldn't join in.The trim womens strike was before my time and the riots in the body plant just after.Industrial sabotage was pretty common .But as everyone knows they still forced all that crap through.

 

[butchersapron]

Bit off topic but some anecdotes from myself.In the sixties I was a Seagull (casual wharfie ),sounds bad I know but we worked with and under union members and had the same rates etc.It was at the beginning of containerisation and bonus payments were in the agreements based on loose cargo so we were getting twice or more of basic pay in bonus's,we had them by the balls.It took them a decade or more to crush the union,it's still going on but the union have been on the back foot with privatisation,neo liberal economics et al and have been whittled away for forty odd years.Was once the strongest union in NZ.

Absolutely key example there - have a look at the first article in this dossier: International Dockers' Struggles in the Eighties: Workers of the World, Tonight! - the one that starts The Transport of Commodities and the Dock Struggle for how class struggle develops technology:

With the advent of motorized shipping, shipping lines were able to regulate themselves. Fleets were established. Shipping times were calculated - thus ensuring a fair degree of accuracy for costs. But this did not amount to greater control over the time commodities spent in port. The organization of labor in the ports, like in 19th century pre-Taylorite factories-remained in the hands, of the workers. It was the dockers themselves, organized in work gangs, who controlled work speeds and tonnage.

Class struggle, however, prodded the transport companies into using containers. With containers, they could rationalize the organization of labor in the docks. They could impose their own authority so that the dockers' gangs would organize nothing and they would organize everything.

Containers are the extension of the production line into transportation. Commodities leave the assembly line containerized, then go onto a ship, then onto a truck or lorry or train, aDd are transported to the selling point. From the factory to the door-todoor sale, the rigidity of the production line-the dream of every capitalist-is maintained, making the worker a slave to the machine-in this case, the container-and unable to control the process of loading and unloading.

But the worker's ability to bring the assembly line to a standstill (a fundamental part of the workers' struggles in the 1960s) reappeared in the sphere of transportation. In Spain, 13,500 dockers were able to endanger the smooth and rapid circulation of commodities by the fliminsiest strike. Hence the acrimony and intransigence of the port bosses, as well as the whole of capital, eachtime trouble looms on.the docks or in other transportation sectors. It is enough to recall how the bosses acted during the latest strike in the Asturias haulage firms.

 

[ska invita]

That's exactly the sort of thing i was talking about in my first post -the autonomist tradition stuff (and he was in my house last week).

doesnt make him right!!!
also this http://libcom.org/library/cyber-marx-nick-dyer-witheford

 

[butchersapron]

doesnt make him right!!!
also this http://libcom.org/library/cyber-marx-nick-dyer-witheford

A good book for 2/3 - explains the ideas behind what i was saying in my first post very well, then wanders off into some blind-alleys.

 

[BigTom]

So what I'd like is for people to add their own examples of "technological unemployment" where people in the future could lose their jobs. It'd help me with some idea's for my writing and I think it could be an interesting discussion. Anyone who has any other books or articles on Luddites and technological unemployment, please share!

An example of technological unemployment that is happening at the moment is London Midland who are destaffing completely or reducing hours at afaik all their stations around Birmingham, 130 jobs will be lost and many hours cut as the staffed ticket offices are completely replaced by ticket machines.
http://www.expressandstar.com/news/...idland-jobs-to-go-as-ticket-office-hours-cut/

I'm pretty sure that this will be copied across the railway industry and the various rail unions are campaigning against it.

 

[ska invita]

It doesn't really matter what the intentions of people developing technology are - under capitalist social relations they can pretty much only be inserted into society, into production, on the basis of those pre-existing social relations and so be subject to the laws of competition and concentration etc - whilst still being open to more directly open harmful uses.

I follow this... the ability of everything that happens, be it cultural or technological, to be appropriated into the dominant system is one of the characteristics of the system, but does it lead from there to make value-judgements about what is being appropriated?

It's a very strong statement to say "in reality [ technological development ] is shaped and driven by class struggle, the desire of capital to increase the tempo of work, the amount produced by living labour, to reduce that living labour ". It may come to be appropriated and contested by these forces, but its inspiration and uses seems to me to be much broader than that. If what you are saying in that statement is taken as the only truth, then it would logically lead to saying All Technology is Bad and part of Our Repression.

I'm not saying it's not the case, I just think its a statement that needs to be tempered.

In the long-view, humanity increasingly having the tools to free us from labour will hopefully be a wonderful thing - though I doubt I'll see this work-dodging utopia in my lifetime. Is technology doing our work a bad thing? Id say no, its the economic system around it that's the problem.

Luddism views Technology as (at least partly) the problem. I think of technology as a positive, separate from the forces around it. Even if the system changes, the technology will remain, is what I'm getting at.

 

[butchersapron]

I would point to the title of the key piece for the approach that i'm coming from. The Capitalist Use of Machinery.

 

[ymu]

I follow this... the ability of everything that happens, be it cultural or technological, to be appropriated into the dominant system is one of the characteristics of the system, but does it lead from there to make value-judgements about what is being appropriated?

It's a very strong statement to say "in reality [ technological development ] is shaped and driven by class struggle, the desire of capital to increase the tempo of work, the amount produced by living labour, to reduce that living labour ". It may come to be appropriated and contested by these forces, but its inspiration and uses seems to me to be much broader than that. If what you are saying in that statement is taken as the only truth, then it would logically lead to saying All Technology is Bad and part of Our Repression.

I'm not saying it's not the case, I just think its a statement that needs to be tempered.

In the long-view, humanity increasingly having the tools to free us from labour will hopefully be a wonderful thing - though I doubt I'll see this work-dodging utopia in my lifetime. Is technology doing our work a bad thing? Id say no, its the economic system around it that's the problem.

Luddism views Technology as (at least partly) the problem. I think of technology as a positive, separate from the forces around it. Even if the system changes, the technology will remain, is what I'm getting at.

Technology is not in and of itself a problem - it's often a very good thing, not least for those workers who no longer have to do back-breaking/dangerous/life-shortening work. The problem is that productivity gains are not shared. If new machinery is introduced that allows the same production with half the workers, it doesn't mean everyone's hours get cut in half whilst their wages stay the same, or that the remaining workers earn twice as much as before. It means that half the workers are chucked on the dole and the rest accept shittier and shittier T&Cs because there are unemployed people desperate for their jobs.

This was one of the things Keynes got very wrong. Found this article with a quick google - it's quite extraordinary how bad the analysis is, but it mirrors Keynes' error in implicitly assuming that workers share productivity gains equally (with a brief nod to the real world at the end).

 

[Delroy Booth]

Thanks so much to everyone who's posted so far, I'm a bit tied up atm but I'll try and get round to replying to things later on tonight!

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

I'm a bit tied up atm

did you get tangled in your loom?

 

[Firky]

I can't read the word Luddite without think of garf frothing at the mouth and accusing someone of being one. Because they used the word philistine.

 

[butchersapron]

Getting a bit boring now.

 

[love detective]

Some quotes from Capital delroy that you might be interested in (and touch upon some of the things that butchers has mentioned above), not so much directly addressing technological unemployment but sets the general scene/framework for it, there's a lot more in there as well so well worth a decent read off

The knowledge, judgement and will......are faculties required now only for the workshop as a whole. The possibility of an intelligent direction of production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the capital which confronts them. It is a result in the division of labour in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him. This process of separation starts in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the individual workers the unity and the will of the whole body of social labour. It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. It is completed in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from a labour and presses it into the service of capital

Hence, too, the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital. “If,” dreamed Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity, “if every tool, when summoned, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Daedalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephaestos went of their own accord to their sacred work, if the weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers, or of slaves for the lords.” And Antipatros, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the invention of the water-wheel for grinding corn, an invention that is the elementary form of all machinery, as the giver of freedom to female slaves, and the bringer back of the golden age. Oh! those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and before him the still wiser MacCulloch have discovered, nothing of Political Economy and Christianity. They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working-day. They perhaps excused the slavery of one on the ground that it was a means to the full development of another. But to preach slavery of the masses, in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus, might become “eminent spinners,” “extensive sausage-makers,” and “influential shoe-black dealers,” to do this, they lacked the bump of Christianity.

In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.....

.....At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity. The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman.

But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the “master.”

The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used

It is an undoubted fact that machinery, as such, is not responsible for “setting free” the workman from the means of subsistence. It cheapens and increases production in that branch which it seizes on, and at first makes no change in the mass of the means of subsistence produced in other branches. Hence, after its introduction, the society possesses as much, if not more, of the necessaries of life than before, for the labourers thrown out of work; and that quite apart from the enormous share of the annual produce wasted by the non-workers. And this is the point relied on by our apologists! The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from the capitalist employment of machinery, do not exist, they say, since they do not arise out of machinery, as such, but out of its capitalist employment! Since therefore machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labour, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labour; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes them paupers-for all these reasons and others besides, says the bourgeois economist without more ado, it is clear as noon-day that all these contradictions are a mere semblance of the reality, and that, as a matter of fact, they have neither an actual nor a theoretical existence. Thus he saves himself from all further puzzling of the brain, and what is more, implicitly declares his opponent to be stupid enough to contend against, not the capitalistic employment of machinery, but machinery itself.....

....No doubt he is far from denying that temporary inconvenience may result from the capitalist use of machinery. But where is the medal without its reverse! Any employment of machinery, except by capital, is to him an impossibility. Exploitation of the workman by the machine is therefore, with him, identical with exploitation of the machine by the workman. Whoever, therefore, exposes the real state of things in the capitalistic employment of machinery, is against its employment in any way, and is an enemy of social progress!

We saw in Part IV., when analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.