For a long time after the Industrial Revolution, many thinkers believed that automation would lead to us living lives of leisure. Twenty your work weeks, or even less, and many people wouldn’t need to work at all, but would still live good lives.
It never happened.
Economists will tell you this is because there’s always more work to be done, but economists are the priesthood of capitalism, not scientists, not even social scientists.
Most of us are well aware that many jobs are, in David Graeber’s memorable phrase, bullshit jobs. They either don’t really need to be done or are actively harmful. Everyone working in private equity. All the engineers optimizing ads. Almost everyone who works on Wall Street or in shadow banking. Most bankers, for that matter. The jobs which are actually necessary, “essential workers”, are badly paid and treated, but if they don’t show up, as we find out in a garbage, nurse, transit or teamster strike, disaster ensues.
If the janitors don’t show up, everyone’s in shit. If the CEO doesn’t show up, life continues and most people don’t care. Indeed, without CEOs most companies would run better than they do, and you’d be in a lot less danger of losing your job.
We could easily work 20 hour weeks already, if that was a priority.
But the structure of capitalism makes this impossible. We create goods which are designed to wear out quickly and be replaced. “Planned Obsolesence.” We need people to have jobs to get money to buy these shoddy goods. We buy fast food crap because we’re too busy, rather than cooking good food, and most people spend their lives doing work they’d never do if they didn’t need money to survive.
So we find more bullshit jobs, and more harmful jobs for people, and the machine churns on, destroying the environment, making people sick and unhappy and forcing us into wage slavery. Most people spend most of their waking hours doing what they’re told. Or else. Then when you’re old, you might be allowed to retire, and enjoy your declining health. Might.
We have more houses than we need, far more than the number of homeless. America throws out one-third of its food, yet people go hungry. There’s more than enough, literally more than enough food for everyone in the world to have a full and healthy diet.
Perhaps they will, I hope so. To do so, however, they will have to move away from capitalism towards true communism, where everyone shares in the benefits of automation, and not just a few.
There is no reason why this isn’t possible. It could have been done any time in the last century or so, had we wished to.
Remember this: you work like a dog, obey some manager’s orders and don’t do what you really want to do because our system, and our leaders require it when it isn’t actually necessary.
Capitalism might (or might not) have been necessary for industrialization. But it is a set of leg irons weighing all of us down now, and threatening to destroy the very conditions required for life to continue on Earth.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the task of the next generation of leadership is to figure out how to run modern societies without it, without wasteful over-consumption and without destroying the environment, while making sure everyone has what they need and can live fulfilling lives: lives they choose, where most of their time is their own to do with as they would, not as some boss desires.
May it be so. The other options are far, far worse, likely catastrophically so.
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