i can imagine a day where robots do a large majority of the grunt work. but if all these companies are firing their employees and buying bots, who are they going to sell their stuff to?
unemployed people can't buy stuff. the ironic part of capitalism is that the consumer is protected merely because they are needed as consumers. people must have money in their pocket. and this guy is just afraid of the future like a thousand before him.
In fact the above was Marx' core argument for the inevitability of the failure of capitalism.
The key result of capitalism is competition. The only measurement of the success of a company under capitalism is profit. Driving up profit means increasing sales, which can only be done as long as consumption increases, or the total market increases (population boom, or expanding into areas you don't currently reach).
The moment these factors are all constrained (population doesn't increase, companies reach all possible consumers, and consumers are consuming as much as they can), the ONLY remaining way to increase profit becomes fighting over market share, or reducing cost. Fighting over market share also increasingly IS an issue of reducing cost, and hence prices, as there is only so much you can do with marketing and product differentiation if someone is dramatically undercutting you.
Cutting cost inevitably boils down to reducing the amount paid to other people, because all resources and materials you pay for ultimately involve paying people, whether it is wages, licenses, purchase of property or any other transaction (even when you pay a corporation, you are then indirectly enriching the owners of the corporation, if a foundation or trust the beneficiaries, if a government, the people)
The logical conclusion is a strong push to cut workforces and/or cut pay. Often the second is a result of the former: People in areas where work is short, or with skills that are becoming obsolete will lower their salary expectations.
However, at some point you reach a level where any reduction in cost lead to a reduction in consumption, at which point reduction in cost for one company will be increasingly hard to compensate by growth elsewhere.
Marx' thesis was that at this point, capitalism will continue to produce, and continue to cut costs, and drive consumptions among the people with capital to extreme excesses by promoting waste that people wouldn't normally consider, while more and more people are pushed into poverty by cost cutting measures.
Capitalists on the other hand, dismiss this, usually by assuming that overall consumption can continue to grow forever, hence always allowing for cost cutting to be compensated by growth in other markets.
Taken to extreme, a society where "workers" aren't needed, capitalism is unlikely to survive. How do you maintain a system based on private ownership of the means of production when it leads to immense poverty, and that poverty isn't "needed" because of scarcity?
It is hard to see a situation like that not eventually leading to growing popular unrest.
Incidentally, in "The German Ideology" Marx wrote [paraphrased] "if the revolution happens in a country with insufficient resources to meet the basic needs, the same shit will start all over again" - Marx always made it very clear that for a socialist revolution to have a chance to succeed, it must happen in a highly evolved capitalist economy, a country where a small elite have accumulated sufficient wealth that the needs of the population as a whole could be met by redistribution, and where the wast majority had been forced into poverty by the more and more extreme competition of capitalist economy.
He specifically named the UK, France and Germany originally, but in a later preface to the Communist Manifesto, he pointed to the US with it's rapid growth and expanding markets as more likely to mature to the sufficient level first....
Interestingly, he also specifically made it clear that he believed that a socialist revolution in Russia would be doomed to failure because of it's low level of development (it was a feudal dictatorship with a mostly agrarian economy).
people aren't obsolete (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:people aren't obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
The key result of capitalism is competition. The only measurement of the success of a company under capitalism is profit. Driving up profit means increasing sales, which can only be done as long as consumption increases, or the total market increases (population boom, or expanding into areas you don't currently reach).
The moment these factors are all constrained (population doesn't increase, companies reach all possible consumers, and consumers are consuming as much as they can), the ONLY remaining way to increase profit becomes fighting over market share, or reducing cost. Fighting over market share also increasingly IS an issue of reducing cost, and hence prices, as there is only so much you can do with marketing and product differentiation if someone is dramatically undercutting you.
Cutting cost inevitably boils down to reducing the amount paid to other people, because all resources and materials you pay for ultimately involve paying people, whether it is wages, licenses, purchase of property or any other transaction (even when you pay a corporation, you are then indirectly enriching the owners of the corporation, if a foundation or trust the beneficiaries, if a government, the people)
The logical conclusion is a strong push to cut workforces and/or cut pay. Often the second is a result of the former: People in areas where work is short, or with skills that are becoming obsolete will lower their salary expectations.
However, at some point you reach a level where any reduction in cost lead to a reduction in consumption, at which point reduction in cost for one company will be increasingly hard to compensate by growth elsewhere.
Marx' thesis was that at this point, capitalism will continue to produce, and continue to cut costs, and drive consumptions among the people with capital to extreme excesses by promoting waste that people wouldn't normally consider, while more and more people are pushed into poverty by cost cutting measures.
Capitalists on the other hand, dismiss this, usually by assuming that overall consumption can continue to grow forever, hence always allowing for cost cutting to be compensated by growth in other markets.
Taken to extreme, a society where "workers" aren't needed, capitalism is unlikely to survive. How do you maintain a system based on private ownership of the means of production when it leads to immense poverty, and that poverty isn't "needed" because of scarcity?
It is hard to see a situation like that not eventually leading to growing popular unrest.
Incidentally, in "The German Ideology" Marx wrote [paraphrased] "if the revolution happens in a country with insufficient resources to meet the basic needs, the same shit will start all over again" - Marx always made it very clear that for a socialist revolution to have a chance to succeed, it must happen in a highly evolved capitalist economy, a country where a small elite have accumulated sufficient wealth that the needs of the population as a whole could be met by redistribution, and where the wast majority had been forced into poverty by the more and more extreme competition of capitalist economy.
He specifically named the UK, France and Germany originally, but in a later preface to the Communist Manifesto, he pointed to the US with it's rapid growth and expanding markets as more likely to mature to the sufficient level first....
Interestingly, he also specifically made it clear that he believed that a socialist revolution in Russia would be doomed to failure because of it's low level of development (it was a feudal dictatorship with a mostly agrarian economy).