Workers Rights vs. Social Programs

[Dermezel]

First, to negate any initial attempts at workers' chauvinism, see my thread on "The Labor Theory of Value as Prescriptive". It is misspelled, but should be recognized nonetheless.

Secondly, I have to note, that placing too much emphasis on workers, especially on the economic power of workers, is extremely dangerous as a tactic. The fact of the matter is Marx scientifically proves that variable capital is displaced by constant capital over time.

The reasoning is straight-forward and simple. Capitalists own the machines. The machines increase the efficiency of labor. As labor increases in efficiency it becomes more expendable and loses its value. Make workers 8 times more efficient, and you only need 1/8th the work force, you can then lower the value of their wages significantly. That is why the relative value of wages deteriorates over time.

I think it is important to keep this in mind, especially in the era of robotics, and focus more on cultural and political solutions. That isn't to say defending workers' is not important as moralistic or idealistic actions, but the real aim is social programs which helps the proletariat as a whole. Social Programs, like health care, and welfare, and free public transport are the real aims. Higher wages, unionization are axillary targets.

That does not mean if social programs are impossible you abandon the quest for higher wages. As the fourth generation rule states: "Adjust your ends to your means." A modern day strategic-political campaign must be flexible in order to succeed.

At the same time though, in terms of political advantages to the proletariat, social programs are far more powerful. They are based on taxes, which is determined by force of democratic politics. They are thus not as subject to the relative loss of variable capital.

They apply to all the proletariat equally, or near equally. Proletariat do not have to compete for social programs as intensely as they do for jobs, hence it creates a greater spirit of cooperation. This is critical especially because it creates a more unified political goal- all proletariat can pursue social programs such as welfare, or lowering the age of social security without any significant loss to any other segment of the proletariat. However consider workers who argue for subsidizing high polluting industries such as mining or logging. Their jobs come at a cost to the entire rest of the proletariat as the pollution they create far outweighs any of the benefits of the perceived jobs. Or say protectionist measures, that can cost the jobs of local workers in an advanced nation for poorer people in the third world or farm subsidies (in fact, I know from experience how easy it is to get workers even in different departments to be at each others' throats). It also frees proles from the dictatorship of the work place. This gives them more free time to develop class consciousness. Last, it helps the working class members of the proletariat by giving them more options under horrid work conditions. With sufficient welfare programs simply leaving a job becomes easier because it does not entail automatic homelessness. It likewise means less proletariat have to work, increasing the bargaining power of proletariat that do have to work i.e. remove child labor, and working adults do not see their wages deteriorate as rapidly.

Again, I am not saying this battle is unimportant, but it is ultimately a losing and secondary concern. The primary concern is social programs at any time.


Last I want to note, between 0-15,000 GDP per capita societies experiences a significant shift in cultural attitudes. 15,000 GDP per capita seems to be the "liberal values" vs. "security values" divide according to modern day sociological measurements of modernity. Though it was not specified, this likewise indicates the point at which thought it general becomes significantly less conservative. Such is very much in line with a materialist conception of thought, as people facing resources scarcity will have to implement more selfish and short-term behaviors to survive. At 45,000 GDP per capita, additional monetary resources has almost no effect on one's level of happiness compared to other variables.

What this means is a primary goal for helping the proletariat attain class consciousness must be to get the proletariat to that 15,000 per capita mark. At that point class consciousness is significantly more capable of improving.

There are two ways of doing this- one by increasing the value of wages: which is already noted impractical as it supposes opposition to all economic forces in operation under capitalism. Two- by political means, social programs.

Not only are social programs more practical, but they are also capable of avoiding a variable that can negate the gains of the monetary increase: time and energy spent working. The human body, according to ethnographic research in evolutionary psychology, evolved to work no more then 4 hours a day of generally lenient work. After eight hours a day the body is beyond exchausted. Such people, even with increases in monetary resources, are unlikely to be able to develop significant levels of class consciousness simply because they do not have the time or energy available for intellectual pursuits. They will simply hear one side talking about socialism, another saying their problems are from higher taxes, another saying it is the devil, and will not have the means by which to make the necessary distinctions between the various competing claims.

Social programs however free the proletariat entirely, both in terms of monetary gain and free time. This provides a perfect ingredient for the development of class consciousness through education. That is why advanced nations with more prevalent social programs are so far ahead of the US in terms of class consciousness.

Much like the best way to support the troops is to bring them home, the best way to support the workers, and more importantly, the proletariat in general, is to make it so they do not have to work.

Likewise, there is not a lot of statistical data available to prove this point, but gains in terms of wages and workers' benefits seem to be fleeting, whereas gains from social programs seem to be relatively constant. Social Security has far outlived any gain made from increasing minimum wage. Food Stamps have persisted far longer then the gains of union bargained health care benefits (especially since blue shield has stated they will increase their rates by a third next year.* )


*Eye-popping health insurance premium increases of up to 39 percent are not an exception but a worrisome sign of the times, the Obama administration said in a report Thursday.Proposed premium increases by Anthem Blue Cross for Californians purchasing their own coverage set off a wave of criticism and forced the company last week to announce a postponement. Now, the Health and Human Services Department says similar pressure on premiums is being felt in at least six other states.

Note: Blue Cross/Shield are the primary health insurance plans for the Teamster's Union in California.

Again the economic gains by workers, even unions are fleeting because you are fighting against economic laws. Political gains are completely different however, and if anything, prove to be very resilient as the Republican 40+ year campaign against Social Security has proven.

[Outinleftfield]

Ultimately it would be best if robotics could completely replace human labor.

At that point justifying capitalism would be impossible. When nobody is "laboring" anymore they can't use the Lockean myth that their property is justified by their labor. Even if they try to link it with inheritance the fact that nobody else would have a chance (because the economy would be fully automated) would make everybody demand an equal distribution of wealth. We'd probably set up a centralized computer system to manage the economy that takes into account needs, monitors the environment, and processes people's requests and then has some way of determining what to prioritize first and what is just so completely impossible and ridiculous that it wouldn't even consider it(for example, somebody asks it for a space station the size of the sun obviously it can't do that).

[bayano]

I'm sorry, but this is patently wrong on a number of specific counts. Firstly, it's not revolutionary. Secondly, it's non-sensical.


Much like the best way to support the troops is to bring them home, the best way to support the workers, and more importantly, the proletariat in general, is to make it so they do not have to work.

- In order for social programs to work, there must be workers. Nothing exists without labor.

- So we should all just vampire off capitalism and be lazy? we may as well just dumpster dive and squat. Oh wait, those require work.

- This calls for us to be lazy and get comfortable. That means people eventually stop struggling and just enjoy the privileges of capitalism.


Again the economic gains by workers, even unions are fleeting because you are fighting against economic laws. Political gains are completely different however, and if anything, prove to be very resilient as the Republican 40+ year campaign against Social Security has proven.

Read my recent thread in the Politics section. Or anything about the neo-liberal project. They are systematically dismantling public education across the country, something most had begun to take for granted. They are dismantling county based health care and cutting public transit with fare hikes. They are cutting public universities. Medicaid if receiving less discretionary funding. Welfare was vastly cut in the 1990s. The rollback has been consistent and aggressive, and has been political.

Sorry if I sound mean, but your comments exist in another reality.

[Dermezel]

I'm sorry, but this is patently wrong on a number of specific counts. Firstly, it's not revolutionary. Secondly, it's non-sensical.

I'm calling for the complete replacement of the capitalist system by socialism at its very root- that of basing value on labor.


- In order for social programs to work, there must be workers. Nothing exists without labor.

Even Marx noted how false this was in his Critique of the Gotha Program:



First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture."



Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm


In fact I will argue that Marx does not go far enough in his criticism because he was not capable of imagining purely automated economic systems, which are possible today via AI and robotics. Indeed it is a testament to the sheer inefficiency of the capitalist system that we have not yet brought this about despite having sufficient technological resources, or at least, being so close to such that a sufficiently well planned research program would bring us to that point in a decade.



- So we should all just vampire off capitalism and be lazy? we may as well just dumpster dive and squat. Oh wait, those require work.

Who cares? If someone is lazy as a slave why do you care? Would you rather be in the fields and tell all other slaves how much harder they have to work?

You are so stuck in your bourgeoisie assignment of supernatural qualities to labor that you actually think of lazy proletariat in the same terms of the bourgeoisie. Why even hire foreman to squeeze labor out of the proletariat at this point when their own members will play the role of overseer for you?

Managing to steal resources from the bourgeoisie is something to be admired. This is for several reasons, some moralistic, some because it reduces the surplus value amassed by the bourgeoisie ever so slightly, and surplus value is the primary means by which capitalism intensifies its exploitation of the proletariat.


- This calls for us to be lazy and get comfortable. That means people eventually stop struggling and just enjoy the privileges of capitalism.

No, it calls for us to focus our activities on politics- where they can bear fruit as opposed to being more efficient slaves.

[Dermezel]

Also I want to add it is sheer idealism to think that the ruling classes will not wholly replace the proletariat worker with machinery some day. As Marx notes constant capital displaces variable capital- this has held true for the last century and a half since Marx wrote it, and has if anything, accelerated.

But Marx did not go far enough. Marx did not imagine that one day Constant Capital could 100% replace Variable Capital. With AI and Robotics it is now possible, and indeed, we are at a stage where they can make a robot scientist. To quote Nature journal (hardly the place for radical theorizing):


The question of whether it is possible to automate the scientific process is of both great theoretical interest1, 2 and increasing practical importance because, in many scientific areas, data are being generated much faster than they can be effectively analysed. We describe a physically implemented robotic system that applies techniques from artificial intelligence3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 to carry out cycles of scientific experimentation. The system automatically originates hypotheses to explain observations, devises experiments to test these hypotheses, physically runs the experiments using a laboratory robot, interprets the results to falsify hypotheses inconsistent with the data, and then repeats the cycle. Here we apply the system to the determination of gene function using deletion mutants of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and auxotrophic growth experiments9. We built and tested a detailed logical model (involving genes, proteins and metabolites) of the aromatic amino acid synthesis pathway. In biological experiments that automatically reconstruct parts of this model, we show that an intelligent experiment selection strategy is competitive with human performance and significantly outperforms, with a cost decrease of 3-fold and 100-fold (respectively), both cheapest and random-experiment selection.

It is a robotic series of limbs linked to an AI and a sensory system. This machine can form a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, and evaluate the results with more accuracy then an actual human scientist for one third of the cost.

Consider the implications- if a machine can do that, it can also take your job. It is only a testament to the sheer inefficiency of capitalism that wholesale replacement has not occurred already.

In fact such parallels abound in capitalism. The replacement of the horse by the automobile did not take place on a wide scale until world war 2, simply because the bourgeoisie had a vested interest. But once it took place the workers/living labor/horses were slaughtered in mass graves.

So much for the supernatural powers of living labor.

The only solution will have to be political and will have to include social programs, not work ethic, as the primary means by which the proletariat secure their freedom and existence. Working extra hard for your masters is no incentive for them to set you free- you must conquer political power.