JazzRemington
24th March 2007, 05:27
My final step before I receive my degree from my school of choice is an internship; however, there is an option available if the situation turns drastic (which it is) and I cannot find an internship: a large paper. Not wanting to wait around, I've already developed my main thesis, as outlined in this short introduction.
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Industrial society has reached a new era recently, beginning obviously in the nineteenth century and speeding up around the middle of the twentieth. In the past before industry, production was dominated by physical labor and set by the natural pace of the human body. Each new development in the means of production created higher productivity, but relied less on the natural rhythms of the human body and more on that of the machine being used. The process was sped up in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by the development of the steam-engine, which began the long process of replacing humans with machines. Such a process resulted in the usual increased productivity, but caused many job losses. What jobs were created for the maintenance of the machines could not cover the jobs lost because of the machines.
All of this caused a shift in the working class. No longer where they simply using their labor on machines to produce, they were now beginning to use their labor on what the machines produced. Thus was the creation of the service sector, which is slowly becoming the dominant means of employment.
But this process also created something interesting. If the separation of the working class from the means of production is the starting point in the beginning of capitalism, then the process of automation, by which the working class is further and further removed from the production process, is the beginning of the end of Capitalism. To wit, each new implementation of automation only serves to show the outdatedness of capitalism: that system based on scarcity in a world where the only thing that is scarce is scarcity itself, that the notion of hard work is inconceivable in a world where machines produce everything, and that the idea of thrift in response to
the increased production of goods is loosing ground.
The purpose of this paper is to show that automation does ultimately more to damage the system's credibility than anything else. I will show automation's development in history, its effects upon society, and a possible path of development for society, carved by automation itself. But all along, we will see that all of history is merely the further separation of the working class from the means of production, culminating in their complete removal from the production process itself.
While this work makes extensive use of the tool known as historical materialism, the materialistic way of looking at history, it must be noted that that this author does not wish to replace the tool. Rather, he wishes to use it in studying automation and its effects. The product of the study is the above mentioned development: that the course of history includes the removal, bit by bit, of the working class from the production process. As such, this work does not present any rigid, world view or ideology. This is not a view that is imposed upon society, like so many social theories. It is a theory that is taken from society, something that is seen within it and made clear in the light of day.
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Industrial society has reached a new era recently, beginning obviously in the nineteenth century and speeding up around the middle of the twentieth. In the past before industry, production was dominated by physical labor and set by the natural pace of the human body. Each new development in the means of production created higher productivity, but relied less on the natural rhythms of the human body and more on that of the machine being used. The process was sped up in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by the development of the steam-engine, which began the long process of replacing humans with machines. Such a process resulted in the usual increased productivity, but caused many job losses. What jobs were created for the maintenance of the machines could not cover the jobs lost because of the machines.
All of this caused a shift in the working class. No longer where they simply using their labor on machines to produce, they were now beginning to use their labor on what the machines produced. Thus was the creation of the service sector, which is slowly becoming the dominant means of employment.
But this process also created something interesting. If the separation of the working class from the means of production is the starting point in the beginning of capitalism, then the process of automation, by which the working class is further and further removed from the production process, is the beginning of the end of Capitalism. To wit, each new implementation of automation only serves to show the outdatedness of capitalism: that system based on scarcity in a world where the only thing that is scarce is scarcity itself, that the notion of hard work is inconceivable in a world where machines produce everything, and that the idea of thrift in response to
the increased production of goods is loosing ground.
The purpose of this paper is to show that automation does ultimately more to damage the system's credibility than anything else. I will show automation's development in history, its effects upon society, and a possible path of development for society, carved by automation itself. But all along, we will see that all of history is merely the further separation of the working class from the means of production, culminating in their complete removal from the production process itself.
While this work makes extensive use of the tool known as historical materialism, the materialistic way of looking at history, it must be noted that that this author does not wish to replace the tool. Rather, he wishes to use it in studying automation and its effects. The product of the study is the above mentioned development: that the course of history includes the removal, bit by bit, of the working class from the production process. As such, this work does not present any rigid, world view or ideology. This is not a view that is imposed upon society, like so many social theories. It is a theory that is taken from society, something that is seen within it and made clear in the light of day.