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Did automated/robotic labor make marxist theory of classes obsolete?
As the title says, the whole idea of an exploited proletariat isn't becoming obsolete when confronted with the ever increasing presence of robotic/automated technology in all sectors of the economy?
From car manufacturing to stock markets, the relation of workers and means of production is changing, to the point where in some circumstances workers are inexistent or completely outsourced to another place.
Like a Bansky graffiti metaphor: where and who would be these so called workers that will install a dictatorship of the proletariat? Aren't they diminishing exponentially?
Bonus question: wouldn't a dictatorship of the proletariat instantly create another class who would be dictating/ruling the proletariat instead of uh... Being the proletariat?
Last edited by barbelo; 29th March 2014 at 22:05. Reason: correcting small typo :3
no. a proletarian is simply someone who has only the ability to sell their labor rather than make money off of capital. this doesn't necessitate that they actually have a job. the relations of workers, employed or not, to capital is still the same.
there is the lumpenproletariat, whom make their living on the margins of society. there is some argument as to whether the lumpens can be a revolutionary class. the Black Panthers argued that this is the case, and i'm inclined to agree with them.
Would you care to elaborate? I find this interesting but I keep imagining an ancient profession which is obsolete nowdays, trying to think a situation where someone with a qualification or knowledge in it would still be considered a worker.
For example, let's suppose coin and paper currency disapperead, fully replaced by digital currency, bank cards, etc. Will the engraver who was formely employed by the central bank to produce the copper etchings of bank notes still be considered a worker? His job is obsolete thanks to technology and he isn't employed anymore.
That doesn't mean he isn't still a proletariat. His only way to live, aside from criminal activity, would be to sell his labor to a capitalist. That position alone makes him part of the proletarian class; not whether his career choice was made invalid or he's not employed any more at the engraving factory. It is still within the realm of possibility for him to get a job as a janitor, factory worker, desk jockey or whatever else, else where.
I can tell you as someone who has recently worked in a car parts manufacturing factory that the worker is not obsolete even by your use of the defining characteristics of the Proletariat which I believe has been corrected by rednoise.
The machines do have fully automated weld cells but there needs to be someone loading the parts into the machine and also monitoring them in case there is a fault or an arm malfunction, and as robotics in this field goes the all might automotons still do make mistakes and these have to be corrected by spot welders who must do the corrections by hand as I am certain many are aware even computers making errors in calculations(I mean who actually loves doing math imagine it being your one and only purpose, ewww).
Anyways THe point is that even though new robotics technologies are coming out everyday in the manufacturing industry there is still at present time the need for an observer, General Laborers, and of course maintenance technicians, I hope that gives you some explanation atleast as far the advancements in modern factory lines. I would also add that even after the bots are done making the parts there is still a lot of assembly required hahaha.
If anything, the idea of an exploited proletariat is becoming more apparent. We have all this abundant labour-saving technology and yet more and more individuals are being forced into menial pointless jobs in order to maintain the drive of a minority to accumulate capital through profits.
Fundamentally, contemporary workers have exactly the same relationship to the means of production as, for example, factory workers in the cusp of the industrial revolution. Workers don't own or control the businesses they work for and simply receive a wage by selling their labour. What that labour consists of might be changing but this economic relationship hasn't altered as capitalism still exists.
That Banksy picture is indicative of the concept that people who call themselves revolutionaries often find themselves distanced from the working class. This becomes particularly apparent in periods of setbacks amongst the labour movements such as when Banksy painted that piece of art.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is a term that should be contrasted with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. We currently live in the latter: a minority of people who own capital also exercise hegemonic domination over the majority, the working class. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a dictatorship of the class and not for the class and so would be democratic and liberating for the vast majority of humanity, the proletariat.
Modern democracy is nothing but the freedom to preach whatever is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie - Lenin
But like I said, what if the technology made him unable to sell his labor to capitalists? Is he still a proletarian?
It's a what if scenario where every menial job is filled by automated machines and like you yourself said in the second post, proletarian is someone with ability to sell his labor. What if this labor doesn't exist anymore due to technology?
I thought that dictatorship and democracy were opposite things.
bolded part by me, i think marx really hit the nail on its head here.
for marx the dictatorship of the proletariat did only mean that the workers would rule instead of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in wich we are living now.
All i want is a Marxist Hunk.
It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things – but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces – but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty – but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence – but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.
Wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten!
What we're talking about isn't anything new. Jobs and workers have been made unnecessary, obsolete, or have changed wildly because of new technology. Unemployed people may still be proletarians. Just because they don't have anyone to sell their labor to at the moment doesn't mean they suddenly aren't proletarians anymore.
As for your scenario, I'd have to say it would be bringing some pretty massive problems with capitalism to light. When the great mass of people don't have the means to earn a wage, who would consume? Who would the capitalist sell to?
I'm on some sickle-hammer shit
Collective Bruce Banner shit
FKA: #FF0000, AKA Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
I think you are mistaking an occupation or trade with "worker" as a class designation.
I don't think workers are disappearing at all - in fact on a world scale there is now a prolitarian majority that hasn't existed before. Just the fact of China as the world's manufacturing center makes the idea of workers disappearing a little far-fetched.
But technology in capitalism doesn't replace workers - in fact that's how a worker-run society might use it: more widdgets, faster - great, let's take the rest of the day off! Technology and automation in capitalism mainly serves the purpose of managing (controlling) and "rationalizing" Labor Power: in other words it diciplines how fast, and in what manner workers do their tasks. It ensures that the boss, in buying X hours of your labor, can guarentee a certain level of output. Automation, making tasks de-skilled or simpler, is used by the bosses to cheapen the cost of labor power - if anyone can work an automated machine that does the work craftspeople or skilled workers used to do, then that worker is much much cheaper.
So workers are still a huge part of the population and central to capitalist production and society. They haven't disappeared, what has happened is in many places there's been a reorganization of the economy on a very large scale. In some places, people have impressionistically and incorrectly argued that workers don't exist as a large force anymore because their conception of workers is a very narrow industrial assembly-line worker or machinist or whatnot. In places like the US there are less of these particular workers, but it is because their productivity has greatly increased due to automation - one worker now produces much more than in the past. This has had several related effects: The need to use more machinery to increase worker output as well as the need to make sure that production workers are replaceable has led to more office work, more managment tasks, more computer systems to ensure that production work is rationalized and conrolled by the bosses and not the workers. So there's been an increase both in "white collar" work (some of which is certainly more prolitarian than in the 1940s, with only the high end being still a decidedly petty-bourgeois position) and an increase in support and service work.
It creates different problems, potentially different ways necissary to fight (which I don't think class militants or the left have figured out yet), but it doesn't mean there are less workers or that worker's aren't central to production. One McDonald's can't have a sitdown strike like a centralized auto-plant... at least not in a way that would have as much of an impact... because McDonald's would just shut down that one store and open a new one across the street - or fire everyone and shift workers from other locations. But because fast food workers face similar conditions over a large area, if workers in stores coordinated, then it might have a bigger impact than a sectional strike by one group of workers in one large factory... a city-wide strike of fast food workers would immediately begin to take the form of a class fight, rather than an occupation fight.
Dictatorship of the proletariet doesn't mean a dictatorship of a person or party or some kind of autocracy, it means that the workers as a class hold power over society. If a worker is elected PM of the UK, it's not a "proletiarian dictatorship/PMship" it's still the dictatorship of the Capitalists because they still control how society functions and produces the necissities of life, their laws (privite property, control of the masses) still apply. In my view a dictatorship of the prolitariet can only really work under some kind of democratic decision or prioritization process. We're a huge and diverse group and we'll need space to really discuss and hammer things out once we run the factories and distribution and organize our housing and so on.
Thank you for all the replies, indeed I can't think of workers (as a class designation) without seeing it tied to a profession/occupation/trade through whom somone earn his income, otherwise what would distinguish them from the capitalist class who exploit them?
Anyway, I need to read more.
This is exactly what I think, if labor itself is changing/diminishing/disappearing, the way money serves as payment for labor will also need to change and the way resources are used would need to be more tightly controlled.
Last edited by barbelo; 30th March 2014 at 15:40.
You could maybe try approaching the classes on the grounds of capital instead of occupation.
The capitalist can live off of the surplus from his capital. The worker does not own any capital from which he can live off of. Whether the worker is employed or not, he is unable to live off of capital.
That is not a proper definition of the proletariat, but if you are having problems with rectifying workers and occupations, that is one way to look at it. The worker and the capitalist can be distinguished because one possesses and lives off of capital, the other does not.
Well, I don't know what to tell you then, except you're not looking at it the right way if you're trying to get a grasp on it from a Marxist perspective. Stop tying it to careers and jobs. That part certainly matters, but it's not just that that makes someone a part of the proletarian class. It's also their relation to capital, which exists despite whether someone has a job or not.
Maybe, in the course of reading more about the Marxist classes, you should also familiarize yourself with the concept of the "reserve army of labor". That may clarify some things for you.
I'm not so certain the two terms are dichotomous but essentially, if it helps you conceive of it better you might as well call it the 'democracy of the proletariat' for that is essentially what it means. If we can agree that we live in 'bourgeois democracy', where the democratic process, the economy etc are run on the basis of maintaining the privileges of the capitalist class by the capitalist class, then 'proletarian democracy' would be where the democratic process, the economy etc are run by the proletariat as a class. And what is in the proletariat's interest? To abolish wage labour and the system of capital altogether.
Modern democracy is nothing but the freedom to preach whatever is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie - Lenin
Think about it this way: if you own your own shop all by yourself and stock shelves and work a cash register, are you a worker in the same way as someone working at a department store? I don't think so: the first person is an owner who decides what to buy for the shop, how to work, how profits should be used. For the worker in a store he doesn't earn - she/he only decides to sell her/his labor power - it's still the owner of the shop who decides what to sell, how to work, etc.
Class in this sense isn't some position in a hierarchy of wages or occupations or tasks, but is a relationship to the way society produces.
red: Indeed there is a possibility that the lumpen-proletariat can support communist parties, but however we have to realize that the great majority of lumpenproletariat people are too individualists and lack a leftist communist world view which are impediments for them to be pro-actively, thinking about supporting a leftist option in America and in many other countries
"Dad, how many pounds of potatoes does an american have to eat before he dies." -Matt Dillon, in a movie
I'm not sure why you think the "great majority" of them are "too individualist". Have you met the "great majority" of the lumpenproletariat? Do you understand their motives, feelings, thoughts, etc.? This is what kind of irks me about Marxists who over-rely on what Marx was saying about lumpens and don't think critically about it. Frantz Fanon had a great deal of really good work in this area.
