Redundancy of Work?

Lol, redundancy might have sounded a bit extreme.

A combination of factors: rising capitalist productivity, and the double blow of outsourcing and immigration of skilled workers, are contributing to unemployment in this country. The rich don't bother to give any resources to help the poor get skills, 'cos it's much easier to let skilled workers who've been educated elsewhere come in. It's a crucial issue, and saying that unemployed people are potential members of the workforce, while 100% true, understates the problem. Plus it's not just this country I'm talking about, the picture across the world is just as bad, if not worse (I mean, we've basically given up hope of full employment in this country thanks to Thatcherism). If global unemployment goes up, along with the population, and productivity continues to increase (the amount of resources produced per amount of time worked), that's a lot of people getting screwed over by the system.

Because with increasing productivity, unemployment actually suits the rich. Especially when they can import skilled workers from outside, or merely hire them in their own countries, and leave the poor to rot. Maybe my prediction will be wrong, but it makes sense. As technology gets better and corporations get ever more efficient, it's easier and easier to force people out of the system, especially when resources are finite.

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be fighting for the rights of the workers (and I suppose the right to work is part of that), just that there's a double issue here, which is growing. Unemployment in this country now is much, much higher than in the years before Thatcher, maybe even higher than ever before, and it's rocketing all across the world.

http://www.btimes.co.za/96/1208/trends/trends1.htm

The first half of that article is quite useful, then it starts going on about how jobs have become progressively more stable in the last three decades, which, as everyone knows, is bull.

I think you guys are concentrating so part on my bullshitting about terminology, I didn't really mean that, it just sounded catchy. I don't think I even mentioned the word "proletariat" in my original post, though if I did I didn't mean to .

My hypothesis is that what we're seeing is a combination of productivity and labour factors that mean capitalists don't actually need people to be involved in their system any more, the real labour pool is limited to the productive sectors (about 15% of the workforce). That's very different from before, where technology meant that it was in the capitalist's interests to force as many people to work as possible in the big wage slavery system that was the capitalist-industrial factory base, or even the peasant farming economy.

That explains the expansion in services and unemployment in the West to unprecedented levels. We now live in a country where something like 70% of the workforce is employed in services, and unemployment is something like 10% of the eligible population at the bare minimum (I'm not using claimant count figures here, they're just barefaced lies). So, I can't be arsed to figure it out completely, but that works out at something like 15% of people at the absolute maximum (probably less if we include just manufacturing and agriculture) involved in actual productive labour. That's what productivity gains mean: fewer and fewer people need to be involved in resource exploitation to maximise the amount the bosses get, and then it's in the bosses' interests to force as many people out of the workforce as they can get away with without outright revolution, and the rest go into services.

The fact is, in the modern environment, if we were all involved in productive labour, at current technologies and productivity levels, we would produce too much for ourselves and the world to handle. That's where I think the future lies. We can share the labour between us, and no-one will even need to work that hard - the socialist solution, it gives us room to work where we want, say brizzul's sort of vision of going to the factory for a couple weeks then taking a car out to help bring the harvest in over the next few days. Only 1% of the population is employed in agriculture, and yet a huge amount of food is produced with modern farming methods. Shorter hours is a part of that, because the upper classes reckon they can get away with making the productive workhorses work harder, longer hours, while forcing the rest of the people to grind away in services or on benefits.

I mean, I don't like to reduce things when it comes to history, but you can break down the phases (in employment terms, I'll avoid Marx's more in-depth analysis, and I'm making up these figures completely if you want to call me on them ):

Peasant-rural economy: 90-99% of people work in agriculture

Industrial-urban economy: 70% of people work in industry, 20-25% in agriculture

"New" economy: 15% productive labour, 80% unemployed & services

(the bosses being the missing figures)

Now I don't think the new phase is just some kind of "services" economy, because services, although it involves exploitation, job instability and wage slavery, just isn't productive like manufacturing and farming are. It isn't 100% necessary to everyone's survival. Maybe instead of seeing services and unemployment as just part of the economy, we should see them for what they are: a way of keeping down a huge part of the population. If the bosses were to lay everyone off and just keep the resources from the productive sectors of the economy, they'd still make the same amount of money, but they couldn't keep us down with 70% unemployment. The bosses need services, but just enough for themselves: such massive service sector employment, from a system point of view, is a natural way of keeping everyone just happy enough to stop the outbreak of revolution.

But what I think we're seeing in the US and the world is a problem with that system solution - productivity means that economic growth doesn't mean jobs any more. And soon people are going to start waking up to the fact that we don't need to limit productive labour to such a small section of society, and that sharing it will make everyone better off. I mean, only 1% of UK citizens in farming and whatever it is for industry (10%?) - splitting that work between ourselves would be no problem. 4 hour working days would be about right, and even give a ton of spare capacity (which capitalism can't take). Instead of being forced to spend our days behind telephones and pasting up adverts the majority of the "services" workforce can get the rights we deserve.

People need to see that the socialist solution isn't just better, it's the only possible solution to the current levels of productivity. And I reckon that's going to happen as soon as the bosses lose control of the unemployment-services balance I'm suggesting exists.

alexa: very true, but what value does the services sector have to the upper classes? They couldn't care less about what happens to the majority of society, they can get their own services. It is true that keeping a lot of people in the services sector lets them force down wages in the productive sectors, but then the same applies to having a pool of unemployed people.

pingtiao: I don't think they're going to impose less work on us, just more people are going to end up going from the services grind to the benefit grind as productivity increases and the number of people involved in manufacturing and agriculture decreases in response (the jobless growth thing). Land, food and industrial commodities form a finite pool of resources, right? The capitalists control the land, and if you aren't a producer of food or goods, then your position in the labour pool surely doesn't actually mean that much to them. They'd take all the resources if they could, but they can't because the people would wake up immediately. So instead the system responds naturally by allowing the services sector to grow, which provides money to people and gives the capitalists a market. But the services sector could be removed from the equation tomorrow and they could still take all the food and goods.

You see, the concept of a Roman/feudal/industrial rev. labour pool implied that the labour was necessary in some way to the capitalists, and that unemployment provided a capacity for extra labour. But I think that's deliberately misleading when applied to modern productivity, when, if everyone was in 50-hour week productive work, overproduction would be massive. A lot of labour nowadays in services is only necessary to the capitalists in that it keeps people in employment, and so stops them from rising up. But that balance will surely break if productivity keeps going up and more people are forced out of work.

You can trade in services, but in the end that concrete amount of "stuff" you have, your wealth, is measured by how much land you have, how big your house is, how much high-tech stuff you have around your house, how easy it is to buy good food, and so on. Money doesn't equate to real affluence, it's how much of the finite pool of resources you can secure for yourself, with all the machinery of state violence backing you up. My point is that services labour doesn't provide profit for the capitalists in the same way that productive sector work does. The sector being directly exploited for its produce is shrinking as productivity grows, and the masses involved in service sector work and unemployment increases all the time.

I'm equating benefits with service sector work - both are ways of providing a sop to the lower class, even though unemployment and service work are largely unnecessary, and productive labour could easily be shared at a much greater capacity across the general population.

Yeowch, I had to re-read that a few times . I think Marx is totally right about the labour system (especially in the way that systems work - the capitalist system is always evolving to contain threats to itself, and even thrive on them, international terrorism being the current example). Systems do act like conscious organs.

But, back to my point, the actual productive sectors of labour are much smaller than they used to be, right? I mean, it's fine to say "capitalists put people into services to make a profit off them," but their money isn't real in that sense: real things are things like commodities, textiles, food, buildings, land, electricity. The services sector simply isn't involved in the kind of labour that involves those sorts of production. I fail to see how capitalists make real gains from services except in terms of keeping down the vast majority of the population, giving them something to do (something like 70% of the workforce, that's an awfully large part of the total wage slavery in society), and using them as a market for their goods (again, capitalist goods & mod cons like TVs are clearly useful in keeping down the population, even though there's no way I'd give up my TV for that!!). See what I mean?