Trans-ending Capitalism
Everywhere I turn, someone’s complaining about how things used to be. From the current POTUS to activist rhetoric that’s been playing out for decades, people seem to think there was a golden era when life was good.
As a millennial, I believe that golden era is now. Society innovates, and in this day and age it innovates at a rapidly evolving pace. Except for Donald Trump. Most of us can agree he was an objective step backward for the entire world. But we move mostly forward otherwise.
If we want to put an end to the anti-change politics we must force it to adapt. How do we accomplish such a feat? Supply and demand, baby. That microeconomics class in community college paid off after all.
See, in the good ol’ days when oil and manufacturing was the moneymaker, young hippies stood in the streets with picket signs to rage against the machine. Cue my favorite plot device: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. In this day and age, the machine is our friend.
We’ve designed machines and computers so well that they’re starting to replace living, working people in the workforce by performing tasks faster and more accurately than we can. In fact, check out this cheeky little infographic made by the McKinsey & Company Global Consulting Firm. It details the percentage of tasks that can be automated with technology available today. It even separates all of these tasks into what kinds of jobs are at high and low risk for automation outsourcing.
How can you trust this information? The company is the number one global management consulting firm. In layman’s terms, they make businesses run better and faster. So if they’re putting out information to boast the capabilities of automation, you bet they have a vested interest in the truth of that statement. It’s how they make their money.
“Wait a minute, Quinn. I thought you said the machine was our friend.”
It is, hear me out. See, with these machines doing our jobs better than us, our future predicts a huge number of people out of work. In the food industry alone, we have the technical feasibility to automate approximately 73% of the daily activities involved from preparing food to collecting dirty dishes.
Obviously, there are certain service sectors that we cannot automate due to social-acceptance barriers. As efficient as these robots are, they can’t replace the bedside manner of a nurse. Nevertheless, automation is here, and it’s going to put millions of people out of work. It’s not a question of if, it’s when.
Here’s the good part. The Republican Party claims it’s committed to the economic growth of the American people. They are, after all, just a type of governing policies that pursues what they believe is in the best interest of the country. So if automation threatens our labor force, conservatives ought to do something about it, right? Not an option. Attempting to control automation within businesses contradicts the Republican ideal of weaker government oversight.
Deregulation is the crux of Republican politics by nature because contemporary conservatism favors free market capitalism. It supports less federal intervention so businesses can thrive without “Big Brother” stepping in and barking orders, which is all good in the hood until the efforts of capitalism produced the silver bullet to it’s own economic structure: automation. If they start back-pedaling on this specific occasion, their entire modus operandi is moot.
Our workforce is facing an inevitable rate of unemployment, so the question is: “What is our government going to do to provide for the tremendous amount of people who will soon be out of work?”
Let them starve? That would be a complete waste of human capital. One solution would be to increase taxes to provide a Universal Basic Income (UBI). It’s this idea that everyone gets a guaranteed wage no matter what they do. It’s not enough to live a lavish lifestyle, but it’s enough to get by on, and it frees people up to perform tasks that can’t be automated — yet. After all, it’s only a matter of time before the bigoted poor working class realizes that it isn’t the immigrants taking their jobs.
“So we’re just going to pay people to sit around and do nothing?”
With what our machines can do and will be able to do, there eventually won’t be any organizations left willing to pay a human wage for work that a machine can do at a fraction of the cost. We will have no choice but to restructure our economy to prioritize investment in a public education system that is formatted to put people into jobs that have been created due to the myriad of newly outsourced industries.
Consider this: at the height of Blockbuster’s economic boom, it employed 84,000 people, serviced approximately 3 million customers and generated $6 billion in sales. In 2016, Netflix employed 4,500 people, consisted of over 60 million subscribers and generated $8.83 billion in revenue. Innovation allows companies like Netflix to employ less workers, produce more content, and generate more revenue. Those laid off workers didn’t all remain in the media distribution industry, they simply reallocated because we innovated the supply of media to diminish demand for that type of work.
In the case of automation and its relationship with UBI, people will reallocate, but we need the social infrastructure to aid that process.
Sounds a lot like socialism, right? It is, and it’s going to replace capitalism. When socialism was in its early stages of development, it was purely utopian. The idea of socialism manifested from people who sympathized with the manipulated working class by the capitalist bourgeois all across Europe. Early adopters failed to understand the role that capitalism was playing, and that the economic model had casualties because it was young in its lifecycle.
To put it simply, when it became clear to Karl Marx that every historical time period had a unique method of production, he understood that capitalism was the correct method for his era.
When we exposed a common thread that ran all throughout human history, we were suddenly able to follow it into the future. The working class identified its role in society as labor power to increase the surplus value of capitalism. And it is with that knowledge that Marx bestowed upon the working class their mission in history: to transform capitalism into socialism when it became irrelevant. With the help of automation, that’s what the tech industry is doing. In effect, Marx predicted this more than 200 years ago, and it’s happening.
The concept of Universal Basic Income is in the process of experimentation already. According to an Independent article published yesterday, an effort to implement UBI is already seeing results in Finland. The country provided unconditional income to a control group of 2,000 citizens in January, and it has reported “decreased stress, greater incentives to find work and more time to pursue business ideas.” Countries such as Norway and Switzerland are also conducting the same experiment.
The common argument is that this could never work on a population scale as large as the United States, and my counterargument is that we have never tried. The United States of America was the pioneer of capitalism when feudalism collapsed, and so the sentiment we grew attached to was never truly doing things best way, it was doing them our way.
Unfortunately, for much of the Western world clinging to capitalism’s diminishing production value, our way is no longer the right or most efficient way.
Sure, it can feel like a hopeless dream that will never be achieved, especially when it’s coming from the mouth of a 20-something, unemployed dimwit (AKA: me). But the idea is being championed by world-renowned figures such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Wozniak and notable politicians from established nations. It’s not only achievable, it’s happening. Right now.
So against the wishes of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas who once wrote, “Do not go gentle into that goodnight”, I urge those who stoke the fire of yesteryears: Please, go gentle into that goodnight.
