Yanis
Varoufakis spoke with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow!
about his new book and recent developments. Varoufakis explains in a
brief and simple way, why capitalism, today more than ever, is about
to collapse:
The
beauty of capitalism is that it is undermining itself. Capitalism is
fantastic at overthrowing capitalism. Think about all of the gadgets
that it creates, the technologies.
Very
briefly, imagine for a moment that this technological innovation -
artificial intelligence, robots - moves in a manner in which it is
moving, but even faster. Very soon, you can have robots producing
everything. Now, the robots do not want to consume that which they
produce and the rest of humanity is not going to have the money to
buy it.
So,
capitalism is going to have a massive crisis, simply because it will
have a humongous capacity to produce stuff and no capacity to consume
it, which is already what we are observing. The reason why Trump is
the president of United States is because of this great incongruity.
In the United States today we have a magnificent capacity to produce,
but more than 50% of American families cannot afford to buy the
cheapest car on the market for the first time in the last 70 years.
So, we
have the capacity to produce all sorts of things, but not enough of a
capacity to consume them. That is what undermining capitalism.
A few
years ago, Varoufakis revealed
what he learned firsthand from an 'insider':
“While
I was watching from my window in Austin-Texas, I saw a big cloud of
dust deep in horizon. Two days ago, I was walking in that area and I
was surprised by the view of the big factory where bulldozers and
machines were continuously working, producing the dust. From the
front side of the building under construction it was obvious that
(fortunately) they were not building a new trade center or apartment
blocks. No, it was a big industrial center.”
“Although
I didn't notice it the first time, after a few seconds I realised
that something was missing from this factory: people! Specifically, I
counted three. All of them were wearing helmets and protection suits
and were located in a small office in a space outside with a few
computers, while they were covered by a tent like those used by the
army. Ten bulldozers, three cranes and more or less ten moving tools,
at least from what I could see, were moving without drivers,
operators, workers generally.”
“When
I returned to my office, I went straight to find a colleague who
knows well what's going on. He informed me that the workplace I saw,
was the new factory of Apple to produce MacBook Pro. It was true
that, it was constructed through almost complete automatization. The
materials had been selected through a way with which, the automatic
machines - therefore robots connected to eachother through a local
wireless network (intranet) - to be able to construct without human
interference - even the hydraulic structure of the building will be
constructed by plumpers-robots. A factory that under normal
conditions should employ thousands of workers is functioning with the
presence of less than one hundred souls.”
“I
asked him about the move of Apple to produce computers in America, by
bringing back in the US the production from China for the first time
after decades. 'How's that?' And the answer was the expected one,
although quite impressive: 'Wages are of no importance. The
export of productive processes from America to China (off-shoring)
was only an intermediate stage. The production has returned to
America, but not the jobs. The new factory of Apple, not only is
constructed without American workers' sweat, but will also produce
MacBook Pro through complete automatization, without hiring Texans.
Welcome to the New, Brave World', ended with a smile,
referring obviously to the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley.”
It seems
that Karl Marx had predicted
the self-destruction of capitalism through automation:
Marx’s
economic theory was based on the labour theory of value: that the
value of a good is, at it’s simplest form, the necessary labour
time to make it. In “The Fragment on Machines”, Marx
tackles a question that is more relevant today than ever: how do we
define value when the human labour required to create goods rapidly
approaches zero? Or, put more apocalyptically: when AI have taken all
the jobs, who is left to buy goods?
Another view for Mr. Varoufakis:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.defenddemocracy.press/varoufakis-and-democracy-left-and-nationalism/
http://www.cadtm.org/How-Tsipras-with-Varoufakis-s-aid
There is a very simple fix to capitalism. Capitalist price and profit seeking technology has given sellers the technology ability to automatically charge more to rich people and less to poor people for the same thing. Charging more to rich people and less to poor people is first degree price discrimination and very very profitable for business and sales. When done perfectly, it would result in giving sellers the ability to capture all the surplus profit from rich people and make a huge profit for the retail sales department. The result is a price system based largely on a persons price sensitivity so that price sensitive poor people are charged less than price insensitive rich people for the same thing . Equality follows naturally as a result of profit seeking behavior by the sales and retail pricing department.
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