Garry
Glass discusses how advances in automation are disrupting class
relations.
Part
3 - “Scarcity is manufactured simultaneously with the manufacture
of our consent.”
Henry Ford
is credited with the idea that if bosses drive down costs through
mass production whilst paying high enough wages for their factory
workers, these workers will be able to get credit and eventually
afford the high priced products of their labour. ‘Fordism’ was
essential to modern industrialisation by driving the expansion of
mass production through linking it to debt-based consumerism.
The crisis
of overproduction comes when the worker as consumer can’t actually
afford or get credit for the goods they make at the market rate given
their stagnant, low wages. The strategies of expansion, debt
accumulation, environmental exploitation and the privatisation of
public services do little to conceal this contradiction of
capitalism. In the medium term information technology and automation
are expected to keep capitalism buoyant but the long term picture is
one where profit margins approach zero thus removing the incentive to
invest capital.
To solve
this problem, some on the political right believe workers could be
made to work for next to nothing, whilst those on the left (and
increasingly many free market thinkers) believe giving everyone a
basic income will solve this.
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