by
Grace Blakeley
Globalisation
and automation: these are the trends reshaping our world, or so we
are told. According to the consultancy McKinsey, 80% of jobs could
technically be automated by 2050. Globalisation will bring the Global
South closer to the Global North. Together, they will create a world
in which an ever greater number of human beings compete for a
shrinking number of jobs.
But
there’s a fatal flaw in this narrative: it doesn’t make any
sense.
‘Globalisation’
can’t do anything – it is not an actor; it does not have agency.
The same goes for ‘automation’ – whilst robots may one day
become autonomous beings, as things stand they still have to be
programmed by people. Hence the absurdity of claiming that ‘the
robots are taking our jobs’. Robots don’t have the capacity to
‘take’ anything.
Capitalists,
on the other hand, most certainly do.
Globalisation
and automation are both examples of what linguists call
‘nominalisations’: nouns created from adjectives or verbs. For
example, interference is a nominalisation of ‘interfere’. Whilst
the verb ‘to interfere’ would have to be used with a subject (I
interfere, you interfere, etc), the nominalisation does not. One can
completely strip out the actor behind the change and rely instead on
an abstract noun to do all the work.
This
method of political discourse is powerful and highly ideological.
Talking about ‘globalisation’ allows us to construct the idea of
‘globalisation’ as an inevitable, impersonal trend, driven by the
agentless forces of history. The nominalisation completely obscures
the fact that ‘to globalise’ is a verb – the same goes for ‘to
automate’. ‘Automation’ doesn’t just happen – tasks are
automated by people.
In fact,
‘nominalisation’ is itself a nominalisation – someone has to be
doing the nominalising. Those who popularised the depoliticising of
terms like ‘globalisation’ and ‘automation’ benefit from the
processes they claim to describe but in fact obscure. And it is not
hard to see how.
Popular
use and acceptance of these terms represents a significant victory
for the agents behind these changes. People talk easily of
globalisation and automation, viewing them as abstract ‘facts of
life’ to which we will all have to adapt, naturalising what are in
fact contingent phenomena. This has served to obscure the role of
those doing the globalising and the automating.
When it
comes to globalisation, the wealthy have benefited massively from the
dramatic increase in capital mobility since the 1980s. They are
increasingly able to invest their money anywhere in the world, paying
as much or as little tax as they would like to along the way. They
would argue that this was an inevitable result of technological
change, but legal, social and organisational changes were required
too – from the removal of capital controls, to the massive
deregulation of finance, to the creation of international financial
institutions like the IMF and World Bank.
By
presenting these changes as natural and inevitable, elites have been
able to claim they are also irreversible. Fashionable nominalisations
like ‘globalisation’ have allowed elites to argue that high tax
rates don’t work in a world where capital is free to move wherever
it likes. You can’t tax the wealthy, so the argument goes, because
if you try they’ll just leave. Don’t like it? Take it up with
globalisation.
The same
kind of analysis can be applied to the idea of automation. We are
increasingly being flooded with doomsday scenarios about mass
technological unemployment resulting from developments in machine
learning and artificial intelligence. Rather than challenging these
narratives, many on the left have succumbed to these apparently
inevitable changes and developed policies that will ease the pain –
from universal basic income to the three-day week.
But such
a narrative totally fails to grasp how these changes are being
driven, and in whose interests. Much of the technology behind
automation has been developed either by huge transnational monopolies
or highly militarised neoliberal states. More importantly, the way in
which these technological changes work their way into the production
process is determined almost entirely by giant corporations and their
state sponsors.
These
actors have a direct interest in driving labour out of the production
process entirely. This transformation would not only allow
capitalists to dramatically increase their profits, but would also
finally crush labour’s capacity to resist (whilst of course
creating new contradictions to which this new mode of capitalism
would have to adapt). Full automation under capitalism would
represent the completion of a 40-year project to seize an ever
greater share of national income for capital, at the expense of
labour.
‘The
robots’ aren’t coming for our jobs – but the capitalists who
own the robots certainly are. And this is ultimately what the
politics of automation comes down to – the ownership of capital.
Unless ownership of that capital is dramatically broadened, the
coming decades will witness ordinary people further stripped of power
and control over their lives, with increasing numbers rendered
surplus to an economy in which they have no role nor stake.
Resisting
capitalist automation should be part of any socialist agenda, as the
much-maligned Luddites were well aware. The movement towards a
socialist mode of production may then allow us to achieve what might
be termed ‘alter-automation’ – à la the ‘alter-globalisation’
movement – based on full automation, a universal basic income, and
the full socialisation of wealth.
We on
the left must stop presenting ‘automation’ and ‘globalisation’
as interesting, slightly scary, but ultimately inevitable changes to
which we must adapt. These terms should be confronted for what they
are: active processes to shift wealth and power from the overwhelming
majority to a tiny elite. Without that recognition, we will struggle
to wrest back control over our economic and political systems and
rescue potentially liberating technological advances from the
dystopian control of the powerful.
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