[lbo-talk] Contradictions of contemporary working class consciousness

Barry Brooks durable at earthlink.net
Wed Aug 14 06:30:22 PDT 2013


Unions made a very bad deal to cope with technological unemployment. When the surviving workers split the increased profits made possible by increased productivity, those workers who were made redundant were abandoned and left to hope that the consumer economy would waste even more resources in order to "create" new unnecessary jobs for them.

At the limit the capitalist drive to cut labor costs will result in a robot economy in which unions will have as little place as paid human labor. Maybe the unions should have read more Russell and less Marx. "In praise of idleness" would have been useful to change the world in a practical way. Trying to making enough jobs to keep all workers busy has led to planet plunder.

Automation and Robotics News http://blogs.evergreen.edu/arnews/ ************ Krugman near the edge. I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.” But what, exactly, would they propose instead? http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/06/paul-krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html *********************** Le Monde basic income article. In 1968 Tobin, with Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and 1,200 other economists, first called for a basic income... http://www.exacteditions.com/read/diplomatique/may-2013-35492/1/3/

Barry



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