Workerism is Over

What good is a worker-centered ideology in an era when workers as both a social category and a technical necessity are disappearing? Aren't we both narrowing our appeal and impoverishing our vision? Shouldn't we plan for the future post-work society right now?

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dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/new-working-class-precarity-race-gender-democrats?utm_source=Dissent Newsletter&utm_campaign=4ec418c318-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_05_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a1e9be80de-4ec418c318-101949705
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/comite-invisible-the-coming-insurrection
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"Worker control of the means of production" and "popular control of the automated factories" aren't all that different.

It requires a serious paradigm shift in how we theorize and organize.

What the fuck do you think a worker is?

Most anarchist theory does not proceed from Marx's Law of Value (although it is generally acknowledged as being correct) and thus requires little, if any, revision for a future world of high automation.

If this is the case then intersectionalism is all we have left and i dont want to live in that world

What about "permanently unemployed people of the world unite?"

Social control over the means of production.

What touches all ought to be controlled by all.

Decisions that effect X people ought to be decided by X people.

The working class isn't disappearing, it is just not the industrial working class anymore. So we just have to adopt the language. Dissent is usually too liberal for me but this article is incredible IMO.

dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/new-working-class-precarity-race-gender-democrats?utm_source=Dissent Newsletter&utm_campaign=4ec418c318-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_05_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a1e9be80de-4ec418c318-101949705

It adresses class as most central, but also copes with intersectionality theory.

Also even though we see deindustrialization in the first world, the majority of the global south can still be organized with orthodox marxism, worker control over factories, etc.

Additional reading should be Zizek and Jodi Dean on those who are "proletarianized" under capitalism.

Leftists should abandon folk political 'workerist' organising and demand UBI and full automation

Hello liberal. It would be really better for you if you disguised yourself at least a bit.

Demanding higher salaries and benefits is counterproductive in an age where the employers can just replace you with robots

Demanding control of the robots isn't.

what the fuck do you think we're trying to do here. what do you think fully automated luxury communism is

Lol

a silly joke that got a little out of hand?

Socialism is the only feasible means of automating production. Under capitalism, it would either lead to economic devastation for the working class as jobs suddenly started disappearing or the state would step in with social reforms ensuring a minimal standard of living. Social democratic reforms are not an indefinitely viable solution however, and eventually the now not-working class would grow intolerant of the blatant economic inequality and lack of class mobility and rise up against the capitalists in revolution.

Zizek is right when he says that the future will either be socialist or communist. succdems will be Capital's last defense

It's all about changing terms. I like participatory economics, it sounds really tame and technocratic

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Tired: workers revolution

Wired: going all out for Zucc 2020, Srnicek and Williams, UBI, tech solutions, waiting for the coming AI God to solve all our problems so we can achieve Full automated luxury gay space communism and play vidya all day while watched over by our benevolent tech overlords

It went to shit and is a mixture of business news, ad copy for tech companies, and pop science.

I guess the several billion people still laboring at jobs that are not easy or feasible to automate, that keep all of modern society running, just don't matter.

They'll be a minority eventually. Besides, these manufacturing jobs aren't coming back to the US, ever.

We should help those workers logically, through science and innovation, rather than through leftism. Any labor disruption is counterproductive as it delays the singularity. Just sit down and wait while the tech industry invents full automation and Creates an AI God capable of solving all our problems. It can't take that long. We are in the future now don't

...

Looks like someone's read Bookchin.

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/comite-invisible-the-coming-insurrection
Read this.

We're all workers now more than ever. The classic identity of the factory worker is disappearing in the west, but proletarianization still proceeds apace, expanding via phenomena such as the Spectacle into fields of life outside of the firm. The ongoing death of the firm is its ultimate victory in becoming generalized to the whole world and therefore indistinguishable as a distinct, differentiated thing which can be pointed at and be said of "this is a firm". Everything is becoming a market relation, and the metropolis, both in meatspace and cyberspace, is the endless monotony of an unbroken sea of these, stretching as far as the eye can see.


Hi, Srnicek and Williams. Bye, Srnicek and Williams.

The 20th century left was focused on workers, because workers were a key component in the capitalist system. Pretty much all workers are about to be replaced by robots and AI within the next few decades, hence the left must shift it's focus accordingly if it wants to keep driving progress forward.

To a certain degree. But I think Zizek is completely right when he says we should expand the proletariat to include the permanently unemployed and precarious. Bookchin's idea of "the people" and "citizens" works aswell if you make sure it stays class-focused (I've heard people say that Bookchin's ideas resemble fascist class collaborationism but I think that accusation goes a bit too far)

This is a fucking lie. There is no such thing as "automation", it's just increasing magnifying of labor power through capital. This factor of magnification can be like x100 but it's still labor. You might replace factory workers with robots, but there'll still be engineers and robot manufacturers.

Muh insurrection scares people. When people think insurrection they think riots and barricades. UBI and automation offer concrete solutions to concrete problems people actually experience. How does one measure alienation? Can it be scientifically defined? What makes alienation into something that is not solvable by technical means, such as better anti depressants or Zuckerberg's plan to foster community and purposefulness through social media?

Read the book. The anarchist side of communization focuses on reinterpreting normally pre-revolutionary activities (such as sharing via foodbanks) as part of a prefigurative project of developing communism right now with what we have, and what concrete actions will transform them from integrated parts of capitalism into a separate circulation of use values.
The only problem with it is that it, like almost all leftist works since the '50s, thinks in terms of territory relations rather than power relations, of which "territory" is a function and a particular type. Focus on the parts where they talk about society as control, cybernetics and all that.
It needs a lot of work as both a piece of writing and as a modern exposition of a scientific socialism, but it's a great start regardless.
UBI and automation don't offer any way out because they are the uncritical intensification of current realities. I've always said that Leninism is a dead end which should be avoided like the plague, and Srnicek and Williams's attempts to deconstruct accelerationism back into a Leninist framework is just one more proof of this out of many. Ignore them.