Marx Versus Bezos
January 25, 2018 11:11 PM   Subscribe

Amazon Go and the Future - "For decades technology helped the industrial world work better; more and more, technology is replacing that world completely, and there will be pain. That, though, is precisely why it is worth remembering that the world is not static: to replace humans is, in the long run, to free humans to create entirely new needs and means to satisfy those needs."

The dawn of American socialism - "Instead of merely building out a Europe-style welfare state, they would make it the most generous on Earth. Where it makes sense, they would directly build and own things like housing. And instead of merely taxing capital, they would bring a considerable portion of the national wealth under direct democratic control." (via)
In 1994, probably the historical low tide of socialism since the mid-19th century, Ralph Miliband defined it with two fundamental principles: "democratization far beyond anything which capitalist democracy can afford; and egalitarianism, that is to say the radical attenuation of immense inequalities of every kind which are part of capitalist democracy."

That is the future utopia that socialists are striving for — not some gray Soviet drudgery, but a thoroughly free and democratic world where the fruits of economic technology are as widely shared as possible. A place where people can, for the most part, do whatever they have reason to value. To somewhat misuse John Maynard Keynes, in such a future, "We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."
A Basic Income for Everyone? It's Not a Crazy Idea - "Alaska's experience means that there's very little risk in implementing a small UBI. Giving every American $3,000 a year would cost about $1 trillion -- less than one-sixth of current total government revenue. That amount could then be increased as desired, or increased in certain areas in order to get more data about the effects of larger transfers. In the ongoing war against poverty, a modest UBI looks like a safe, effective tool that wouldn't hurt the economy."
posted by kliuless (34 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
That, though, is precisely why it is worth remembering that the world is not static: to replace humans is, in the long run, to free humans to create entirely new needs and means to satisfy those needs.

Well let's be fair here, I hope people like the author get replaced, so that I don't have to explain their utterly wrong usage of Marxian concepts to support an appalling, exploitative, self-serving point of view couched in such unctuous rhetoric.
posted by polymodus at 11:57 PM on January 25, 2018 [11 favorites]


So basically we are talking about literally implementing Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism? Sign me up.
posted by overglow at 1:14 AM on January 26, 2018 [13 favorites]


"For decades technology helped the industrial world work better; more and more, technology is replacing that world completely, and there will be pain. That, though, is precisely why it is worth remembering that the world is not static: to replace humans is, in the long run, to free humans to create entirely new needs and means to satisfy those needs."

Odds of reading Atlas Shrugged, 100%.
posted by Beholder at 3:20 AM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've heard people muse that communism isn't natural because humanity is naturally greedy and selfish. I'm beginning to think democracy is unnatural for the same reasons.
posted by adept256 at 3:57 AM on January 26, 2018 [7 favorites]


I disagree with the opening premise, which frames cashiers as a 'marginal cost'.

"...that time costs the convenience store operator money. To sell 100 more items requires even more time — costs increase in line with revenue."

When I worked retail, they paid me a salary (perhaps we can call this a "fixed cost") and in a day I might sell 1 item or 100 items! The article makes it seem like if 2 customers walked into the store, I'd have to scurry to hire someone.

Articles like this which justify 'cashiers' as a 'marginal cost' or a 'fungible resource' or an 'opaque financial operator' or whatever are suspicious. Cause they're people, and, afaik, people are the reason we're in this game.
posted by parki at 4:16 AM on January 26, 2018 [7 favorites]


I always like how wondering what Marx would make about technological change freeing people from labour never takes these people quite so far as to find out what Marx wrote about technological change freeing people from labour.
posted by bebrogued at 4:25 AM on January 26, 2018 [36 favorites]


Did I miss the place in the article where it says that the goal of Amazon Go is to make the process of of paying for things less visible and more abstract so people won't notice it?
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:47 AM on January 26, 2018 [11 favorites]


The UBI experiments so far are a fucking joke. $3000 per year is not an income, it’s a lucky scratch card. The US hasn’t even gotten a workable solution for universal health care, but I’m expected to believe that UBI will coalesce at just the right moment to meet the needs of all the people who will be out of work when driverless automobiles hit the saturation point.

Here is the thing about meeting my needs: technically you’ve provided me with everything I need if you feed me a flavorless but nutrient-rich paste every day, a weather-proof box to sleep in at night, and maybe a shared space to for me to wash up or take a shit. Oh man, it’s going to be awesome. I’m finally going to able to pursue all my interests.
posted by um at 5:21 AM on January 26, 2018 [19 favorites]


Here is the thing about meeting my needs: technically you’ve provided me with everything I need if you feed me a flavorless but nutrient-rich paste every day, a weather-proof box to sleep in at night, and maybe a shared space to for me to wash up or take a shit

honestly, throw in health care (actual health care) and i'd take it
posted by halation at 5:33 AM on January 26, 2018 [12 favorites]


A majority of people seem to have been taught, and to believe sincerely, that the "work ethic" comes from God and that toiling for your subsistence until you drop dead is His plan. The collision of this worldview with the growing dispensability of labor is not going to be pretty.
posted by thelonius at 5:33 AM on January 26, 2018 [16 favorites]


Here is the thing about meeting my needs: technically you’ve provided me with everything I need if you feed me a flavorless but nutrient-rich paste every day, a weather-proof box to sleep in at night, and maybe a shared space to for me to wash up or take a shit. Oh man, it’s going to be awesome. I’m finally going to able to pursue all my interests.

Er... not to be reductionist, but yes, that would provide you with all your basic needs. I'd much rather everyone have three-star meals and a nice loft downtown, but I'd rather not let the perfect be the enemy of the good . Nutrient paste + weather-proof box is a step in the right direction for a lot of folks.
posted by Mayor West at 5:34 AM on January 26, 2018 [19 favorites]


The UBI experiments so far are a fucking joke. $3000 per year is not an income, it’s a lucky scratch card. The US hasn’t even gotten a workable solution for universal health care, but I’m expected to believe that UBI will coalesce at just the right moment to meet the needs of all the people who will be out of work when driverless automobiles hit the saturation point.

Society hasn't even begun to scratch the surface on UBI, so there's nothing to critique, but just the concept itself sure does set some people off.

All I can say about UBI, since we don't have any legislative proposal to actually discuss, is that the arguments against this not yet specified program sound an awfully like arguments you could make against any social program, including food stamps. This is a huge red flag to me, though I'm not an economist and not really qualified to take the disagreement further.
posted by Beholder at 5:37 AM on January 26, 2018 [8 favorites]


Nutrient paste + weather-proof box is a step in the right direction for a lot of folks.

I see people every week, as many here do, who'd simply be grateful for a place to sit where cops wouldn't be allowed to hassle them. Adding even a cardboard box would be gravy.
posted by Beholder at 5:40 AM on January 26, 2018 [13 favorites]


Instead we'll get automated machine guns defending Amazon Gos full of rotting food from hordes of starving people.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:54 AM on January 26, 2018 [28 favorites]


Stockton Gets Ready to Experiment With Universal Basic Income

‘For one year, several dozen Stockton families will get $500 a month, no strings attached.
(...) the goal is to gather data on the economic and social impacts of giving people a basic income.‘
posted by The Toad at 6:37 AM on January 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


cost about $1 trillion -- less than one-sixth of current total government revenue

CHIP costs about 1% of this and is for the most politically defensible constituency besides private interest. And it's dead on the side of the road.

Who in their right mind thinks this is [politically] feasible in any real way?

What's going to happen is that the geographic identities of any private interest are going to continue to disassociate from any local (and democratic) interest. The capitalists will still need to solve the issue of aggregate demand, but the demographics to do so are much more ripe in SE Asia and Africa. That's where the purchasing power is going.

As for ideas about 'middle class' living, it will be an accelerating evaporation in the US.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 6:39 AM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


It turns out both of these things can be true:

1. Inventing ways to create value without human labor is a key part of creating a world in which a person’s ability to live a decent life is no longer dependent on their provision of labor, which I think we can all agree is a good end goal.

2. This is very much not what Amazon Go is doing.
posted by Itaxpica at 6:42 AM on January 26, 2018 [15 favorites]


If Amazon wants to kill the local convenience store, they can fuck off and die. I imagine their plan is to Walmart their way into the corner store market with outlets of varying quality, depending on the area. They've already started replacing the USPS with the Amazon Locker and their own delivery fleet. People can argue until they're blue in the face over whether or not Amazon is a monopoly as it is historically defined, but they're definitely an Akira-like bloated beast with insatiable hunger subsuming everything in their path. And everyone's all "But it's so convenient!"
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:48 AM on January 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


"For decades technology helped the industrial world work better; more and more, technology is replacing that world completely, and there will be pain. That, though, is precisely why it is worth remembering that the world is not static: to replace humans is, in the long run, to free humans to create entirely new needs and means to satisfy those needs."
Odds of reading Atlas Shrugged, 100%.


Or could have read about the Technocracy movement and its claim to consider some of the ancient Greeks on the nature of work. Or perhaps the mantra of rural electrification - which was something Lydon Johnson rode to the WH.

Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941 as an example book.
posted by rough ashlar at 6:53 AM on January 26, 2018


nutrient paste riots
posted by thelonius at 6:57 AM on January 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


Peter Frase wrote a book a few years ago called "Four Futures: Life After Capitalism" The four possibilities he outlined are:

- Equality and Abundance (automation brings a kind of communist utopia)
- Hierarchy and Abundance (automation brings "rentism" and plutocracy)
- Equality and Scarcity (climate change, but we work together and survive)
- Hierarchy and Scarcity (climate change and the rich all move to Antarctica and the rest of us die)

In all likely hood, we will see versions of all four play out in different parts of the world.
posted by gwint at 7:30 AM on January 26, 2018 [12 favorites]


All I can say about UBI, since we don't have any legislative proposal to actually discuss, is that the arguments against this not yet specified program sound an awfully like arguments you could make against any social program, including food stamps. This is a huge red flag to me, though I'm not an economist and not really qualified to take the disagreement further.

It's not opposition to the concept you're seeing. Rather, it's the view that that UBI, at least in the US, will be used as a social good or to help or free people from the drudgery of work. That view is so naive that anyone expressing it is likely not capable of having a useful discussion about it.

I don't think it's a coincidence that discussion of UBI has bubbled up into the mainstream just as these megacorporations are embracing total automation. I've even seen avowed libertarians embrace it. It's because they see it as a third alternative to "Socialism or Barbarism": use a teensy bit of the profits they reap from automation to give the masses just enough so they don't riot or make too much noise about real change.
posted by Sangermaine at 7:33 AM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Shortly after the world became a parody of a William Gibson novel, it became a parody of a Ken McLeod novel.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:51 AM on January 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


which was something Lydon Johnson rode to the WH.

Known to his friends as Rotten Johnson.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:55 AM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


CHIP costs about 1% of this and is for the most politically defensible constituency besides private interest. And it's dead on the side of the road.

Who in their right mind thinks this is [politically] feasible in any real way?


This assumes that poor children are a politically influential constituency, which seems maybe not the case in fact?
posted by atoxyl at 8:39 AM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Minimum wages and UBIs denominated in nominal dollars (euros, pesos,yuan etc)  can't change the power of the rich to suck up all that spending power through rent seeking, deception and price hikes.  UBI and Wage laws pegged to inflatio  or consumer price indexes could be fun as two conflicting feedba k loops fight, as landlords try to raise rent faster than incomes get readjusted etc.  You can't shrink a spring by pushing on the bottom and not touching the top!

So I see nothing that says we are not on path 4, hierarchy and scarcity.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 9:43 AM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I didn't say influential, I said defensible. My language could be more exact, but the point is, don't hold your breath for UBI on the house floor.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 9:44 AM on January 26, 2018


By the way, i still support UBI and minimum wage.... the more people equalized at the bottom, the more possible solidarity from common experience in the wax box riots of 2025. Many AI drones will shed digital tears over the slaughter.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 9:46 AM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


So I see nothing that says we are not on path 4, hierarchy and scarcity.

The trajectory of Elon Musk would seem to indicate a 5th path to the eventual space condos exists.

Plenty of futures have been made from the exploitation of natural resources and as the time traveling view of the future brought back to us by Futurama indicates - 1st to Mars means you get to have vast land holdings for your mars farm.

AI can get the kick of "we HAVE to have it!" after a nice plague or big war with less people around. And less hassle than trying UBI 1st.
posted by rough ashlar at 9:58 AM on January 26, 2018


I didn't say influential, I said defensible. My language could be more exact, but the point is, don't hold your breath for UBI on the house floor.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if you want to be maximally cynical about how politics work, an argument you'll hear is that while poor children might be highly defensible in the moral or intellectual sense, they are not particularly defensible in the military sense - an view which favors the viability of programs the constituency for which is "everybody." However (as I said in another recent thread) I think this reasoning fits a lot better if you're comparing, say, means-tested versus fully universal approaches to delivering health care - it's more complicated when it comes to something like UBI.
posted by atoxyl at 10:48 AM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Who do capitalists think will buy stuff, if they automate everyone out of a job?
posted by Happy Dave at 11:43 AM on January 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


I think it's pretty clear that the current Congress isn't going to pass anything resembling a UBI. I was most excited about Ryan Cooper's article about the "dawn of American Socialism" and the new space that has been opening up for socialist organizing and politics. The rise and continuing popularity of Bernie Sanders seems very significant in terms of the potential for a dramatic leftward shift.

I mean, Seattle already has a socialist City Council member and more politicians running in local and state elections are opening criticizing capitalism and advocating for socialist and social democratic solutions. And winning.

I'm especially excited by potential socialist approaches to the housing crisis, as described by Cooper:
What cities like New York need is a ton of decent new apartments at a reasonable price. Socialists would attack the problem head-on by directly building them on public land. They would be modest, but in contrast to the traditional practice of a sharp means test for public housing, they would be open to a wide socioeconomic spectrum, and priced accordingly.

This would accomplish several objectives. First, it would drastically expand the housing stock while creating new socio-economically-integrated neighborhoods — no more projects with heavily concentrated poverty. Second, cities generally own a good deal of land, and can borrow relatively cheaply, so financing wouldn't be a problem. Third, because there would be non-poor people occupying the majority of the units and paying something closer to market-rate rents, the investment would pay for itself — indeed, in tighter rental markets it would quickly become a huge revenue source. Fourth, it would take some pressure off the private market, and help keep rents down there as well.
posted by overglow at 3:35 PM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


I listened to an interview with Jeron Lanier last week. He explained that in the view of the Silicon Valley magnates, many fewer people are going to have jobs in the future. So they're going to have to pacify the population with social media and VR, a UBI, and literal opiates of the masses (yes he really said that).

I don't think that prediction makes a lot of sense. In the past 50 years, we've allowed women to work in large numbers, brought back millions of troops, gone through a massive wave of immigration, automated away hundreds of entire categories of jobs from bookkeepers to phone operators to assembly line workers, and allowed billions of extremely poor people to make goods and export them to the US. You would think all that competition would decrease wages to near-zero. Instead they've stayed roughly constant (arguably decreasing a little, but not a plummet). It's lead to mass social upheaval, but not mass unemployment.

Even though I don't agree with the mass unemployment hypothesis, it's still valuable to know how the Silicon Valley magnates think. And if it helps us get to a better social safety net, I'm all in favor.
posted by miyabo at 5:24 PM on January 26, 2018


Instead we'll get automated machine guns defending Amazon Gos full of rotting food from hordes of starving people.

Basically Zardoz.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:41 PM on January 29, 2018


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