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Guys I hate to break it to you, but under capitalism, automation improves productivity but doesn't actually reduce the amount of time workers must work to survive. Instead, productivity gains are captured as profit. Only worker organizing will reduce our labor time. Yes, this applies to 'AI'

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Automation isn't exclusive to capitalism. AI is nothing more than relabeled programming, just like 'the cloud' is nothing more than relabeled server memory space. Techbros putting a fancy name on existing stuff is nothing more than a hype grift.

Right, its just a continuation of capital’s growing share of income, and perhaps an acceleration, but not qualitatively different other than the interface

wfrost@wfrost.bsky.social

Labor’s share of income almost below 50% for the first time

Worker organizing has been tried. It is not managed to do away with capitalism yet and there is no reason to think that it will. It can make local, temporary gains at best. Capitalism will have to collapse of its own accord. We can mitigate the suffering and prepare for the future. That's about all.

In economics, they taught us that productivity gains were responsible for weekends, the eight hour work day and wage improvements. This is because econ (the field as it exists today), is an embarrassingly transparent servant to oligarchs and corporate interests.

It's a social science where the most basic social scientific concept, responsibility, is unmentionable as David Ellerman points out. If responsibility were mentioned, it becomes clear that workers are responsible for all results of production since they use up inputs to produce outputs.

And the backbone to organizing is unity. I just listened to a philosopher talk about what unity is. He said unity is coming together with not only the people you do like but the ones you don’t like. At that moment is when I understood why worker organizing fails

Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. Those things you mentioned were paid for in blood. I’m not talking about the labor movement from 100yrs ago. I’m talking about today. There is no unity among workers today.

Which makes it all the more important to allow prices to fall so households get the benefits of productivity growth (instead of higher corp profits)

> Only worker organizing will reduce our labor time. No. Voting for better politicians also matters. Telling your friends and family about whom to vote for -- also matters. And so on.

Sure, voting for better politicians is an important thing to do as well. However, you need an organized base to ensure the 'better politician' keeps pushing hard in the direction we need

Let's put it another way: Even if you believe 'fully automated luxury communism' is possible And even if you're willing to ignore the ecological limits to 'growth' (hint: you should not be willing to ignore these) The distribution of goods and services will still depend on organized demands

Every productivity gain is more profit for the executives and large-scale shareholders*, and ultimately no benefit for workers. *If you happen to be an average worker and invest in your company (or in any company via 401k, etc.) you can't live off those profits if you lose your job. The rich can.