/149/ It's Not Robots, It's Capitalism ft. Aaron Benanav / Liz Pancotti
Added 2020-09-24 06:00:02 +0000 UTCOn unemployment.
The Covid crisis has led to millions out of work - but the situation was none too rosy before, either. Post-crisis recoveries seem increasingly 'jobless', while the overall labour force participation rate keeps falling as people drop out entirely.
We interview to Liz Pancotti of Employ America for a picture of what's driving US unemployment.
Then we talk to Aaron Benanav about his new book and learn that it's not robots who are stealing jobs, but rather capitalism's own stagnation. Why are both radical Keynesian ideas and UBI proposals no real solution? And, finally, what is the working class to do in a world with depressed demand for labour?
Running order:
- Liz Pancotti - (04:09)
- Aaron Benanav - (53:09)
Readings:
- Automation and the Future of Work, Aaron Benanav, Verso
- Unemployment Benefit Expansions: A Guide for Policy Responses in the Wake of COVID-19, Elizabeth Pancotti, Employ America
- Do not let homeworking become digital piecework for the poor, Sarah O'Connor, FT
Comments
I'll say this. Benanav interviews well, and comes over like a "nice intellectual guy." But the slick presentation hides a really weird argument. Clearly he is a communization theorist, and believes the state has no role in liberation. This whole palaver in his NLR pieces about the "capital strike" is a trap. Yes, of course, the capital strike is basically the gravitational limit of capitalism. But that’s hardly news. The capital strike was a central pillar of the Grexit debate too, and we all know who won that. There was no way, as Leo Panitch more than adequately explained, that a “grexit + parallel economies” plan was going to work. It was a highly speculative bit of nonsense that would have knocked Greece into the stone age. We may not like that, but the Greek left was only going to be able to wrestle with the capital strike by means of a more hybrid strategy. For Panitch, the parallel economies were an important element in the plan. But they needed a state strategy if they were to going to be able to win anything from the EU. No amount of hand waiving from Benanav over the “failures of the Keynesian state” is going to change that. You might not like the state, but you need to have a plan for it. This leads me to my biggest grudge with Benanav, which is this silly strategy of trying to pin FALC theory like its some kind of Silicon Valley boosterism, with no analysis of deindustrialization except “the robots are coming for your jobs,” and no solution other than left UBI. This is such a brazenly bad faith reading of the FALC literature. Even Mason (admittedly a flawed figure in this debate) has a multivariate analysis of the global economy, that absolutely understands deindustrialization. Bastani, too. And Bastani has a wide range of solutions in his book, that go far beyond UBI. What must be remembered about FALC is that it is not a proposed solution for a problem called automation, but an attempt to leverage the opportunities of contemporary technology to build a populist left project that people will actually want to vote for.
Nicholas Kiersey
2020-09-26 22:50:34 +0000 UTCso here we are in 2020 and it seems that there is no way out of neoliberal paradigm. not on the left at least. as Michael Hudson aptly put: “there are Keynesians and there are Keynesians”. according to someone like Aaron keynesianism just means priming the pump, and employment is only secured through private sector. there is no public employment i guess. and what does productivity (technology) have to do with employment level, which is always set by the state as a currency monopolist? liz, on the other hand, is clearly a leftist “expert” on labor markets because why else would she keep repeating nonsense like “jobs guarantees” and imply that job guarantee is some obscure concept without 30 years of literature on it? oh, and btw lower rates LOWER inflationary pressures through an interest income channels. all these labor issues have been talked to death in mmt circles for the last 30 years and all these questions have been resolved thoroughly. why is the left so averse to them? bring pavlina tcherneva, randy wray or better yet warren mosler and they ll answer any question on labor with crystal clear clarity.
martynas aukst
2020-09-24 19:38:22 +0000 UTC
