bitsplease , 1 year ago

right - but you’re looking at it from a single-company perspective.

Individual companies will absolutely cut their work force wherever they can when automation makes it possible. My point is that new industries spring up to fill the vacuum. Things like instacart, Uber, and Doordash didn’t exist in 2005, neither did a myriad of other industries. Where there is unemployment, there is profit to be made in exploiting their labor (which is often cheap, thanks to the fact that they just got automated out of their niche), and as a capatilist society there will always be someone willing to make that profit.

they don’t really care if the rest of us all die off from starvation or war.

Not from a moral perspective, no - but from a pragmatic perspective they absolutely do. If 90% of the workforce was suddenly laid off and left to starve, what do you actually think would happen? That we’d all just sit at home and quietly die? Ask the french royalty what happens when it’s population realizes that it’s main hope to not starve to death is to dismantle the existing system and start over.

The rich of today absolutely squeeze the shit out of the working class for every penny they can - but not to the point where most are actually immediately concerned with starvation. It’s one thing to not be able to afford a home, need roomates, and to have to budget carefully to make ends meet (as is the case today), it’s another entirely to have significant portions of the population be told that there is no job for them, and likely never will be again.

But all that is mostly besides the point anyways, because until literally every possible human job is completely automated, there will always be profit in exploiting labor. And there’s only profit to be had in any case if there are people with money to buy things. If 99% of jobs are automated - that just means that for any given population of workers, they’ll be able to produce 100x more goods for the same (or less) pay. A Capitalist society is never going to say “that’s ok - we have enough productivity”, they’ll just scale up and make even more money