Technical innovation increases the productivity of labor in industry. If production shouldn’t be wasteful, there needs to be a reduction in workers. Where do all these workers go if there’s no unemployment? In a capitalist economy the workers are left to die on the streets but in a socialist economy they need to get a job again, right? Does the state take the burden of cost of reeducating these workers to enter another field and factor this into calculations when introducing new technology?
Simple: let people work less
I think we should also remember that what we see as labour under capitalist labour would not necessarily be the same as what we see as labour under socialist society. In capitalist society, we only tend to view labour as, to put it bluntly, jobs or activities that generate some sort of profit. If your labour does not generate a profit but is useful to society, i.e. lots of healthcare workers, the railroads, education etc., it runs the risk of being cut. And then we haven’t even talked about labour that isn’t seen as labour, like household activities or raising children.
When we switch to a socialist system we can also start viewing labour as something else than something that generates money one way or another. Many forms of work will rise with the implementation of socialism.
This isn’t necessarily an answer to your question, but I think it’s something to consider.
The USSR and modern China practically eliminated the peasant and serf classes overnight, almost all of them became first agricultural, then also industrial workers, then also teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers etc. The unemployment that would have come with each of the technological advances was avoided by simply giving those workers the means and the leisure to educate themselves in the technology at hand.
Humans are not lazy creatures. The laziness one may observe is in reality an abhorrence of exploitation, of a work environment where you labour not for your own enrichment, but for that of an exploiter whose interest are opposite to yours. It attempts an escape not from work itself, but from the conditions under which it brings forth pain, insult, fatigue, alienation, and terror. Once these conditions dissolve, people can contribute to society increasingly freely and more according to their own passions and interests, thereby slowly defeating their own laziness and becoming more open to change.
Already now, most people work in excess of what must be done to ensure one’s survival, and don’t even regard it as work: To contribute to an association, to rear a child, to cook for your family, to maintain a garden, to dance and play music, to practice an art, to study and nourish your own mind - These are all things that present a great silent effort to massively improve and contribute to society. Even if you wouldn’t personally use it to contribute in such a way, increased leisure and cultural activity will stochastically lead to increased innovation.
Unemployment, as it exists under capitalism, is used to create the “reserve army of labour”
Basically, if there are people who are able to work, but unable to find work, the capitalists can lower the wages of all workers, as there will always be someone else ready to take the job.
This doesn’t exist under socialism, as a socialist country has no need to squeeze their workers for every bit of labour.
I’m also not really sure what this has to do with innovation though. It’s hard for me to imagine how innovative people can be when they’re constantly worried about being kicked out onto the streets, or not being able to afford food. Seems like living better would be overall better for innovation. People are naturally creative and curious. We like to try new things for the fun of it. Innovation, despite what capitalists will tell you, absolutely does not need worker exploitation.
I read innovation as technological innovation. Under capitalism when the supermarket introduces self-checkouts in the front and forklift trucks in the back, they don’t need as many cashier’s and shelf-stockers. So implementing new technology creates unemployment, i.e. is one of the causes of the reserve army of labour.
Ah, that could be it. I’m bad at answering people’s questions, I assume too much.
I wouldn’t go that far! Yours is a good answer and if the OP meant something else by innovation than technology, you’re right to question it. And even if they did mean that, your right to challenge the idea that innovation is good if it leads to such consequences.
It’s hard, isn’t it, the assumptions thing. It’s kind of automatic. Especially with writing online and on Lemmygrad. We tend to use an informal style as it’s appropriate for a forum like this. But that clashes with the theoretical content that were often taking about on here.
Then there’s the potential to come off as rude by telling someone their question isn’t tight enough. At the same time as giving the question a generous interpretation and answering it.
In formal essays, it’s common to tell the reader how you interpreted the question. But that can come off a bit strange online because it implies a criticism of the question, which then does the thing above but kind of passive aggressively this time.
We’re bound to talk past each other sometimes, or answer a question that wasn’t asked, etc, as these kinds of things slips in through the various quirks of the online.
move them into other industries to develop those ones and shorten the workday, retire workers.
China’s retirement age for industrial workers is very low (55 for women, 60 for men)
For a vision of how advanced socialism would look for working I recommend ‘news from nowhere’ and the fiction section of ‘half earth socialism’ (which is basically an updated version). In summary there are no “jobs” as they exist now. People just sign up for stuff because they like doing it.
uh well more people with education and free time, with subsidies of science = lotsa innovation
a highly simplified version but yeah
Depends on the situation.
If some new coal mining technology means there’s now 50% of the available coal mining hours, it’s plausible that all the existing coal miners have their hours cut by half(-ish) while still being paid the same. The transitory period would see some coal miners switch to poetry mining.
If a technology wipes out a type of job, e.g. computers (the women that did lots of maths), the transitory period would see more skills tooling, holidays old be paid out etc.
I think it has also been easier to find work in socialist states as well, less onus on the individual to maintain energy under years of rejection. You just kinda sign up for some job registries that state your intention to work in an industry.
Remember that the end of all this is communism; the technology of production has reduced the hours necessary so much that the needs of society can be provided by people who essentially do X task as a hobby (or, in another way, professions don’t exist, you can try your hand at farming a couple of hours a week and produce enough food for your entire community).
It’s a little difficult to answer specifically without an example socialist country, so I’ll keep it theoretical.
While capitalism is happy with the result of implementing new technology (high unemployment), it’s not inevitable. Even under capitalism, the state creates jobs, many of which don’t really need to exist. The state has to ‘make’ money, too, or there’s nothing to circulate, broadly speaking. Which means that whatever happens, the state has the ‘burden’ of giving out money to someone. In capitalism, it’s to the bourgeoisie, to public workers, and to the pensioners and the poorest in pensions and welfare. It doesn’t have to be balanced in this way.
It’s similar in quasi-public workplaces (like universities) and private businesses, where jobs can apparently be created out of thin air for someone’s niece or nephew. The money is magically ‘found’. There’s a lot of creative accounting! The same thing can happen under socialism, determined by the state, to reach full employment.
Additionally, under capitalism, there’s an incentive to pay existing workers overtime rather than get more workers. If I do overtime, I either don’t get paid for it or I get paid a bit more, by the hour. If the take the overtime off my and everyone in my area and give it to someone else to fill up a new person’s schedule, the employer needs to pay: for another computer, internet access, a chair, a desk, space, a vehicle, health insurance, etc. One more worker costs a lot more than just their salary. That’s unacceptable to capitalists.
Socialists might be more willing to pay the price, knowing that producing the extra equipment for the new worker (averaged by all the new workers across society) will need to be made by someone, creating more jobs. It’s a feedback loop. It’s not necessarily more costly overall. But it requires redistributing some wealth.
If we paid the senior management team slightly less and stopped paying the shareholders, at many companies you could double the number of workers and keep everyone full time.
Alternatively, you can shorten the working day to increase employment. If you have 100 workers doing an average 40 hours a week, that’s 4000 working hours/week to keep the company doing what it’s doing. That could become 160 workers doing 25 hours/week, for example. The wages could be the same or lower if things were set up right. (E.g. if rent was capped or healthcare and higher education were provided by the state, so people didn’t need to factor those costs into their savings, etc.)
These are just some ideas. Quite Keynesian, too, so not even that radical, really.
