... seems to me that the value form is transitioning from labour to information, as you in essence begin to suggest. A single individual (or fleet of robots?) can create huge economic value using minimal amounts of traditional labour via the programming of computer systems with information in various forms.
Wouldn’t the exploitation of robots reduce toil and drudgery and wage slavery, thereby liberating the worker to pursue his own creative endeavours?
Can computer systems really create value on their own? I'm imagining all workers had made the transition to the so-called elite class with access to a universal education, non-physical highly abstract employment, etc. would the whole class of these people sit and stare at computer machines and just randomly determine who is rich and who is poor? — kudos
The change in value form isn't towards computers as analogous to the technologies that humans operated like machinery prior to the Information Age, but rather consists in the data itself encoded as abstract meaning within software and interfaces. The significance is that physically instantiated work is effectively excised in various ways from its role as focal point of social and economic organization, replaced by information as the engine that drives culture.
Could you go into a little more detail about from where you are drawing their equivalency? — kudos
Applying dialectical materialism to the 21st century would probably require an army of intellectuals.
My candidate for 'the biggest threat to labor' is customary or state regulated denial of easy / universal access to (a) clean water; (b) safe, effective, family planning; & (c) quality education of females of all ages. Y'know, because - Ignorance breeds surplus. Sickness breeds surplus. Poverty breeds surplus. But 'surplus people' are only a symptom (pace Malthus), like 'automation' (pace Harari) which compounds it, and not the problem: malign neglect ... abetted by the scale & complexities of technocapital societies. — 180 Proof
UBI + soylent green for the precariat masses ("the 99%") barely surviving global desertification. International Labor's revolutionary window, IME, opened in 1848 and closed in, or around,1948 (re: Eric Blair, Bretton Woods, NSA of 1947, Czech coup d'état / Marshall Plan 1948, etc). Almost three quarters of a century of post-Marxist, post-industrial capitalism so far – and the illiberal, anti-democratic, crypto-plutonomy is accelerating.[ ... ] Surplus (economically unproductive) billions of people, however, are ethically and politically problematic, as is the technocratic prospect of how to humanely "thin the herds" in order to make humanity compatible with robo-automated global civilization. — 180 Proof
I do see how money can be made from machines, but they don’t generate value to us in and for themselves. Thus it sounds like both you and I have an idea of this as something of an eventual dead-end as far as capitalism is concerned if that’s not taking too many liberties.
This is limiting our sight to primarily those technologies whose general purpose is to reduce or eliminate some section of the working class. It makes me wonder why there exists this impulse to destroy certain jobs. — kudos
I don't have a deeply studied comprehension of the value form concept, but I think of it as the locus of collective psychology, the core dynamical agent that dictates how members of a social group intersect as they relate.
…According to this account, information is the value form of the 21st century because it is replacing labor as the locus of collective psychology.
No. As I wrote: post-Marxist, post-industrial, capitalism that coopts (and commodifies) any "reforms" which merely tweak the "status quo" and that otherwise paramilitarily polices any "grass-roots" stakeholder opposition to, and defection from, exclusively shareholder-controlled systems. Capital long ago adapted by "pricing-in" (in it's post-1948 financializing models) the "antithesis" of Labor that's institutionally reproduced by Capital's strategic exploitation of Labor.Is your viewpoint in some way related to the dialectical materialism that Enrique is referring to? — kudos
Capital long ago adapted by "pricing-in" (in it's post-1948 financializing models) the "antithesis" of Labor that's institutionally reproduced by Capital's strategic exploitation of Labor. — 180 Proof
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