CURRENTS OF CAPITALISTIC DYSTOPIA and ATAVISTIC DISPLACEMENTS

Currents of Capitalistic Dystopia and Atavistic Displacements

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© March 10, 2015

Are we on the cusp of a new Renaissance or a Society Revolution?  This may seem a rhetorical question, but it is six hundred years almost to the date when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Chapel door in Germany and started the Protestant Reformation.

Nearly eighty years ago sociologist Pitrim Sorokin noted that we were ending a six-hundred year Sensate Day, when psychosexual materialism and blatant self-indulgence were then reaching their apogee. 

Among the books he has written are “Social and Cultural Dynamics” (1937), “The Crisis of Our Age” (1941), “Man and Society in Calamity” (1942), “The American Sex Revolution” (1956), and “The Basic Trends of Our Times” (1964).

Each of these works is a measured concern for the future.  On the basis of a vast body of evidence he writes:

We find every important aspect of the life, organization, and the culture of Western society is in the extraordinary crisis … Its body and mind are sick and there is hardly a spot on its body which is not sore, or any nervous fiber which functions soundly … We are seemingly between two epochs, the dying Sensate Culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational Culture of the creative tomorrow.  We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred year-long Sensate Day.

The oblique rays of the sun still illumine the glory of the passing epoch.  But the light is fading, and in the deepening shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly and to orient ourselves safely in the confusions of the twilight.  The night of the transitory period begins to loom before us, with its nightmares, frightening shadows, and heartrending horrors.  Beyond it, however, the dawn of a new great Ideational Culture is probably waiting to greet the men of the future (Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1937, Volume III, p. 131).

FAST FORWARD TO THE 21ST CENTURY

Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies” (2015) take the baton from Sorokin and in doing so reveal some startlingly disruptive changes, while Tyler Cowen in “Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation” (2015) is equally dramatic.

Much of what these authors have to say puts the future in the context of an incredible but mainly quiet revolution in terms of what the Computer Age has done, is doing and will continue to do to Western society and beyond.

The U.S. government started a program in 1996 called the “Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative” (ASCI), and developed ASCI Red, which was designed to do a trillion calculations per second.  It continued to be the most powerful computer until 2000.  ACSI Red was little smaller than a tennis court and used as much electricity as 800 houses and cost $55 million.

The equivalent in power of ASCI Red was launched by Sony of its PS3 in 2005, fits comfortably under your television set, runs on a normal power circuit, and sells for about $400.

Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the computer chip company, Intel, noticed in 1965 that silicon chips were getting more and more powerful at a remarkable consistent rate.

For the past half century, computer chips have double in power or half in price every 18 months.  This has brought about something of a miracle.  Transitioning from the ASCI Red to the PS3 Sony, has been, according to these authors, “the greatest invention in human history which has improved at such speed over such a long period.”

Put this altogether and it seems obvious that computer technology is going to seriously impact and disrupt our daily lives.   Large categories of work, especially work that is mechanistically precise and repetitive, or work that is already automated will disappear for workers.

What is going to happen has already happened as the New Industrial Revolution or The Second Machine Age has been going on right under our noses.   Computers are not a new invention, but their impact on economic growth has been slow. 

We have had a number of iterations in this scheme of things: the iPod replaced the CD Walkman, the smartphone replaced the cellphone, as well as essentially replacing the laptop and desktop, and the iPad has marginalized the personal computer.

Quite incredibly, perhaps because these gadgets are mainly opportunities for consumers on the job and in their leisure time to entertain themselves, they have not succeeded in replacing human labor on machines.

Author John Lancaster writes in “The London Review” (March 5, 2015, p. 6):

Most of the real productivity benefits of the computing revolution happened a few decades ago.  We have more and cooler devices, but what these gadgets do, for the most part, is entertain and distract us.  They do nothing to aid productivity, and may even diminish it.  The light bulb changed the world; Facebook is just a way of letting people click ‘like’ on photos of cats that resemble Colonel Gaddafi.  On this view, Moore’s Law has mainly led to an explosion of digital activity of not a very consequential type.  Real change would involve something like a ten or hundredfold increase in the potential of batteries, but that requires progress in chemistry, which is a lot harder than cramming more circuits into a silicon chip.

Technological unemployment, which we are now facing, involves the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.  A fundamental axiom of economics is that economic processes are based on human wants, and since human wants are infinite, the process of supplying them is also infinite.

The economy will not come to a halt until human wants do.  Since that will never happen, there will be enough work for everyone except during occasional recessions, stagflations, depressions and crises.  But that work will also constantly be changing.

The disappearance of work happens to individuals, not to economies.  A job lost in one place is replaced by a new job, which may be somewhere else.  In 1810, agriculture employed 90 percent of all American workers.  In 1910, it employed 30 percent; in 2010, it employed less than 2 percent.  The American population in 1810 was 7,239,881; in 1910, 92,228, 496; and in 2010 it was 308,745, 538.

One of the most productive industries in American history has been that of agriculture.  With less than 2 percent of Americans directly involved in farming, not only do farmers feed the nation, but agricultural products are a major American export.

The First Industrial Revolution took 150 years to come to complete fruition, starting with the steam engine, the railroad, automobile, the airplane, the assembly line, progressing communications to the telegraph, telephone, movie picture, electric typewriter, and so forth into the twentieth century.

Oxford economists, Michael Osborne and Carl Benedikt Frey, using mathematical and statistical calculations, see sweeping changes in 702 occupations.  Here are the top five occupations seen coming out of this Second Industrial Revolution: (1) recreational therapists; (2) first line supervisors of mechanics; (3) emergency management directors; (4) mental health and substance abuse social workers; and (5) audiologists.

The bottom five are: (698) insurance underwriters; (699) mathematical technicians; (700) sewer, hand; (701) title examiners, searchers; and (702) telemarketers.

Choreographers at (13) come ahead of physicians at (15), writers at (123) and editors at (140).

IS THE FUTURE TO BE A REVOLUTION OR A RENAISSANCE?

Frey and Osborne claim in the next two decades 47 percent of employment as we know it today is in the high risk category, meaning that potentially many of the jobs white and blue collar workers now have could disappear.  

The less paid workers are more at risk.  This will be a manifestation of the Computer Age placing its indelible mark on society.  The poor will be hurt, the middle will do a little better, and the rich will do very well.

Computer and automation productivity is expected to soar but to be increasingly disconnected from pay.  That said the typical American worker’s income has barely gone up since 1979, and has actually fallen since 1999, failing to keep up with the rate of inflation, while paradoxically, that same worker’s productivity has gone up in a nice straight line.  Put another way, the amount of work done by a worker has gone up, but that worker’s pay has not.

Profitability is accruing to capital rather than to labor. 

This can be dramatically illustrated.  Imagine an economy in which the 0.1 percent own the machines, the rest of the 1 percent manage the operation of those same machines, and the 99 percent either do the work not done by the machines, or are unemployed. 

That is what automation has done, is doing and seemingly will continue to do, as capitalism finds its capital triumphing over labor, which means the majority of people who have to work for a living.

New technologies are not expected to make businesses 10 percent more efficient but ten times more efficient.  Meanwhile, home ownership, which is the staple of and best measure of the laboring class wealth, is expected to collapse in price.

John Lancaster writes:

(As the value of homes drop) there is no reason why the median home in Palo Alto, in the heart of the Silicon Valley shouldn’t cost $50,000 … The prospect of millions of jobs being rendered obsolete, private home values collapsing and the prices of everyday goods going into a deflationary spiral hardly sounds like a recipe for nirvana (opt. cit., p. 7).

Imagine how this “news” might hit someone in Palo Alto in a median home that cost $400,000.  As we have seen many times before, when real estate values go down in one part of the country they follow in all the other sectors as well.

He continues:

The disappearance of 47 percent of jobs in two decades must be right on the edge of which a society can bear, not so much because that 47 percent, as because of the time frame … (This) is of a hyper capitalist dystopia.  There’s capital, doing better than ever, the robots doing all the work, and the great mass of humanity, doing not much, but having fun playing with its gadgets… (Ibid, p. 8)

It took the First Industrial Revolution or First Machine Age 150 years to reach completion.  Compress this into 20 years with society having inadequate time to deal effectively with all the inevitable challenges and you have the currents of dystopia.

We know from history of the Roman Empire's total collapse in 476 C.E. with the invasion of the Visigoths and Germanic tribes from the north.  But long before that, Rome denied its changing circumstances, and failed to deal with its obvious socioeconomic unraveling.  Instead, it entertained its citizens in mass extravaganzas in the coliseum rather than rallying its citizens to embrace the challenges of a new day.  The lessons of history never seem to take.

What we are seeing across the United States in 2015 as well as in the rest of the Western world is hyper capitalistic dystopia and atavistic displacement because "the robots are coming."  Isn’t it strange that we are intimidated by the inanimate objects that we have created?      

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