Comment by spangry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spangry | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What you've highlighted is what I've always thought Marx's primary criticism of capitalism was: that the surplus value (roughly: revenue - wages - cost of capital) from industrial production is deemed the exclusive property of the owners of capital. Following from this was the prediction that this surplus value would be used to attain additional capital which would accumulate in the hands of the capital owning class until capital entirely replaced labour in production.

In the context of the industrial revolution, IMHO Marx's predictions were ultimately incorrect. It turns out that steam is not intelligent enough to run the machines, and so production still requires the employment of labour. Consequently, up until this point, capital has enhanced the productivity of labour, not displaced it. Some of this productivity gain has even been captured by labour in the form of increasing wages.

I wonder if recent the advances in machine-learning will, in time, be viewed as the start of the 'next industrial revolution'? More disturbingly, I can't help but think Marx might be proven right this time around...

>capital which would accumulate in the hands of the capital owning class until capital entirely replaced labour in production.

I'm not sure if this is what Marx was getting at, at least from my point of view. Marx of all people knew that labour would always be required to work machinery, however his point was that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall was a consequence of the diminishing need to extract surplus value, as all a machine does is transfer value, unlike labour power it does not create value. To a certain degree, machinery has indeed displaced labour, though of course those employees which remain are more productive because of it, though that doesn't mean that more surplus is being extracted, at least not necessarily.

I don't think Marx intended to say that all labour would be displaced, and indeed in the long run a capitalist is intelligent to know that nobody will be around to buy back the products that his machinery creates. In chapter 1 of Capital he writes:

The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

I don't think he meant to imply that the value would srink to exactly zero. And as my sibling commenter has mentioned, the machinery itself requires production, and the machinery's value, which it transfers, must be given to it by labour. Machinery alone does not eliminate the requirement for labour, as you have noted, but Marx's theory doesn't require that it does.

> ... all a machine does is transfer value, unlike labour power it does not create value.

Here's a plane. A pilot uses the plane to fly 200 passengers from A to B. There's value created, at least for people who were at A and wanted to be at B. If I understand what you're saying correctly, you're ascribing all of that value to the pilot and none to the plane. True, without the pilot, the plane is just a very expensive paperweight. But without the plane, the pilot leading a walking expedition from A to B. Either one without the other doesn't work; ascribing all the value to one and not the other seems clearly mistaken.

If all the value is ascribed to the pilot, and none to the plane, then why would an airline spend millions of dollars to buy the plane? They can just hire the pilot, and save all that money. But it's pretty clear why that approach isn't going to work...

Am I completely misunderstanding your (and Marx's) position here?

>Am I completely misunderstanding your (and Marx's) position here?

Yes, or at least, to the best of my knowledge of Marx. The aeroplane has thousands of hours of basic socially necessary labour which have been put into it. All the labour hours to construct the aeroplane, and all its parts, etc. Further, the plane requires constant maintenance and fuel, which are also products of labour. The pilot adds his own labour too. The actual flight is a commodity separate to the plane, yet it is produced using the commodity of the plane itself.

Both the labour put into the plane by the workers who made it, and the labour applied by the pilot, contribute to the final value of this commodity of a single passenger flight. As you noted, it is not the same commodity if there is no pilot, or no plane; in the same way, a hole-punching machine does not produce the same commodity without someone to operate it. This combination of values is no different from the combination of wood and paint to make a toy.

> until capital entirely replaced labour in production

Automation + Robots = capital and means of production become one and the same. For one in a direct way (you own robots and those do the work, which includes maintaining and building robots), but also because robots won't blink forcing people to do whatever, breeding and brainwashing them into whatever, eventually turning non-owners into perfect robots as well. I'm not even sure that's a prediction, we're clearly on that road and the walls to the left and right are too high to easily change lanes already; we're making them higher yet. If it takes a crash to change direction there will be no vehicle left to change directions with, that's my "prediction" anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com