Digital work and exploitation
thenextrecession.wordpress.com
thenextrecession.wordpress.com
>The COVID pandemic has triggered a new crisis in capitalism, but capitalism’s underlying tendencies leading towards such crises are not new.
>In a way, Roberts reckons nothing has really changed. In the post-COVID world, the intensification, through digital media, of productive and unproductive labour processes continues. In other words, exploitation and oppression in the paid workplace is still the dominant method employed by capitalists to extract a surplus from their workforce.
>A Marxist theory of digital technology, labour and work must therefore begin with the premise that the labour process is part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production and the creation of surplus value through alienated labour.
So, everything is new, but it's also the same. Really deep stuff. You can tell that someone with decades of experience in Marxist Economics wrote this flowery and meandering piece. Upon reading it, I truly felt as though I had read something that someone had written.
There's so much emotional investment into the idea that everything is terrible and falling apart, you can feel the urgency with which the modern world is reframed into a familiar context of good versus evil. Don't worry, even the world has shifted in unpredictable and unforeseen ways, our dearly-beloved, cryptically tautological, and relentlessly self-referential epistemology of economic philosophy is still perfectly suited for the task, as it has been since the days of pre-historic tribal socialism.
Or maybe you can look at the average worker is one pay check from disaster, that the American expectancy has been declining for several years and maybe the recent changes look more like things that reinforce the problems.
Notably, the biggest issue for rail workers in the recent dispute wasn't sick days or pay but "precision crew scheduling", a system that involves workers being on call for nearly hour of the day, for nearly every day of the year. [1]
The Marxist picture of an evil capitalist villain fits both the rail road companies and Elon Musk pretty well lately. If they don't want it pinned on them, maybe they should change their behavior.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/rail-strike-why-the-...
Just look at the first sentence:
>For months, the world’s largest economy has been teetering on the brink of collapse because America’s latter-day robber barons can’t comprehend that workers sometimes get sick.
We learn so much from this trite piece of... journalism.
1. We're on the brink of collapse (again!) 2. We're living in a new era of robber-barons 3. The people running things are idiots have no idea that people get sick, unlike the very smart author of this article
Meanwhile, in reality, the "crisis" spelled out in the article was resolved in a predictably political (and boring) way. That kind of news doesn't fuel clicks, though. In its staunchly dogmatic opposition to modern capitalism this kind of journalism can't avoid embracing the exact business model it pretends to decry: clicks go up, journalism more better.
Its not a matter of 'belief'. Its a matter of mechanics: The companies that dont abuse their employees and customers like that get let behind by those who do to get the most market share and profits. Eventually getting either pushed out of the market or gettin bought-out. The mechanics of the system encourage, reward and enforce sociopathy. Anyone who doesnt out-sociopath others is eliminated from the game.
That's not really their modus operandi. They're more likely to buy up all the pins. And the means to produce them.
And now that we have reclassified usury as productive it has got even worse. We not only count it as productive but often give preferential tax treatment.
Our tax systems have become a perverse inversion where we tax the poor to enrich monopoly cartels.
Could you expand on this?
Naively looking at the details on the federal tax revenue, I'm having trouble understanding: https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...
A chart, by income: https://files.taxfoundation.org/20220119175703/FedData2022_1...
Some relevant conclusions:
"The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI below $44,269) faced an average income tax rate of 3.5 percent."
"In 2019, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. "
"The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI of $546,434 and above) paid the highest effective income tax rate of 25.6 percent—more than seven times the rate faced by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers."
When you are really rich it's not income tax you are trying to avoid rather it's about protecting the vast wealth you've already accumulated via asset inflation.
And then we could talk about the largely regressive nature of sales tax.
Taxing income is actually a perversion as well, why should we be taxing actual productive actively when it's wealth we are looking to redistribute. Tax the accumulate wealth not the income.
If you haven't noticed, I am very uneducated on these types of things, so be gentle. :)
When you say “middle class” do you the petit bourgeoisie or the middle income segment of the working class (the former is the traditional use in discussing capitalist economies, and the latter is popular in the US; they are very different groups.)
In either case, the simple way is to set a threshold exemption (possibly purely quantitate, but possibly also differentiated by types of wealth) on the wealth subject to taxation that essentially exempts the group of concern; if you mean the popular US use of “middle class”, that’s can be done with a fairly low threshold; if you mean not to erode the wealth of the petit bourgeoisie and to focus the tax only on the haut bourgeiosie, that’s a much higher threshold.
Personally, I think wealth taxation probably ought to take a back seat to income taxation that simply doesn’t radically favor capital income as a priority, since equalizing tax treatment of income is a simplification of the tax system that makes it more equitable, rather than an additional complication.
Last time I checked shitposting on social media wasn't mandatory for the average person, and employees who didn't like their job or thought they weren't paid enough could quit.
Am I missing something?
Who can’t make that argument based on the fact Marx’s theory of value is just plain wrong?
And what’s up with all the pro-communist propaganda being posted lately?