| OK, I assumed that by "sustain" you meant "subsistence". I agree that the capitalist won't pay more than needed to retain the worker. > But the worker only works for the capitalist class on pain of death or destitution. If this isn't forced, I'm not sure what is. Well, in the early days of capitalism, when working for the capitalist class had the alternative of staying in subsistence farming, many people chose the factories because it was better than the "freedom" of subsistence farming. That wasn't forced - there was a real alternative at the time, and in fact the alternative was the default. > That's still wage labour though... OK, if I wanted to start my own business, I could do that, too. I'm still not forced into wage labor. > and you're still having your own labour decided its use by someone else. You don't have to be your own manager, the point is that you should have free association to choose who you want to work for and what you want to do, rather than a much more limited choice which restricts your true capabilities and creativity to merely what drives profits. Well, I could work on what I wanted, rather than on what drives profits. That would be really cool. Unfortunately, I can't take that choice, because I'd starve - which is your point. But I would say, why should I be able to? Sure, it would be nice if the world gave me a living while I do what I want. But why should I expect it to? If I want to engage in the economy at all, say as an owner of my own business, I have to care about what people want to buy; I can't just do what I want. Why should I be surprised if it's the same when I work for someone else? > Automation usually means that the capitalist has been able to buy machinery which performs the same job with a lower socially necessary labour time than a worker. This means that one or more workers are replaced by such machinery, as the value of their labour is only some fraction of what it was before (going along with Marx's theory of value anyway). I think you're looking at this backwards. Look at it from the point of view of the society, not from the point of view of one worker, and think in terms of spending people rather than employing them. Societies used to have one third of their people working on farms. Now they have maybe 3% of their people working on farms. That gives an extra 30% of people that can do something else that helps the society. What do they do? Well, some of them make the tractors and combines that make it so the society can feed itself with many fewer people, and some make cars and refrigerators and washing machines, and some make computers, and some program them. The whole society is far better off than it was when a third of the people worked on farms. Now, automation can still be a problem for individual workers, or even for a fairly large number of workers at one time. Arguably, this is where we are now. But even with that, I don't think that automation is a net loss. |