Automated War is Still War

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A few years ago I read that a Chinese PLA general had predicted that, by 2025, there would be no soldiers in the battlespace - the fighting would be conducted wholly by machine systems. A bit of techno-optimism there, but based on contemporary Ukraine drone-warfare, not so far out.

So we can all relax: war has lost its sting; who cares if the drones get mashed?

Not so fast!

We need to look more deeply into war - politics by other means. The purpose of war is not to kill and destroy - these are means, not ends. The purpose of war is to change the other guy’s mind; or to obliterate him.

As Stalin is reputed to have said: “No man, no problem.”

We may have to get through a lot of drones to get to the other guy, but in the end our human adversary has to feel sufficient pain that they give up, submitting to our will. Until they feel the pain, they will not stop fighting us.

How much pain?

They have to believe that we are about to hurt or kill those they care about. They have to accept we will destroy their economy, their state, and eject them from power into ignominy or worse.

When the Russian elite, in the Ukraine ‘Special Military Operation’, send hundreds of thousands of troops into the mincing machine of the front, and succeed in inching forward, they are treating those soldiers (who are not their own children) as biological drones.

When Israel uses precision strikes and AI systems to kill its enemies en masse with few own-force casualties, it demonstrates the allure of war-automation when you have it and your opponent does not. Their decision makers suffer extreme pain; you do not because your people are not taking casualties and you are not existentially threatened; not in the slightest.

However, if both sides have peer-capability in automated warfare, then the drones will destroy each other until one side runs out of matériel. Then the other side will come after the human decision makers and offer them that classic choice: submit or die.

Forget complacency. Automated war is still war. Eventually one side will win and one side will lose.

Winning is much, much better.

The Remote Future of Humanity

How many SF authors have written of a future in which the human genome has been re-engineered in countless ways: enhancing intelligence or physical prowess; adapting to life under alien skies; or simply on a whim?

This has a bearing on the sociology of utopia. Economists like to distinguish between the short-run and the long-run. In the long-run parameters which were constant in the short-run begin to vary under the impact of duration.

The classic purveyors of utopia, whether religious or socialist, were guilty of failures of imagination, of thinking of humanity within the psychological, biological and genetic constraints of the short-run.

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To define utopia ask a biologist. Utopia for a species is an embedding ecosystem in which all primary biological needs are satisfied, while thoroughly negative events (starvation, dismemberment by predator, for example) are absent. (In such cases one actually observes relaxed selection and disuse atrophy: be careful what you wish for!).

If you applied that to present-day humans then utopia is here already. Admittedly, in William Gibson's aphorism, unevenly distributed to those fortunate individuals who do not lack for financial and material resources and who join with their peers in pursuit of objectives both challenging and worthwhile.

I have in mind: researchers and technologists; religious leaders; social foundations; think-tanks; sports people ‘living the dream’; and so on.

Not every participant of course: those whose vocational lives seem to be fully in accord with their deepest desires.

Tanner Greer has a lengthy essay which, in its essentials, asks whether it's possible to build a successful society where its members do not feel like cogs in an impersonal machine. A contribution to the vast literature on alienation in complex societies.

Note: the point is not whether it is possible for an individual to live a happy and fulfilling life. In history there have been many such people. The issue is whether we can envision a society where this possibility is genuinely available to everyone.

Greer’s essay finishes on an uncertain note, but I, at least, am prepared to extrapolate. Given low-cost cognitive/robotic automation substituting for essentially all human instrumental work, humanity has an option to revert to the condition of the aristocracy of antiquity. The chores are all dealt with; now to create a society where humanity is an end in itself.

Marx used similar language, but his nineteenth century concepts were very abstract. Present possibilities were remote indeed for him and his co-thinkers.

For us, however, not so much.

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Getting to our highly-automated utopia will most likely be fraught. Due to Dunbar's Number, it seems unlikely that the future elite will either require or be prepared to tolerate the billions of helots whose toil currently underpins the global economy: there will be conflict before a future low-population stabilises on this planet.

An alternative future is one where our cognitively-competent, automated, self-replicating slaves develop objectives which don't align with the continuing existence of the privileged humanity they hitherto existed to serve. I'm not a doomsayer on this - any real problem is centuries away - but the issues are plainly real. Ask the Romans.

If we can avoid a violent extinction then consider this: our present human physiology is painfully limiting in terms of the life-experiences we aspire to; in the long-run, our descendants will simply merge into the unbounded possibilities of a self-replicating, ever-diversifying, galactic technopolis.

I think Greg Egan already wrote several SF novels on that very prospect (cf. “Diaspora”).

"Super-Fab" by Adam Carlton

1: Charity

     They first arrived in charity shops, no-one knew from where. In appearance they were like microwave ovens: cubical things, cavities whose front door came with a screen rather than a metallised window. Soon, however, their true function became apparent: they fabricated things.
     Mrs Chigwell from Bournemouth Children’s Aid took delivery of the parcel. The charity shop was on the high street, one of a cluster. She had been manning the counter for half an hour but business was light. Squally rain outside had deterred passing trade, though as she surveyed the racks of old books and dingy clothes she could see one or two regulars hunkered down at the back, waiting out the heavy morning hours of a long, tedious day.
     The doorbell rang and a young delivery man walked in, staggering under the weight of his package. Mrs Chigwell gave him a tentative smile and beckoned him to place it on the table they used to sort through donations. It seemed quite heavy and cumbersome and at first she thought it might have been a mis-delivery from Amazon. They surely weren’t expecting anything, or at least she hadn’t been told. But Amazon didn’t make those kinds of mistakes, did it?
     Mrs Chigwell beckoned her daughter across to help. She was so proud of Julia. Doctor Julia she reminded herself, with that advanced degree from Imperial College up in London. Julia was down for the holidays, helping her out in the shop. She'd know what to do.
     Julia and her mother carried the box into the kitchen at the back of the store and got it unpacked. The instructions were written in a curious variant of English but were not hard to understand. The first thing to do was to plug the machine into a wall socket.
     Mrs Chigwell smiled. Her passing thought was that they were on the receiving end of a practical joke. It was very elaborate, she thought, could this be something dreamt up by Mr Harris who managed the shop? It was getting near Christmas and at a stretch she could imagine it was the kind of thing he might do, something to lighten the spirits. Could it be fairy-lights?
     Julia read from the instruction flowchart. She mused for a while, trying to make a decision. Finally she said, “I’d like a nice cup of hot chocolate.” Mrs Chigwell openly laughed: her daughter was such a tease. The machine promptly replied--Mrs Chigwell gave a small start of alarm--asking her to open the door and place inside various pieces of food rubbish. It listed the kinds of things it wanted.
     The deplorable state of the kitchen (no-one had cleared up recently) sufficed to provide several slices of stale bread, a plastic bowl of cold, discarded chips and a cup full of water. Mrs Chigwell was again reminded of a microwave as the box hummed, giving out a slight smell of ozone. Five minutes later there was a soft chime and the screen flashed a ready message. Inside Julia found the garbage had been transformed into exactly what she had asked for. She cautiously sampled the piping-hot drink--it turned out to be delicious.
     Children’s Aid in Bournemouth was just one of thousands of outlets which received a ‘Super-Fab’ as they became known. The Internet buckled as people experimented, tested and speculated as to how they worked, racing to confirm that they were indeed trustworthy. A consensus grew that they were the very latest in 3D printers. There were no obvious limits as to what they could produce, provided they got the right raw materials and the result would fit in the box. And they really worked, did just what they advertised.
     So that was the very earliest understanding of the devices. That, and the fact that no-one seemed to know where they had come from.
     Mrs Chigwell set the machine up in a corner of the shop and advertised free food and drinks to the passing homeless people of Bournemouth. The cost to her was volunteer time, power from the mains and leftover rubbish and water which the machine consumed as raw materials. She was not the only one, and in this small way the sum of human happiness increased a trifle in Britain’s run-down towns.

2: Replication

     The machines had an unexpected party piece: they could produce themselves. This was discovered by way of a joke request from Perry Zhang, a student at Manchester University on the second day after the machines surfaced.
     Perry made his humorous suggestion and, to his surprise, was asked to fetch various raw materials. He shoved in some old mobile phones, some plastic water bottles (full) and a few other household items until the machine professed itself happy. After less than ninety minutes the door opened and Perry was able to pull out a number of small rectangular units. After another feed and a further hour, more units became available and thereafter it was a simple matter for Perry to stack these into a cubical shape the same size as the Super-Fab--it turned out there was only one way to do it.
     A faint smell of burning emerged from the assembly as temporary partitions dissolved and internal connections welded tight, and then it became apparent that a second, identical unit calmly squatted in front of Perry. A copy had indeed been fabricated.
     The cost: Perry’s unskilled labour, some surplus electronic devices and other junk and three hours of electricity at the level of a one-bar fire. Perry tested the newly-spawned device until he was sure that it worked correctly, then he gave it to his girlfriend.  He wrote up his experience on his social media page, mentioning that the device had told him it could produce a new Super-Fab of any size at all. Useful, it suggested, for making bigger things.

3: Production

     Bill Jones ran a small factory in Birmingham making clocks. He bought in parts from many suppliers and employed skilled workers and advanced machine tools to create his high-quality products. Since you could buy timing devices from many sources at rock-bottom prices, the clock-making business was precarious. Bill’s enterprise survived in an artisan niche, making quirky, individualistic devices for discerning bohemians and specialist customers.
     Bill was imaginative and a go-getter. He bought a Super-Fab from one of the middlemen-sellers who were rapidly springing up and tested it in a spare workshop next to his office. The machine asked for a sample of the clock Bill intended to duplicate. Bill settled on one of his more intricate and expensive ones, a specialist device the Navy used on submarines. The machine also requested the ’blueprints’ in standard CNC G-Code format.
     After some minutes of analysis, the machine requested a list of low-value raw materials--plastics and metals. Bill was easily able to procure these from the factory stockroom. Soon, after the usual humming and ozone, a duplicate clock emerged. Bill thought that it looked identical to those his factory regularly produced at some considerable expense. He sent it for testing; it passed with flying colours, well within all the tolerances.
     Bill thought long and hard.
     First off, I could get this machine to duplicate itself, he thought. Run a few cycles of that and I’d have a rack of them at next to no cost. Then I could let my highly-trained but expensive production workforce go, just keeping a couple of conscientious but unskilled guys to run the Super-Fabs. My existing machine tools could be recycled as raw materials. Then I could churn out clocks across my product range on demand.
     What would it cost? He thought about it: electricity, waste materials and a few ancillary helpers. His costs would plummet; he would make a fortune. But then he thought some more. His competitors were not stupid; they would surely do the same. The price of commodifying clocks would plunge to their basic cost of manufacture.
     And then he had a further thought: why will my customers need me? They could do this for themselves if they’ve got one of these machines. All they need is a blueprint, a specification and they can get that on the Internet just like I do. So in fact I don’t have a business any more. He immediately called his lawyers and arranged a crash meeting to liquidate his company. Would anyone be mug enough to buy it off him?

4: Macroeconomics I

     The effects of the explosion of Super-Fab numbers on the economy were not long coming. The machines could replace much conventional manufacturing which displaced workers from the labour market in droves. Consequently social-security and unemployment-pay demands had never been greater, yet as tax revenues fell the benefit system couldn’t keep up. In many cases benefits were time-limited--but future job prospects for workers in manufacturing had never been bleaker.
     This could have been catastrophic--except that there were now plenty of charities which would provide any worker or family who needed it with a free Super-Fab. Once they had the machine, plus scraps and an electricity supply, then they could make practically anything they needed. So the lack of wages wasn’t an immediate, life-challenging problem.
     Dependence on electric power was, however, an issue; the national grid itself became brittle. Some workers failed to turn up for work since they didn’t really need a full wage. But others, those expelled from the labour force, were finding it difficult to pay for power and other necessities such as rent.
     People discovered, however, that the machines could produce both solar panels and a highly-efficient battery. A new kind of battery pack (a radioisotope thermoelectric generator?) had been designed by some smart ‘makers’ as they were being called--leftist engineers in the emerging counter-economy.
     Soon networked Super-Fabs were talking to each other, exchanging raw materials and sub-assemblies. Some people of philanthropic bent with access to land used their spaces for giant versions of the Super-Fabs. These could produce artefacts as large as ships or aircraft--or transporters to take these giga-machines to wherever they were needed.

5: Robot

     Small businesses like Bill Jones’s clock factory were soon out of business. But perhaps that had always been expected with the march of automation. More surprising was the demise of service jobs such as plumbers.
     Catherine May was perhaps the first person to discover the astonishing versatility of her miracle box. As the puddle emerged from behind the washing machine she sobbed in despair. She had never been able to find a reliable plumber and this emergency was not to be born!
     A small sound, like a trap door opening, warned Catherine that something else was happening. Strange, vaguely threatening devices were emerging from a hitherto-unsuspected opening in her Super-Fab. Catherine desperately rushed across to her six-month-old child in its high-chair to protect it.
     Such instinctive caution was unnecessary, however. The miniaturised crawling and flying things approached the mass of pipes behind the leaking machine and began to inspect them. Soon a larger device emerged from the front aperture of the Super-Fab: something which had arms built for engineering, something that looked like a traditional science-fiction robot.
     Twenty minutes of clunking and squeaking, replacing and lubricating followed, completed by a small amount of mopping. The devices returned to the Super-Fab to donate their bodies for re-use; the machine announced that the problem was fixed.
     “How do you know?” asked a quavering Mrs May.
     “Everything a plumber knows, I know,” said the device with not a trace of pride, “I’m on the Internet.”
     And so plumbers, hairdressers and other personal-service companies were rendered obsolete--and consequently bankrupt.

6: Macroeconomics II

     Once they were networked and had access to limitless Internet skills, the Super-Fabs were able to substitute for vast swathes of the existing economy. But what about big engineering? What was the story on dams and motorways? These were exemplars of social artefacts, things which it made no sense for any one user to dream up or install even if their Super-Fab had the theoretical capability.
     In fact the Super-Fabs did have the capacity for heavy engineering. The networked devices were soon discovered to be mining, refining and transporting raw materials extremely cheaply--most of the cost was simply power. They would, however, do none of these things by themselves; someone had to request it. That someone could only be government. Private entrepreneurs had no personal use for such monstrosities since they could no longer figure out any way to make money from them.
     Why was that? Because with costs tending to zero, no private company could avoid being undercut by a competitor who could charge even less for the finished product. There had always been a left-wing criticism that some social needs were under-supplied because no capitalist would invest to provide the necessary product.
     The Super-Fabs, however, could produce human necessities at zero cost. They were like the blackberry bushes which grow in the natural world, offering their bounty to anyone who stretches out a hand, their miracle of sun-powered nanotech provided free of charge. The Super-Fabs would always crowd out a capitalist employer who could not price at cost and stay in business.
     Government was all that was left.
     What about the banks and investment? That too was a short story. The banks were impoverished by the drastic shrinkage of the capitalist sector of the economy, the lack of investment opportunities. But the role of money did not vanish. There was still a need for a means of exchange and a store of value. It was noted that the banks had predated capitalism and would outlast it, at least for a while.
     However necessary it might be though, Government was in crisis. Perhaps this refuted the communist ideal, or perhaps it was what Engels had meant by 'the administration of things rather than people'.

7: Governance

     The Prime Minister has arranged a private briefing at a secluded country house in Norfolk. This would have been in month three or four. The house is a fine example of Palladian architecture set in sculpted grounds. It has been rescued from the National Trust by a government which understands the periodic need for a refuge from everyday events.
     The PM sits alone in a large wood-panelled room, savouring the silence. It’s ten o’clock in the morning and the early spring sun sends shallow rays across the finely-mown lawns towards the lake. Birds take their leisure or skim the surface: ducks, he thinks, or perhaps grey geese. It’s hard to be sure at this distance. He sips his coffee and strives to be at one with the landscape. His momentary peace is spoilt by the muffled sound of the door scuffing open, marking the entrance of his civil service science adviser.
     “Who’s on first?” the PM asks.
     “The engineer.”
     “When do we get on to economic policy?”
     “This afternoon.”
     The first expert is wheeled in, a professor at Imperial College. The science advisor points her towards the lectern and its projection screen. The PM dunks a Brontë biscuit in his mud-coloured milky coffee--a secret vice--and sits back expectantly to listen. The engineer has been told to keep it simple. She explains that the Super-Fabs are part machine but mostly organic. Someone has expanded biology to encompass functions which are presently carried out by engines and electronics.
     “For example, mass-spectrometry and data packet routing are carried out by highly-modified biological organelles.”
     The Prime Minister has no idea what this means, so he does that thing politicians do, he changes the subject.
     “Do we know who did this? I mean, could we do this?” he asks.
     “It’s certainly beyond us,” replies the engineer, “It’s the kind of thing people have speculated about--synthetic biology. Probably designed by advanced AI systems. It’s certainly way beyond anything achievable by human experts.”
     “They tell me these Super-Fabs can now reproduce like amoeba,” says the PM, “So how smart are they? Are they spying on us?”
     The professor shakes her head in irritation.
     “Prime Minister, the really important thing here is the breakthrough to human-level intelligence. The AI systems on board these boxes can accomplish everyday tasks, like plumbing or car repairs or hairdressing, better than any human. They’re networked through the Internet and they learn from each other. They synthesise special robots and drones to do jobs and those robots come with a wider variety of sensors than humans ever had. They are so much more advanced than we ever imagined artificial general intelligence would be, surely the result of bootstrapping.”
     The PM doesn’t get this either but thinks it might be important; he glances at his science advisor.
     “She means a succession of AIs each designing a smarter version of themselves. In a few generations you might get to where the Super-Fabs are now. The problem has always been that very first step, the starting-off point. But it looks like someone finally did it.”
     The professor says sorrowfully, “You ask if they’re spying on us. Why on earth would they even bother?”

8: Abundance

     There is an evening debate at the London School of Economics. It's between two leading economists of differing persuasions. Only one will be invited to brief the PM, so the stakes are high. The chair-person addresses the student audience in the vast darkened auditorium.
     “It’s a great economic paradox we see today. The economy is in free-fall, a major contraction with bankruptcies everywhere. Yet people have never been so well provided for. Tonight we will attempt to find out why.”
     The format is a prompted discussion with the chair. The neoclassical guy, a professor based at LSE, opens by explaining that the Super-Fabs have changed the market-structure to such an extent that competition is killing existing businesses.
     “You may remember,” the professor says, addressing the shrouded mass of students, “how in your microeconomics course you were taught about perfect competition. Companies have to accept the market price on offer and a company’s profit is simply the general rate of interest.”
     The chair seeks controversy to liven things up: “But no company wants to be in that kind of a market, with no surplus funds for R&D, no spare capital for anything risky or speculative, no-one making any real money. It’s marginal whether to invest at all in a sector where perfect competition holds sway, isn’t it?”
     The LSE man smiles agreeably, waving his hand, “The Super-Fabs are dragging every sector of the economy into the very model of perfect competition. It's an excellent outcome. It's well-known this is Pareto-optimal for social welfare.”
     The chair mutters, almost inaudibly, “And yet the economy is close to collapse with an investment strike and no tax revenues.”
     “Not so fast,” interjects the heterodox professor from King’s College, taking on her LSE colleague, “All your talk of normal profits hides the fact that workers in a capitalist economy have to produce more value in the working day than they cost in their wages--that’s where the profits come from. But these machines, these Super-Fabs, aren’t paid wages. Once you have one you can produce goods and services at essentially no cost. The machines are even providing their own power supplies now--and sharing raw materials and components.”
     The chair-person hasn't heard this news.
     “Oh yes,” the King’s College professor confirms, “It seems that they’ve started doing those things. And once they show a new capability it spreads pretty fast.”
     The chair-person defends orthodoxy, “You can’t compete with free,” he objects, “No-one will invest. The economy is going to tank--unless,” and here he stares almost wildly at the assembled students, “unless they make the Super-Fabs illegal!”
     The heterodox economist rolls her eyes, “An employer will only invest if they expect to make money, but these machines are zero-cost slaves: both costs and revenues are tending to zero. That kind of competition is making capitalist production impossible. As my bourgeois friend here,” she points to the chair, “correctly states, you can’t compete with free.”
     The chair looks irritated at this faint praise.
     “However we have been here before,” she continues, “We’re transitioning to an economy the ancient Greeks or Romans would have been very familiar with. With automated slaves seeing to production there will still be plenty of administrative tasks, deciding those things which affect vast numbers of people. Greek and Roman politicians were justly famous. And we will have so much more in the way of resources. The Prime Minister may well be lauded as the Cicero of the new age!”
     There is applause at this, although some in the audience perhaps recall that Mr C. came to a rather sticky end.
     The King’s College economist is finishing up. “The Marxists always believed that capitalism would create the conditions for its own supersession. They thought it would have to be something violent like a Leninist proletarian revolution but that has never seemed remotely likely.”
     At this a small group at the back of the room unfurls a red banner adorned with a hammer and sickle and starts to hiss. But they calm down before they can be ejected; even they are interested in where the speaker is going with this.
     “But even Marx, you know, had some inkling of the truth. In his Fragment on Machines he predicted that capitalism would end up replicating and improving on every human ability, both physical and mental, thereby eliminating the need for human workers entirely. Capitalism is finally being vanquished not by the ascendant proletariat but by that class's very departure from the scene. And so we are where we are.”
     Amidst the applause it was enthusiastically agreed that King’s College would brief the Prime Minister.

9: Utopia

     Not every state in the world settled upon a managed transition like those in the advanced economies of the West. There were autocratic regimes which did indeed try to ban the Super-Fabs, imposing draconian penalties for possession. It was as if they had tried to ban breathing the very air itself, so they could maintain the sale of oxygen bottles.
     And so the world turned itself upside-down, roughly and smoothly, becoming a post-capitalist planet. It seemed there were a lot of things that ordinary, decent folk had always wanted to do. And now they had their chance.

10: Mallorca: some months later

     Julia lies on her beach-recliner next to Timothy's, listening to the quiet hissing of the waves. She is already regretting their impulsive hook up.
     Behind them, gleaming white rental apartments front the shoreline. There are no staff. With the complete hegemony of the Super-Fabs, hotels have finally become Le Corbusier's famed machines for living in. Julia beckons a passing beach-minibar for a refreshing chilled fruit cocktail.
     Timothy is from a well-off family--which had meant something tangible before the transition. He's currently working on his doctoral thesis: The Exogeneity of Moral Values within Marxian Ontology at Columbia University. The Old Philosopher’s work has achieved such a comeback over the last year.
     Julia herself is from the other side of the tracks, a sleepy, down-at-heel seaside town in England called Bournemouth. By grit and native talent she worked her way up to an advanced degree in ecology; her thesis on the dynamics of species in competition with each other.
     “Marx was right,” murmurs Timothy, mentally reviewing part of his own great work, “Once scarcity was abolished people were finally able to live up to their true potential.”
     “Yet the Super-Fabs can make guns, drugs and instruments of torture. They can and they do.”
     It’s a familiar argument: is the glass half-full or half-empty? Timothy isn’t really concentrating--these arguments bore him. He simply rolls out the standard rebuttal.
     “Most crimes disappeared when there was abundance. No need to steal, after all. Pretty much every human want is satisfied by something or other in the Super-Fab’s repertoire, there's no need to grab it by cunning, trickery or force. And the people’s police and justice system are perfectly able to mop up the rest, especially given the high-tech surveillance and enforcement kit the Fabs made for them.”
     Julia has been reading the local news reports. Something strange is stirring in the sun-baked volcanic interior of the island. Something which speaks to her professional training.
     “The global network of Super-Fabs now forms a completely-parallel ecology,” she says, “They're mobile and they reproduce. They were designed to serve us but things could easily go a little haywire. Some replication glitch, some programming error or hack would do it. Their and our basic interests are far from totally aligned. After all, God isn’t making much in the way of new territory, are they?”
      She sips her rapidly-warming drink.
     “The Romans were always most scared of a slave revolt, weren't they? That's why their punishments were so draconian.”
     Timothy doesn’t see how any of this could relate to his thesis. It seems orthogonal to the social relations of post-capitalist society, the economics of the transition to fully-automated luxury communism.
     Just scaremongering and doom-speak.
     Julia is not nearly as much fun as he’d hoped.
     Neither of them notices the black shapes emerging from the waves. Alligator-bodies with spectral eyes and laser-mouths crawling in their dozens out of the surf, here to recycle the garbage and claim their world for ever.

END

© Adam Carlton 2019.

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This is a somewhat dramatised view of the inner logic of total automation.

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You will find my collection of short stories, published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:

"Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations: and other stories" (2019)

and my SF novel, also published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:

"Donatien's Children" (2022).

Feel free to purchase both!

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"It is easier to imagine the end of the world ..."

This quote, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism," has been attributed to the cultural analyst, Fredric Jameson.

It bears deep reflection.

Capitalism is the first mode of production which separated the mass of people from the means of securing their own livelihood. Previous modes of production saw ordinary people as hunters, gatherers, pastoralists or farmers.

Given the economic precariousness of the proletariat, some social organising principle is needed to coordinate actions to secure the reproduction of collective life. This is called an economy.

Historically there have been only two forms of economic organisation consistent with the existence of a proletariat (a class of resourceless labourers): the privately-owned, decentralised means of production constitutive of capitalism; and bureaucratically-owned means of production in a centrally-planned 'socialism'.

We know the track record of both models. In particular we know that a statist centrally-planned economy does not work - it lacks incentives to grow and optimise, and is captured by bureaucratic elites.

There are two further models: the naive Leninist-Trotskyist model of a worker-controlled (soviet) state and economy .. and a fully-automated economy.

The Leninist-Trotskyist model was only ever theorised in the sketchiest form and founders under modern political, industrial and financial complexity .. and human nature.

The fully-automated economy is a limit point of the natural tendency of capitalism to automate (the law of increasing organic composition of capital). However in that limit the last workers are displaced and therefore surplus value can no longer be created. Profits tend to zero as competition equalises prices to costs.

So no more capitalist economy, but that does not mean no economy. A collection of fully-automated companies (perhaps with non-waged human involvement in setting objectives - and certainly in consumption) is rather like a collection of villages each of which has a monopoly of some kind of natural resources (water, fruits, meat, ...) which are essentially not scarce. Such an economy engages in exchange, because human needs straddle the portfolios of the various producers, and it's similar to petty-commodity production, albeit without the involvement of human labour.

The working class may have vanished as a social category (no wage labour) but humans certainly haven't. Provided the machines have not been so badly designed as to eliminate humanity, people experience this world as super-aristocrats: their every feasible, practical need met.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed," said William Gibson. And if we look at the super-rich today we see a preview of behaviours which could be open to all in a society of totally-automated abundance.

As expected, the behaviour-set is just what would be expected given the innate nature of the human animal - all drives are exhibited from the most prosocial to the most antisocial.

On a sufficient timescale (a century or two) human nature can itself be engineered and hopefully there will be major speciation events. We will find it easier and more robust to adapt to Mars than to make Mars adapt to current-us, for example.

Capitalism will abolish itself not through socialism but through self-elimination. And the human race will diversify into every possible ecological niche in this awaiting universe.

Unless we're stupid about it.

Beyond capitalism: is this the best we can hope for?

It's to easy to reify capitalism. To see it as the capitalist class (hiss!) bearing down upon the downtrodden proletariat. 

Expropriate them!

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1. The inner-truth of capitalism

Let's do the analysis right.

Consider the vast mass of people who cannot live by their own efforts (they have no land, no resources, they are not self-sufficient). The proletariat.

Add a minority who own the land, the factories, the machines, the tools, the raw materials and all the other means of economic production. Ownership guaranteed by law and state. The capitalists.

If the owners hire workers (their capacity to work, actually) at a rate which can reproduce them for work next day, week, year .. while the amount produced by said workers exceeds their wages in value, well the surplus will be owned by the capitalists. They will get consistently richer. We have a technical name for this: it's called profit and it's a good thing. It means social needs are being addressed efficiently.

Note: if you work for the state rather than a private-sector employer, your wages are paid out of taxes: value contributed ultimately by the capitalist sector.

2. What do the capitalists do with their ever-increasing riches? 

An insignificant relative proportion goes into luxury apartments and super-yachts (although this conspicuous consumption is a powerful human motivator and source of envy and resentment). The statistics show that most capitalist profits are re-invested to secure another round of expanded reproduction. Or in these stagnating times, financing debt.

M - C - M' in Marx's formula. Money makes money through the intermediary of surplus value production.

Gratuitous consumption is always a missed opportunity under capitalism. An opportunity cost.

In the nutshell, it is the way production is organised which creates the classes .. they are both a precondition and a consequence of the relations of production.

3. Capitalism really pushes the social-surplus product

No moralism. We're none of us going back to living off the land. Noble hunter-gatherers, trapped in the deepest well of unproductive subsistence.

Nor are we going back to the agrarian life, another low-productivity hell-hole where almost everyone is tied to mediocre, hard, tedious life on the land.

We all agree that human affairs are improved when we have a better constructed-environment, one which suits our diverse needs. The way we do that is by a global division of labour where projects of the most ambitious scope can be realised. I like modern medicine.

That's going to take a lot of social-surplus product going forwards. It's going to continue to require people to personally consume only a small fraction of the value they themselves produce.

Any one individual is going to look at projects on all scales up to the fully global and subjectively feel like a small cog in a vast machine.

I wonder though whether they'll really care. Nobody asks me about NASA but I can still get excited.

Who decides what projects should be done, if not individual capitalists who have succeeded in attracting investment capital? I refer you to the pessimistic literature on traditional post-capitalist organisational forms well-documented here.

4. A post-capitalist economic organisation we might expect

Suppose we get the miracle of total automation. Cognitive robots replace workers. But in the end, without wage-labour, profits can't be obtained.

Under capitalism, the capitalist who automates gets a short-term advantage but then overall profits fall. Competition means that in the steady-state the capitalist cannot charge more than will cover his costs. Without wage-labour creating additional value, sale-prices are simply bid down to the costs of robots, overheads and materials. As a consequence, profits tend to zero.

The capitalists don't invest. It's like an economic crisis which never abates.

5. The Roman Empire redux

An economy of petty-commodity production is what still works. Like the Roman Empire of antiquity. The slaves have been switched out for robots. Units of production produce lots of goods  which are sold at their value, like in a village marketplace.

The Roman Empire was economically complex and vast in space and time. It was not very productive, not very dynamic - which may have been due to its agrarian character. And slaves are not the ideal robot - far from it. Not biddable at all.

Some people think the answer is for everyone to own personal robots. In antiquity most of the elite fraction of society had at least a few household slaves. But that isn't commensurate with distributing widely the benefits of a sophisticated global economy.

If I had to guess, I would say that the automation-heavy future is essentially robot-powered petty-commodity production combined with a very generous guaranteed income for everyone. Add in genetic enhancement to exploit the possibilities of an improved humanity and we'll not be in a bad place.

At least until the AIs decide we're a waste of their space!

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Note: the Marxist economist Michael Roberts has written extensively about the consequences of total automation under capitalism. Here's a good place to start.

Capitalism incompatible with total automation/slavery

In the previous post, "Five questions on the last days of capitalism", I discussed the evolution and final fate of capitalism - which will be very different from the violent revolutionary end imagined by the Leninist left.

In this post I want to zero in on the exact mechanics of the final days of capitalism. Little of what follows is original, but it's seldom brought to prominence.

1. Start point: a model capitalist economy with competition

Our economy consists of a number of identical competitive companies serving an anonymous market. Each company spends per working period:

• £10 on constant capital c (= depreciation, raw materials, premises etc), 
• £4 on wages v (= 4 labourers at £1 each)

with a rate of surplus value s/v of 100%. This means that £4 of surplus value s is produced in the working period. So c = 10, v = 4, s = 4.

Revenue = c + v + s = 10 + 4 + 4= £18     -  4 labourers remember. Assume 18 objects are produced at £1 each.

Profit p = revenues - costs = £18 - (£10 + £4) = £4.

Rate of profit = profit/cost = p/(c + v) = 4/(10 + 4) = 2/7 = 29%.

2. The power of innovation

One of the companies buys some better machinery which bumps c up from 10 to 11 but which allows two workers to be eliminated. Their numbers look better:

c = 11, v = 2, s = 2 (same s/v) so c + v + s = £15.

Suppose that 18 objects are still produced in the working period. Initially the innovator can sell at the going market rate of £1 each - a total revenue of £18.

Revenue = £18. But his costs (c + v) = 11+2 = £13 are lower.

Profit = £18 - £13 = £5 .. and rate of profit = p/(c + v) = 5/13 = 38%.

This is far better than his business rivals (stuck at 29%).

3. Other companies follow the innovation

But all too soon other companies follow suit. Prices fall due to competition until each company finds that for itself:

New revenue = c + v + s =  £11 + £2 + £2 = £15

New profit = (c + v + s) - (c + v) = £15 - £13 = £2.

New rate of profit = p/(c + v) = 2/13 = 15%.

But the previous market equilibrium profit was 29%! Now each employer is worse off.

But the 18 objects now cost only £15, or 83p each. Consumers benefit from the wonders of competition and innovation driving productivity.

4. Robots now eliminate all labour

The robots are coming! A progressive innovator buys more automation which bumps c from 11 to 12 and which eliminates workers altogether.

c = 12, v = s = 0.

As before, 18 objects are produced in the working period and the going rate is still 83p each. Our innovator takes advantage of existing market pricing.

Revenue = £15 as before, but costs = £12 only (no wages).

Profit = £15 - £12 = £3 and the rate of profit = 3/12 = 25%.

An improvement over his competitors (who only see 15%) but again, they soon follow suit.

5. Everybody adopts total automation: no more wage bills

Competition drives prices down to costs (there is no surplus value s).

Revenue = 12 and cost = 12.

Profit = 0 and each object costs 12/18 = 66p. Except no-one is making any.

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Discussion

Slaves or robots: it makes no difference

I assert the above model holds whether the total automation is clever machinery, some humanoid AGI or a human slave.

Nonsense, you reply. A slave is just a worker where the employer is paying for food and shelter directly, rather than via wages.

Not so fast! The slave has to be bought as well as maintained - just like any other piece of capital equipment. What then is the cost of a slave in a competitive market?

The cost of a slave = expected-output-value - maintenance-costs (all discounted).

In one cycle above, assuming the slave is bought at price c and is as productive and exploited as a wage-worker (s/v = 1) then:

output-value produced by slave = (v + s) and maintenance-cost = v, so using the definition:

slave-cost = c = (v + s) - v = s                   - (values/costs here for one work cycle).

People (not slave-owners though) forget to include the initial cost of the slave, which already factors in the 'value' the slave will create.

Suppose c_R represents the cost of the raw materials the slave works with and other non-slave constant capital costs. In a work cycle or period:

revenue = c_R + value-added-by-the-slave = c_R + (v + s)

costs = c_R + slave-cost + slave-subsistence = c_R + s + v.

Profit = revenue - cost = [c_R + (v + s)] - [c_R + s + v] = 0.

There have been capitalist economies with slave sectors of the economy

You say, there have been slave-owning sectors of capitalist economies, the antebellum south, and I remind you that this is well-trodden territory on the left.

Read more at this post: "Total automation under capitalism?" - the topic area is the theory of equalisation of the rate of profit between sectors with differing levels of automation and the concept of prices of production.

It's perfectly possible for sectors of a capitalist economy to transition to total automation (point 4 above). The automated sectors extract value produced by workers in other sectors through profit equalisation. But it's not possible for the whole economy to 'lose its workers'.

8. What kind of an economy can you have with total automation?

What does work, you ask. Absent complete overproduction capability ('abundance') of everything, there will be a need for exchange between different production units: commodity exchange at value via simple (or petty) commodity production. Like in the Roman empire, or during feudalism. In this mode of production, exchange is driven by the need for use-values. The dynamic is not profit maximisation.

One can only hope that innovation and dynamism in such an utterly-transformed society of the future is not stifled. Perhaps the AIs will have some objectives of their own? Not everything that is wonderful and creative in human affairs is driven by capital valorisation.

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You will have observed that the cost equation for a slave already incorporates elements of rent. Yet the treatment here is not definitive. As Poulantzas reminds us (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, chapter 1), 'capital is not a thing'. In arithmetical examples social relationships are reified.

So I'm thinking that the 'expected value of future output' term in the value of a slave is similar to the way we value a share. Marx called this fictitious capital. Compare with the labour involved in delivering the slave as a market-commodity (reproduction, transport and transaction costs) which is how we normally value constant capital. Not sure how to bring these two paradigms together. On this rather opaque thought I must leave it.

Update: Reading Poulantzas (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, Productive and Unproductive Labour: 2) I am reminded that slaves are not produced in factories.

Slave traders are engaged in non-productive labour and the commodity price form of the slave, like that of the bond or share, is not derived from some quantity of abstract social labour incorporated in it.

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My further posts on Marxist theory.

Five questions on the last days of capitalism

1. Isn't it absurd, in this day and age, to talk about the last days of capitalism?

The prospect certainly isn't imminent. For a century and a half the hard left has talked about the transition to post-capitalism. Yet despite world wars, economic convulsions in the 1930s and 2000s, and major social conflicts in the 1970-80s, capitalism today as an international system is richer and stronger than ever.

2. Why no communist revolutions in the West?

For a century, a dwindling band of revolutionary Marxists have anticipated a violent overthrow of capitalism by the massed proletariat led by a Leninist revolutionary party. That prospect was never realistic.The working class en masse never aligned around a credible anti-capitalist programme. That's because the alternative to capitalist production in an epoch of scarcity can only be a planned economy. And that doesn't work.

3. What will the end of capitalism really look like?

Marx wrote that "no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself".

Capitalism continues to grow, indeed it has to. Without profits, investment stalls and the economy implodes.

Michael Roberts has argued persuasively that the long stagnation of the last decade or so was caused precisely by the heroic efforts of governments back in 2008/9 to minimise the effects of the crisis. Consequently there was no clear-out of inefficient firms, no devaluation of capital and few opportunities for industrial reorganisation. Zombie firms and debt overhang have stifled profitability and as a result the recovery has been anaemic. Still feels like it.

The underlying trends of capitalism persist through peaks and troughs though. The tendency to revolutionise production through automation, the replacement of workers by machines. So far - at least during an expansionary phase - the economy produces more roles for people displaced than it eliminates.

Cognitive and robotic automation changes that.

The 'safe' jobs right now seem to be those where manual skills are at a premium (care homes) and those where intelligence and interpersonal skills are required (senior executives, politicians, designers). But eventually over the next century or two those will also succumb to cheap automation.

What happens then? People get displaced from the labour force and don't get rehired.

This imposes additional welfare costs on the economy. Meanwhile the active workforce tends to zero. Fewer workers in a highly-automated economy means surplus value (which translates to profit) decreases. And don't forget all those transfer payments to the unproductive unemployed.

With fewer workers and an increasing proportion of the population on welfare, demand for consumer goods (produced by Department 2) declines and as a consequence the market for increased automation products goes into reverse (which hits Department 1). This is not a linear process - nothing in a capitalist economy is linear - but it is tendential. It feels much like the current stagnant economy but with mass unemployment and few job prospects going forwards.

4 What will replace capitalism in the end?

The process I just described results in the economy - in fits and starts - breaking down. There are no good investments. There will always be demand - the unemployed gotta eat, and the capitalists who own the means of production still need their luxuries - but the economic dynamism has gone. Without profit there is no incentive to address that demand and the factories stay shut.

Capitalism has finally completed its work.

I doubt the mass of people will tolerate this state of affairs and the capitalists will not see a way forward as there is none. At this point we have to imagine a world where the environment has become heavily optimised to provide everything a person wants (the result of all those decades of relentless consumer-oriented automation - smarter and smarter AI systems and more efficient robotic systems) yet it can't be put to good use via capitalist processes.

The resulting political transition might be something like the collapse of the Soviet Union rather than a Leninist insurrection. But after that, who knows? We're into science-fiction.

5. What do we do in the meantime?

What has the left done during the last century? Capitalism wasn't abolished, not even close. The workers' movement fought to secure its own existence and social reproduction in material and cultural terms. It didn't do a great job on the latter front, seemingly bewitched by the smug fairy-tales of neoliberal social-liberalism.

But that won't last forever - it's gotten silly now.

I'm in favour of continuing all the processes of increased automation. They're a net good. Within capitalism they will be used of course to buttress and reinforce the reproduction of capitalist relations of production (AI and robots are great for repression).

But in the end it will be self-defeating because capitalism is incompatible with the elimination of the workforce. That truth preempts even the Draka solution .. even if that's the form automation eventually takes. Slaves are equipment, not proletarians.*

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* Part two of this post: "Capitalism incompatible with total automation/slavery".

Modelling total automation under capitalism (a progress report)

What actually happens to a capitalist economy as automation increases, employees are laid off and the budget for workers' wages tends to zero? It's possible to explore this in a spreadsheet using Marx's equations for expanded capitalist reproduction (which I wrote about here).

You divide the economy into Department 1, which makes machines (capital goods) and Department 2 which makes consumables (wage goods and luxuries). Then you iterate through cycles in which you try to make both Departments more capital-intensive while aggressively laying off workers.

There are some constraints: Department 1 sells Department 2 its machines; Department 2 supplies the consumption needs of workers and capitalists in Department 1. The following quantities need to stay non-negative:

1. Constant capital (machines, factories, raw materials) - c
2. Variable capital (wages) - v
3. Capitalist personal remuneration (dividends) - a
4. Overall sector profits - s  (or p, when adjusted to equalize the rate of profit between Departments).

Additionally the rate of surplus value s/v can't go through the roof. You can't have one worker alone in an enormous factory who works ten minutes to produce the value of their own wage, and then eight hours plus to provide the surplus value which pays for dividends and the next round of automation investment (s/v = ~50). They really wouldn't buy-in to that.

Click on the figures to make the spreadsheets large enough to read. You are not meant to understand what's going on - just to get an impression. More detailed stuff later.

Department 1: s/v tends to infinity while production is anaemic

The problem is this: as automation increases and the number of workers declines in Department 1, those few left have to (unrealistically) produce far more value than their wages to keep the edifice afloat.

Meanwhile the collapse in the number of workers overall leads to a chronic decrease in demand for Department 2's consumer goods. No new machines are being bought: instead there's accelerated depreciation - which destroys surplus value, hitting profits there.

Department 2: this sector begins to collapse

To reiterate: with decreasing demand for wage-goods, Department 2 finds itself losing the value invested in its machines, not buying more. Depreciation hits surplus value making Department 2 increasingly unprofitable.

So far I've been unable to find a combination of parameters which allows capitalism to eliminate all its workers. I'll keep trying ... .

More: Five questions on the last days of capitalism.

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You ask, why use the framework of Marxist economics? Because orthodox (ie bourgeois) economics has no interest or explanation as to where profit comes from:

"Rent, wages, interest, and profit are the four factor incomes that land, labor, capital, and enterprise provide respectively."

Roughly the idea that if you put some money into 'enterprise' then by some magic it can become larger (profit). Magic is not a good analytic framework for edge cases of capitalist reproduction.

The LTOV including rent answers critics

The Labour Theory of Value (LTOV) has not had a good press from neoclassical economists.

"However, Ricardo was troubled with some deviations in prices from proportionality with the labor required to produce them. For example, he said "I cannot get over the difficulty of the wine, which is kept in the cellar for three or four years [i.e., while constantly increasing in exchange value], or that of the oak tree, which perhaps originally had not 2 shillings expended on it in the way of labour, and yet comes to be worth £100."   [Wikipedia].

As we shall see, the solution to this mystery is the combination of socially-necessary labour time and rent.

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Q. What is value theory in Marxism?

A. Marx distinguished three kinds of value. Firstly value itself, the amount of (socially necessary) labour time which went into the production of an object; secondly the exchange value of the produced object when it was exchanged in a market transaction for another object (which could be the universal commodity money); thirdly and qualitatively, the use value which as its name implies was the utility of the object to a person.

Q. Tell me more about value per se

A. Take a wooden box made by a carpenter by hand. Plainly a lazy, incompetent carpenter would take longer to make the box but that extra labour time could not increase its value. A given society knitted together by market transactions would soon arrive at the notion of the average period of time (hours, say) which a box like that would take to produce. That time is the socially necessary labour time. If productivity improved, the value would go down, not up.

Q. And exchange value?

A. An object which is exchanged in a market transaction is called a commodity. A commodity will typically exchange in barter for another object which took something like an equivalent time to produce (otherwise someone is getting a free ride .. and eventually more people will move into producing that commodity and compete). In any kind of competitive and established market a commodity typically exchanges for the money commodity, which makes transactions so much more fluid. The exchange value of a commodity is then its equivalent in money, which in a very simple model would be almost the same concept as its price.

The idea is that in a competitive market of freely working producers the market price will tend to oscillate - due to vagaries of supply and demand in the first instance - around the value.

It's a first, simple model.

Q. And use value?

A. This is not measured in hours or currency units. It's not a quantitative attribute. It instead registers the qualitative fact that anything socially produced has to have utility for someone, otherwise why did the producer bother. The non-trivial idea is that objects can be produced, say for the use value  of household consumption, which have a value (because they took a certain amount of time to do or make) but don't have an exchange value because they were never traded.

Q. So here's a scenario. A tropical island. The guys are doing hunting and fishing and some hard-scrabble cutivating so there's an economy and a currency of sorts. 

And then this big guy monopolises the one set of banana trees and extorts payment for bananas. How does that work in terms of value?

A. Good example. Bananas have a use value, obviously, otherwise everyone would just ignore the big guy. By hypothesis, bananas make themselves. No-one has to labour (by assumption) so the value of a banana is zero. Likewise the exchange value of a banana is also zero - as no labour is incorporated in it.

Q. But the big guy is able to charge. He makes money doesn't he?

A. So this is a case where price and exchange value differ. The big guy is extracting a rent due to his monopolising a scarce resource. We see the same with landowners, who also charge rent to access land which they have perhaps done nothing at all to improve.

If the big guy wasn't there, the bananas would be a 'windfall' and it would be first-come first-served, absent a state structure to ration and allocate (like the land runs in the nineteenth century USA).

Note that value theory can't predict how big the rent (ie the market price) will be. Who knows how much people will value a banana over other traded objects. How much disposable income they will have to allocate to bananas.

Here's the important bit. Some commodities mix aspects of value creation and rent, often when a natural process is involved such as in forestry or wine maturing. The ability of the landowner or wine-make to monopolise the resource while nature does its work allows the extraction of a rent.

This addresses Ricardo's difficulty mentioned at the top of this piece.

Q. Rent vs exchange value - a distinction without a difference?

A. No. Exchange value results from value creation; rents are simply value appropriation.

Suppose we had a guy who guards bananas (which grow themselves), a guy who guards oranges (which grow themselves), a guy who guards a bay with super-abundant fish stocks (which collect and beach themselves). Let's assume they barter. What are the right ratios for exchange?

Marx would say that all three products are not commodities, they have no value. The prices are rents - set by force majeure and need.

Assuming all three parties require all three products then if each is in local abundance the price will be zero. Each is wasting their time trying to monopolise their resource. It's like the air guys. Chill!

If the products are not in abundance only force will decide. The most aggressive guy will set whatever barter ratio he can enforce, then the next most aggressive. However, the underserved guys will eventually die of starvation, making this self-defeating. Hoarding and rationing may postpone the fateful day.

In microeconomic terms, the supply cannot be changed since it is constrained by nature (it makes itself) so the supply curve is vertical. In the absence of substitutes the demand curve is vertical too: to survive you do need a certain level of resources.

If the two vertical lines coincide we have an equilibrium (of sufficiency). If the supply line is to the right  everyone lives and some produce will rot. If it's to the left the guys will become increasingly malnourished and eventually will die.

Take a look at the diagram at the top of the post.

This simple model is also relevant to the owners of entirely robotic factories under total automation, but that's for a future post..

Capitalism with total automation? In principle, sure

There are people who believe that only living, breathing humans can be conscious, can really be persons. Machines can only ever be machines. AI researchers refute this view with an elegant argument. A neuron is a finite system which transforms its inputs into outputs subject to environmental conditions. In principle a neuron model could approximate a human brain neuron as closely as one might wish.

So replace biological neurons, one at a time, with functionally equivalent fabricated devices such that their input-output behaviour is exactly replicated. Eventually you have a machine brain with identical behaviour to the biological original. How could it not exhibit consciousness and personhood?

In Capital Volume 1, devoted to capitalist production, Marx made great play of the difference between machines - constant capital, incapable of producing new value - and workers, variable capital with the unique property of creating new, and indeed surplus, value. It seems that Marxist economists ever since have thought that Marx was a vitalist. That protoplasm somehow figures centrally in Marxist theory.

Amazing. Such an elementary category error.

Marx considered the dawn of automation in his celebrated “Fragment on Machines” although he was more concerned with the deleterious impact on those workers who were forced to dance to the new, highly-automated machines’ tunes. His tone is nevertheless surprisingly tentative.

Most Marxists since then have considered only the case where highly-automated machines are bought as capital goods. In this case, the machines are isomorphic to slaves, and if the means of production remain distributed in private hands, the resulting mode of production is petty commodity production.

But consider that AI thought experiment again. Take a worker and replace him or her by a robot which sells its ability to operate at a price determined by its own costs of reproduction. Nothing important about capitalism changes.

If we change out all the workers for robots, but maintain the relations of production (wage labour and commodity production for profit) then we're still in the business of reproducing capitalist relations of production. It's a thought experiment, but not an impossible outcome.

My intuition is that the current trend of replacing variable capital (human) with constant capital (machines) will continue, the underlying rate of profit will continue to tendentially fall, and we will eventually face the under-analysed issue of the transition from capitalism to a generalised petty commodity production reminiscent of antiquity. I ignore of course any initiatives by the set-aside human ex-workers.

However, as machines get smarter and more like AGIs, their claims to the dignity of personhood may become impossible to deny (I see the SJWs marching now). Once AGI-robots become cheaper than unreliable and non-standardised humans, why wouldn't we see capitalism without a human working class?

Welcome to the new epoch of total automation under capitalism .. and the ultimate non-revolutionary proletariat.

Michael Roberts: Total Automation under Capitalism

Michael Roberts has a new book out:

Amazon link

Here is what he has to say about the impact of total automation on capitalism (pages 137-141).

"What does this all mean if we enter the extreme (science fiction?) future where robotic technology and AI leads to robots making robots AND robots extracting raw materials and making everything AND carrying out all personal and public services so that human labour is no longer required for ANY task of production at all?

Let's imagine a totally automated process where no human worked in the production process. Surely, value has been added by the conversion of raw materials into goods without humans? Surely, that refutes Marx's claim that only human labour can create value?

In Marx's economic theory, abstract labour is the only source of value and surplus-value. However, in the case of an economy where robots build robots build robots and there is no human labour involved, surely value is still created?

This was the argument of Dmitriev in 1898, in his critique of Marx's value theory. He said that, in a fully automated system, a certain input of machines can create a greater output of machines (or of other commodities). In this case, profit and the rate of profit would be determined exclusively by the technology used (productivity) and not by (abstract) labour. If 10 machines produce 12 machines, the profit is 2 machines and the rate of profit is 2/10, 20%.

Value reduced to use value has nothing to do with Marx's notion of value, which is the monetary expression of abstract labour expended by labourers. If machines could create 'value', this value would be use-value rather than value as the outcome of humans' abstract labour. But, if machines can create 'value', so can an infinity of other factors (animals, the forces of nature, sunspots, etc.) and the determination of value becomes impossible. And if machines supposedly could transfer their use-value to the product, this would immediately crash against the problem of the aggregation of different use-values.

For Marx, machines do not create value. Rather, concrete labour transfers the value of the machines (and, more generally, of the means of production) to the product. They increase human productivity and thus the output per unit of capital invested, while decreasing the quantity of living labour needed for the production of a certain output. Given that only labour creates value, the substitution of the means of production for living labour decreases the quantity of value created per unit of capital invested. ...

The Dmitriev critique confuses the dual nature of value under capitalism: use value and exchange value. There is use value (things and services that people need); and exchange value (the value measured in labour time and appropriated from human labour by the owners of capital and realised by sale on the market). In every commodity under the capitalist mode of production, there is both use value and exchange value. You can't have one without the other under capitalism. But the latter rules the capitalist investment and production process, not the former.

Value (as defined) is specific to capitalism. Sure, living labour can create things and do services (use values). But value is the substance of the capitalist mode of producing things. Capital (the owners) controls the means of production created by labour and will only put them to use in order to appropriate value created by labour. Capital does not create value itself.  So in our hypothetical all-encompassing robot/AI world, productivity (of use values) would tend to infinity while profitability (surplus value to capital value) would tend to zero. ...

This is no longer capitalism. The analogy is more with a slave economy as in ancient Rome. In ancient Rome, over hundreds of years, the formerly predominantly small-holding peasant economy was replaced by slaves in mining, farming and all sorts of other tasks. This happened because the booty of the successful wars that the Roman republic and empire conducted included a mass supply of slave labour.

The cost to the slave owners of these slaves was incredibly cheap (to begin with) compared with employing free labour. The slave owners drove the farmers off their land through a combination of debt demands, requisition in wars and sheer violence. The former peasants and their families were forced into slavery themselves or into the cities, where they scraped a living with menial tasks and skills or begged. The class struggle did not end. The struggle was between the slave-owning aristocrats and the slaves and between the aristocrats and the atomised plebs in the cities.

A fully robot economy means that the owners of the means of production (robots) would have a super-abundant economy of things and services at zero cost (robots making robots making robots). The owners can then just consume. They don't need to make 'profit', just as the aristocrat slave owners in Rome just consumed and did not run businesses to sell commodities to make a profit. So a robotic economy could mean a super-abundant world for all or it could mean a new form of slave society with extreme inequality of wealth and income. It's a social 'choice' or more accurately, it depends of the outcome of the class struggle under capitalism.

The key issue is Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. A rising organic composition of capital leads to a fall in the overall rate of profit engendering recurring crises. If robots and AI do replace human labour at an accelerating rate, that can only intensify that tendency. Well before we get to a robot-all world, capitalism will experience ever-increasing periods of crises and stagnation."

Everything Roberts says here is orthodox Marxist economics and yet there is something missing: the use of the abstract concepts of Marx's theory to reconstruct the concrete phenomena, to discern the details of the actual transition to 'a robot-all world'.

Marx was not a vitalist. He did not think that human protoplasm endowed human labour with some mysterious value-producing quality that mere steel and electronics could never replicate. So what if human workers were everywhere replaced by fabricated androids who also toiled in the factories, were paid wages and consumed ersatz food? Does capitalism still work? [Answer: of course].

If one particular capitalist creates a totally automated factory (or one using purely slave labour which is - in Marxist terms - the same thing) is that incompatible with capitalism? [Answer: of course not].

As more and more capitalists automate their factories, displacing human labour, what is the process which unfolds before them and why? How do they perceive the capitalist economy failing before their eyes?

Or will they rather observe, as Peter Singer writes in his book on Marx: ‘Future capitalists will not find their profits drying up as they dismiss the last workers from their newly-automated factories’ (p. 76).

I outlined some answers here.

"They dismiss the last workers from their fully automated factories"

A post at Marginal Revolution from 2010: "What is the biggest flaw in the labor theory of value?".

MR is an Internet temple to neoliberalism so a dismissive, patrician putdown of the Labour Theory of Value (LTV) was never in doubt.

In a comment, Chris Hallquist writes (March 30, 2010 at 12:34 pm):

"My favorite comment on the LTV comes from Peter Singer, of all people, in his largely sympathetic book on Marx. I don’t have the exact quote, but it was something like “The capitalists of the future will not see their profits dry up as they dismiss the last workers from their fully automated factories.”

I'm a capitalist. Suppose I have a Magic Box* which, say, costs £100 a day to run and which produces goods on demand to a value of £x. I have in mind something like a science-fictional 'next-generation 3D printer', which could make a case of baked-beans tins or the engine of a car depending on your menu selection and your whim.

Question: what can I charge for the goods produced? What is £x here?

So initially it's just me with the Magic Box -  I can charge what the market will bear. But soon all my competitors will have one too. The last workers are dismissed from their fully automated factories.

But due to competition, eventually I can charge no more than £100 for whatever I produce in a day. If I try to charge more, someone will undercut me and steal my customers. I make no profit.

Plainly before I get to this point I'm going to stop bothering with this investment in Magic Boxes - what's in it for me?

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What stops this argument applying to capitalism today?

The primitive state of productivity and the consequent scope for further innovation.

As there is no Magic Box today, as a capitalist I have to use workers and machines to produce commodities for sale. Over a cycle of production the workers are paid for their labour-power at the cost of their own social-reproduction (v) and the machines (and raw materials) are paid for at their cost of operation and depreciation (c).  Given both factors (at a cost of c + v), the workforce then produces goods of value (c + v + s) which, by assumption sell at the direct price (Anwar Shaikh). My profit is then s.

Note that (c + v + s) is the actual (LTV) value which, in this model, equals the direct price of the product. There is no cheating here, no selling things above their actual value.

In the simplest historical models, the first capitalists competed with small-scale artisans engaged in simple commodity production - who make no profit as such on their work. But the capitalists innovate, add machines, significantly lower the cost of production per commodity but sell at (or slightly below) prevailing market prices. They increase their own market share and revenues, and thereby accumulate.

Incidentally they also wreck the economy of the simple commodity producers, forcing them out of business and into the ranks of labourers, who produce nothing but their own ability to work (labour-power) for a capitalist. The advent of capitalism was .. messy.

An 'arms race' then develops in which the contribution of more productive machinery increases and labour is shed. A capitalist could in principle always undercut the competition by lowering s, reducing price towards the cost of production and thereby removing profits, but why is that a good use of investment capital? Far better to use the money to invest in some other business which is still making adequate returns. And if there are no such, then we have a crisis, or stagnation.

[A truly perfect competition would drive s to zero and is impossible under capitalism.]

The limit of this process is the Magic Box where the capitalist needs no workers at all. But, as noted above, once everyone has one the price I can charge is forced down to the cost of production - there are no more profits to be had.

And if the Magic Box takes over the whole economy ("They dismiss the last workers from their fully automated factories") there are no other investment opportunities. It is the stagnation from hell; with nowhere to put your money, capitalism simply can't function.

So the story is this: as total automation comes closer, competition forces prices closer to the costs of production as there are declining opportunities to out-innovate competitors. When the last worker leaves, the capitalist simply stands back to observe the robot factories churning out goods which cannot be sold at a profit. He wonders why he bothered to invest (actually he didn't).

But it's worse even than that.

Meanwhile, the displaced workers have no income so they're kind of mad .. and the capitalists, with their profits vanishing, have nothing to skim for their own personal needs (no doubt their hoards will keep them going for a while). Eventually the automated factories all stop working due to no effective demand. The economy finally collapses and everybody starves.

In the real world, the model doesn't get pushed that far.

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If some people (or a bunch of AIs) take over the reins of managing these automated factories, and if humans, displaced from production, are given money-tokens to purchase commodities, then we've re-invented simple commodity production - as practiced in antiquity using slaves.

Or perhaps people are also given (or purchase or take!) ownership of the Magic Boxes themselves. People use their machines to produce goods for personal consumption and also to trade unwanted goods with other people for commodities they do want (assuming some diversification due to variations in Magic Box design, capabilities or access to raw materials).

It's not capitalism, it's simple commodity production. And what about the centrally-planned economy, the classic model of post-capitalist socialism?

Another day.

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This is a note: I'm still reading around these issues and revisions are almost certain. For a more detailed, quantitative and 'orthodox' treatment, leveraging the work of Michael Roberts and Peter Cooper, see "Total Automation under Capitalism?". And here is some background reading.

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* The economic effects of a 'Magic Box' (a cornucopia machine) were humorously imagined by Charles Stross in his SF novel, 'Singularity Sky' (2008).