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Something I sometimes think about, is how really can capitalists benefit from that? If you can automate your company away, and fire all employees, and if every
by toomanydoubts 4y ago
Something I sometimes think about, is how really can capitalists benefit from that?
If you can automate your company away, and fire all employees, and if every company is doing that, then workers have no jobs or ways to make money. So the customers for most of the companies start disappearing. It's the ultimate accumulation of capital, to a point that the wheels of economy grind to a halt.
- dougabug 4y agoThat’s exactly what happened to the Magratheans in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “Unfortunately, the venture was so successful that Magrathea soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. The Magratheans went into hibernation, awaiting an economic recovery that could afford their services once more.“
- vidarh 4y agoThis is exactly Marx' thesis. He took capitalists on their word with respect to believing that competition will drive margins towards zero over time, and that as a consequence cutting labour is inherently a pre-requisite for surviving competition, and that as a result that capitalism will eventually, once it runs out of new markets to expand into, start experiencing crises of simultaneous overproduction and under-employment. If he was right, it can be "patched" and made to work with a sufficient level of redistribution to avoid such crises, or left to fail catastrophically without.
- avgcorrection 4y agoWhy should it matter what benefits the group of people who end up just sitting on a pile of money in the end?