[PEN-L:32459] Re: Value and the Robot

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

"I have dealt more at length with the "undiminished" proceeds of labor, on the one hand, and with "equal right" and "fair distribution", on the other, in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists. 

"Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it. 

"Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribut!
ion as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?"

>From Critique of the Gotha Program, Karl Marx

"Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself."

"If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one."

One way or another - "by hook or crook," every qualitatively new means of production creates a new class, but today we are experiencing something very different and profound. The new emergent material conditions of production - the physical properties, are creating new classes and new formations existing outside the economic and social order. 

The economic and social order - the industrial system of material production, is based on human laboring and the exchange of the social products. Advanced robotics and the application of computerization and digitalization of the production process do not conform to the labor process. Robotics doesn't assist the worker, but instead replace him or her and create without the sale of labor power or exchange. The social contract has been, "you sell your labor power for wages and with these wages you can take part in the exchange of social products." 

The third edition of the American Revolution is in full progress. Revolution begins not in the mind, but with the emergence and eventual supremacy of a new means of production and ends with the consequent reorganization of society. The dictionary definition of revolution is overthrowing the ruling class by a lower class and establishing the lower class as the new ruling class. This definition is not accurate. 
The social revolution is an economic revolution that consists in replacing one qualitative means of production with another. "It's the economy stupid," and the economy has as its platform definable material conditions of production, and it has taken me what seems like a lifetime to understand this simple proposition. 

The robot as productivity tool demands a corresponding mode of distribution - exchange or rather "anti-exchange," which is really no exchange at all. Advanced robotics by definition cannot operate in a national market because it would fill the national market with products in a very short period of time. Thus, the "national market" is burst asunder, reconfigured and the various national markets that constituted the world market begin the leap from inner connection to interactivity. What has been called globalization cannot be grasped in its qualitative features based on the mode of accumulation - the evolution of the credit capital system. 

The key is the robot versus living labor. The robot created and then was further developed by the consolidation of the international market. This is not the world market of which Marx and Lenin speaks of. 

The robot as productivity tool demands a corresponding mode of distribution. The robot cannot exchange products but can create products 24/7, which unravels the system of value production and its mode of distribution - exchange. Exchange is a relationship between human beings not machines. Value is the amount of socially necessary labor in the production of commodities. This socially necessary amount of labor is the fundamental underpinning of all exchange, which is expressed in price. 

Society is being torn from its foundation in the value system or the value form is under collapse or the unity of "use value and exchange value" - is polarized, because robotics does not conform to the labor process. All social products within the industrial system contain a use value and an exchange value: that is they are useful to someone and as the product of human labor can be exchange on the basis of labor. No one in their right mind would exchange an automobile for an eight pack of Coca Cola, because the automobile contains a heck of a lot more value.

Robots do not labor but rather create useful products. Only human beings labor - that is exchange. Robots do not conform to the labor process. 

Revolution comes about as a result of the development of the means of production. An antagonism develops between the new, emerging economic relations and the old static relations within the superstructure of the old society. The result is an economic collapse. As the economy collapse it drags down society. The destruction of the old economy does not mean that there isn't any production going on. The destruction of the economy means the destruction of the existing economy, which is the thing society is built upon. 

The economy our society is built upon is an industrial economy with certain laws governing the exchange of products. The invasion and evolution of the robot is destroying those laws. 

The American peoples are ready to hear this and it expresses what they are experiencing. This is the Marx economic theory - Marxism, 101. Virtually everything else is political doctrine. 

The robot as productivity tool demands a corresponding mode of distribution.