Hopeless retro

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

They are called technocapitalists and visionaries. They promise a wonderful future, just like from books and films, something that science fiction has long dreamed of. Colonization of the Moon and Mars, orbital factories and hotels, high-speed transport, flying cars, cities in the ocean. They launch private spaceships, build electric cars and solar panels in their futuristic robotic factories, and they intend to introduce unmanned taxis and drones to deliver purchases.

They are convinced that if there is a problem, there is surely a solution. Forward and higher! Much of what they do or intend to do should have already happened according to the predictions of old science fiction and old futurological predictions. Well, they are ready to make these long-standing predictions and dreams come true. After all, they themselves are similar to the characters of old science fiction novels. Even if this future is somewhat late and therefore has a retro flavor, these heroes will help it come.

Great dreams must come true.

People wanted flying cars - so Uber is developing flying taxis. Not exactly like Back to the Future, but still. Jeff Bezos in April 2017 promised to invest a billion dollars annually from the sale of shares of the Amazon founded and headed by him in the development of his other company - space Blue Origin, in the development and construction of powerful new rockets such as New Glenn. In May, he kept his promise. Prior to this, Blue Origin had already carried out several test launches of the New Shepard rocket. Bezos has ambitious plans - he intends to send cargo and people not only to low-earth orbit, but also to the moon, that is, to create something like a space Amazon. Amazon itself is recognized as one of the most innovative companies out there. In her warehouses, robots deliver goods to workers, she tests drones, obtained patents for hive towers for these drones and for flying warehouses, and opened shops without cashiers. She has a TV series, a cloud business and is constantly striving to capture new niches. A competitor to Blue Origin is Elon Musk's SpaceX, an entrepreneur gushing with ideas and preoccupied with a wide variety of problems: climate change, killer robots, the possibility of a superintelligent artificial intelligence riot, traffic jams in megacities.

But there is still something scandalously retrofuturistic in modern capitalism: the existence of the working class, which in recent decades has been persistently said goodbye to, but it has not disappeared, but has only become larger and more diverse.

"Everything here seems to be from the future, except for us"

Sweatshops in Asia in electronics manufacturing like Foxconn have long been known, but suddenly a few months ago it turned out that workers in Tesla's high-tech robotic "factory of the future" faint from overwork, complain of overwork and injuries, and there is no union at the enterprise. Although the factory is indeed filled with robots, it employs about 10,000 people. “Everything here seems to be from the future, except for us,” one of them commented on the situation. What to do - the enterprise should be profitable, after all, it is necessary to reassure investors. By the way, lithium, which is used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and whose reserves are quite limited, is also mined and processed not by robots, but by workers under the scorching sun in Chile, Bolivia and Australia.

For a believer in market forces, the figure of a visionary, a kind of Tony Stark, is important. According to this belief, workers should simply rejoice that they are working under the leadership of a great man, embodying breakthrough ideas. Let's say Musk is a really talented leader, engineer and visionary, and also, importantly, a great negotiator and PR man. But there is little, if any, natural predisposition to become a talented engineer. You need a good education, social and cultural capital, the ability to build connections. In addition, where would Musk's enterprises be without direct and indirect government subsidies and the intellectual work of many ordinary engineers. Not very much like Einrend's "Atlanta" independent of the state.

The “one-click buy” on Amazon hides the usual manual labor on the conveyor belt, walks along the warehouse shelves with goods and delivery by truck. Various publications have already written about the difficult working conditions in the company's warehouses many times, and some journalists were hired there specially. There are no trade unions in Amazon warehouses in the United States, but there are in Germany and Poland. In Italy, workers at the Amazon logistics center in Piacenza recently went on strike for the first time. Despite robotization, Amazon is hiring new workers, increasing the number of distribution centers in the US. More than 125 thousand people work in its warehouses in the USA. The company has pledged to increase the number of employed in the United States by 100 thousand jobs, thus bringing the number of American workers (along with other personnel) to 280 thousand by mid-2018. It owns more than two hundred logistics facilities around the world. She came to Mexico, opens her first distribution center in Australia and is actively expanding her business in India, competing with local online retailers such as Flipkart. The largest Amazon warehouses can employ more than 2,000 people.

Warehouses and distribution centers are moving into the de-industrialized American cities of the Rust Belt. The authors of the video on the Outline website say that Amazon and Jeff Bezos, not Trump, will create the jobs. In Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, Amazon has built an “order center”. The metallurgical plant of Bethlehem Steel used to work here. But the salaries of warehouse workers are lower than those of metallurgists in the era of strong trade unions and social contracts. It is also home to distribution center giant Wal-Mart, Amazon's main retail rival, owned by the Waltons, one of the richest families in the United States.

As traditional retail and malls decline due to the proliferation of online shopping, Wal-Mart is forced to adapt. For example, the company bought online retailer Jet.com, and then electronic retail companies ModCloth and Moosejaw, to develop its own online commerce. In turn, Amazon bought the Whole Foods health food supermarket in August this year, which is more than 400 stores plus many warehouses. Both corporations are notorious for their tough anti-union policies.

As the American author Kim Moody writes, a new landscape of class conflict has emerged in the United States, and one of the components of this landscape is huge logistics clusters, which employ tens of thousands of workers. (Distribution centers, logistics complexes are industrial enterprises with conveyors and manual labor. The logistics industry is extremely important for the modern capitalist economy. This is true not only for the United States and Europe - think of such megacities as Moscow with the region, St. Petersburg and Kiev, whose needs are served by many logistics and warehouse complexes).

Since the recent Black Friday (day of holiday sales), Bezos has surpassed $ 100 billion.

In addition, in the United States, Amazon employs camper vans who wander in search of work, including retirees who lost their savings due to the 2008 financial crisis. They move in their mobile homes from one warehouse to another, from state to state. The company's managers point out that older people are a reliable and rewarding workforce. This is the place for old men. One Amazon presentation cited Bezos as saying that by 2020, one in four such nomadic “work camper” will be working for Amazon. In the UK, some workers sleep in tents to avoid being late for work, as warehouses are far from where they live. Since the recent Black Friday (day of holiday sales), Bezos has surpassed $ 100 billion.

Thus, the funds received (there is, of course, even greater profit from the cloud business and other divisions) from the exploitation of thousands of workers in distribution centers in the United States and Europe, invested in the development of Blue Origin, in a space dream - which could be more retrofuturistic. Lofty dreams depend, among other things, on working old people and warehouse workers falling from fatigue on the day of sales. Just the same plot for the left science fiction novel of the 30s: a clever and cunning capitalist, cruelly exploiting workers and wishing to conquer other worlds.

Couriers Deliveroo, Foodora, food delivery companies that bore themselves as innovative, and UberEats (a division of Uber) have gone on strike in Britain and Italy. Their common work space is the streets of megalopolises. "It is interesting to note that strikes in the gig economy have so far focused on services that retain an element of shared physical presence.", - Italian researchers write. Algorithmic management is the way these companies manage their workforce and they define it as the new digital version of Taylorism. However, it is argued that the couriers operate as independent self-employed contractors, although they wear company uniforms. The newest spirit of capitalism - similar to the old one, but now with algorithms.

On the one hand, Amazon and Tesla like to showcase their high tech, and on the other hand, they like to create jobs. Amazon can relocate its logistics centers to a neighboring county or even a neighboring country (from Germany to Poland), but they cannot be relocated to Bangladesh or China. Therefore, if you boast that you are creating new jobs, and your workers are on strike, or their complaints even get into the media, then this cannot be hidden behind beautiful photographs of robots. Also, you can't hide couriers if you claim that they are self-employed contractors, but at the same time oblige them to wear uniforms with your company logo.

But the work of the Google search engine is provided not only by algorithms and we are not talking about engineers, but about the so-called raters. They, it turns out, are also exploited, and they are thinking about creating a trade union. Officially, the raitors are not Google employees, but the accuracy of the search is ensured by them as well. They test Google algorithms from home on a system called Raterhub, owned by Google. Each day, they “perform dozens of short but difficult tasks that provide invaluable data on the properties of Google's ever-changing algorithms. They are significant contributors to several Google projects, from search and voice recognition to photography and personalization features.” Each raiter goes through training and exams, but every month they have to learn something new. They are contracted as contractors to other companies, but they are actually a full-time job for Google. Researcher Sarah Roberts believes that big companies like Google want to keep raters hidden, mainly because they like to brag about how many tasks they do with AI. “Are there algorithms for all these problems? Certainly. 100 percent? Not even close. There is some profit motive behind these claims that machines and algorithms rule everything. … Therefore, the work of raters is hidden behind a double veil: behind the supposedly doing everything by the algorithms and the practice of outsourcing.

The press compares the current captains of the industry with the robber barons of the 19th century - such industrialists as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Jay Gould.

Everything described is scandalous, strange and inconvenient for those who believe in capitalism without the proletariat, but for the left the existence of the proletariat under capitalism is an obvious fact. New technologies have shaped new segments of the working class.

Such an old capitalist phenomenon as monopolies and oligopolies has not disappeared anywhere either. Amazon dominates online commerce, Google has a near monopoly on internet search, and Facebook is the main social network. The press compares the current captains of the industry with the robber barons of the 19th century - such industrialists as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Jay Gould. They owned telegraph and shipping companies and developed railroad networks that were the high-tech enterprises of the era and a symbol of progress. But their spread was accompanied by the so-called. railway wars between rival companies, brutal exploitation of workers and powerful strikes that escalated into armed clashes. The system of logistics centers is somewhat similar to the railway network, representing an important infrastructure for the modern economy. As journalists of the past, would mud rakes like Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens name Jeff Bezos? The king of warehouses and delivery of goods?

In June 2016, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund invested $ 5 billion in Uber3. Funds from the oil rent of an absolute monarchy, in which atheists are persecuted and the rights of women are severely restricted, are invested in a “cutting edge” company that extracts the rent. Capital is a great communicator. The relationship between Uber and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund echoes the pattern of cooperation between the United States and Saudi Arabia - the leader of the democratic "free world" and fundamentalist despotism. As the author of the article on Vox writes, this investment will be spent on a price war with competitors. In another economic system with the letter "C" or even "K" everything would have been arranged differently, but it is considered bad form to talk about it. However, Uber also invests in automation, testing a self-driving car and fighting for technological secrets with Google - behavior is quite in the spirit of the robber barons.

At some level, capitalists may be quite sincerely concerned about global problems - including the problem of economic inequality exacerbated by automation. In addition, it is not very pleasant to think that your elite suburban villages can be besieged by commoners with pitchforks. Recently Steve Yurvetson, a prominent venture capitalist who has invested in Tesla and SpaceX, said in an interview: “I think entrepreneurs will feel like they've won the lottery. This is what the American Dream will be like when it globalizes and everyone has access to it. There will be winners, but in the information business, due to network effects, this is a winner-take-all dynamic. So yes, there will be Google, there will be Facebook. But there won't be thousands of companies in every small town. If you don't do that kind of thing - if you don't work for Google or Facebook, or you don't want to make money from programming - what the hell are you doing? Therefore, I think that the powerful law of inequality in wealth will only grow stronger. Philanthropy can ease that pressure a little, but it's the only thing that comes to my mind right now. Entrepreneurs love to solve problems, which is a big problem. It will kill us long before climate change if we don't do it right.”

However, today's discussions about automation have a strong retro flavor - automation was discussed in the 50s and 80s, and then the discussions were also accompanied by fears similar to the current ones. It wasn't until the 1980s and 1990s that workers from Asian sweatshops turned out to be robots. But maybe someone frightening, but someone who pleases (no grimy archaic proletarians!) Predictions of total automation will come true this time?

As the Marxist economist Michael Roberts writes: “Robots and artificial intelligence will intensify the tension under capitalism between capitalists' desire to raise labor productivity through 'mechanization' (robots) and a downward trend in investment returns. This is Marx's most important law in political economy - and it is becoming even more relevant in the world of robots. Indeed, the biggest obstacle to a world of super-abundance is capital itself. However, before we reach the "singularity" (if we ever reach it at all) and human labor completely disappears, capitalism will experience a series of ever deeper technogenic economic crises. " Marxist and venture capitalist agree that both paint a picture of a robotic society in which robots are owned by a small elite of the wealthy. Only Roberts believes that before such a post-capitalist but class state is achieved, what Jurvetson so feared will happen. Rightly afraid. Commoners would be imprudent to rely on the goodwill of a small group of masters.

The level of income inequality is already such that the current situation is called the new “golden age” or compared to the era of the Great Depression. That is, all this futurism is increasingly reminiscent of the retro-futurism of London's Iron Heel and When the Sleeper Wakes up by Wells.

Thus, we are in a situation of a strange doubled retro: reality at the same time resembles both old fiction and the reality of the past. It is also a bitter irony that films about the future, made over the past few years, depict colossal class inequality, segregation and total commodification: Elysium, Time, The Rippers. How many years have passed since the release of Metropolis? Such a future looks like, with all its exaggeration, much more likely than a utopia. Property and class inequality is growing. Social spending is being cut and wealth taxes are being cut. The wealthy take refuge in fenced-off Elysium communities, and some are even preparing for the apocalypse of class anger. In the so-called. developing countries have formed a "planet of slums" with a population of over a billion people already living in dystopia. The turn of the historical spiral raises all the same “old-fashioned” questions raised in the century before last.

The present, which was once a promised future, looks like the past. The future promised by technocapitalist visionaries also looks like the past, only with rockets and flying taxis. Something does not seem at all that we are all rushing in a hyperloop / rocket / flying car to some wonderful land of tomorrow. Maybe because now, in the 21st century, the real hopeless retro is capitalism itself?