Four Futures: Ecological Catastrophe and Automation (interview with Peter Frase)

[Jimbo101]

Truth-Out.org

As we automate more jobs and continue on a road to scarcity of resources, whither capitalism? The following is the Truthout interview with Peter Frase, author of Four Futures.

Mark Karlin: Your very first sentence in your introduction describes contextual forces that shape your book: "Two specters are haunting Earth in the twenty-first century: the specters of ecological catastrophe and automation." Can you, in a paragraph or two, describe the potential impact of ecological catastrophe on economic systems in general?

Peter Frase: One of the distinctive peculiarities of capitalism is the way it inverts the logic of scarcity and abundance. That is, it tries to impose scarcity where none need exist, while at the same time treating truly scarce things as though they are actually unlimited.

Artificial scarcities are imposed wherever landlords are allowed to charge exorbitant rents, where drug companies charge enormous rates for drugs that cost virtually nothing to produce, where people are sued for thousands of dollars for downloading a few music files, and so on. Yet when it comes to our ecosystems, businesses will, wherever possible, extract resources with no regard to their potential exhaustion, and dump their waste into our air and water.

People are increasingly recognizing the limits of that strategy, as can be seen in everything from the depletion of ocean fish populations to lack of access to fresh water to the accelerating impact of climate change due to atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. However, the fact that we are running up against these material limits does not necessarily mean that the ruling elite is doomed. The question is a bit more complex: will they find a way to impose the costs of ecological degradation on poor and working people, or will we force them to pay the costs?

Can you next explain the impact of automation -- a very important theme in your book -- on present and future economic systems, and why automation is intractable?

The biggest problem with a lot of contemporary debates about automation is that people speak as though the phenomenon is new. But this is a central problematic of industrial capitalism, going back a couple of centuries. Once upon a time, almost everyone worked in agriculture; now that employs only a tiny fraction of people in rich countries. Then manufacturing became a main source of employment, before that too diminished due to automation (and also due to outsourcing, but to a much lesser degree than many people think). Now we see service sector and professional jobs being subject to the same basic force, which is the capitalist drive to economize on labor: to do more with less workers in order to increase profits

I'm not going to say it's impossible that we might turn the wheel one more time, and shift everyone into some new kind of employment, rather than simply eliminating the need for labor. But I'm more interested in what's possible in a world where we do have a drastically reduced need for work.

Because another problem is that people speak as though there's no human agency here; that the robots just come for our jobs, and there's nothing we can do about it. But for as long as the capitalist drive to automate has existed, there has been a counter-movement from the side of labor: the demand that the benefits of increased productivity should accrue to the working masses, not to the tiny elite of owners. This drives demands for shorter hours, higher wages, and even such things as a Universal Basic Income, guaranteeing everyone a basic standard of living irrespective of work.