I'm not an expert on communist theory, but seems to me that the value form is transitioning from labor to information, as you in essence begin to suggest. A single individual (or fleet of robots?) can create huge economic value using minimal amounts of traditional labor via the programming of computer systems with information in various forms. How this will radically change the structure of society remains to be seen. Whoever can predict the range of possible consequences should write a book about it.

Wouldn’t the exploitation of robots reduce toil and drudgery and wage slavery, thereby liberating the worker to pursue his own creative endeavors?

... seems to me that the value form is transitioning from labour to information, as you in essence begin to suggest. A single individual (or fleet of robots?) can create huge economic value using minimal amounts of traditional labour via the programming of computer systems with information in various forms.

Can computer systems really create value on their own? I'm imagining all workers had made the transition to the so-called elite class with access to a universal education, non-physical highly abstract employment, etc. would the whole class of these people sit and stare at computer machines and just randomly determine who is rich and who is poor?

Wouldn’t the exploitation of robots reduce toil and drudgery and wage slavery, thereby liberating the worker to pursue his own creative endeavours?

So a blue collar worker who lives from generation A to B experiences the loss of his job at a mining plant and must re-structure his or her career accordingly. I'm interpreting your response as implying this will be in the collective interests of happiness or the utilitarian argument. What would lead you to believe that from your own experience?

I have seen one company starts using robots and then the whole auto industry moves to robotics: are there now more happier auto-workers? More recently, I have seen Uber reflects changes in the taxi industry and then the whole industry eventually catches up: are cab drivers now better off? In most of these cases in the short term the worker loses and the businesses win; we get short term increases in profits that eventually level off once the technology is adopted. Furthering this point I could draw from many examples from Christoph Roser's book 'Faster, Better, Cheaper in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond.'

Don't you think that this will cause a collective suffering that outweighs the minor increase in collective comfort, and the short-term notoriety and profit of the product developers and businessmen who made these advancements? They'll soon become universally implemented thus eliminating any short-term increase in profit. After that, all that's left is the collective convenience of the many, but if value relies on the workers themselves wouldn't this too be an argument against the collective good?

I was just trying to look at it from the Marxist point of view. I am neither a Marxist nor a collectivist, so I could be wrong. It just seems to me that toil, exploitation, and wage slavery would be negated if it was robots rather than workers under control of the capitalists.

The trade between worker and robot might be the start of the much-heralded epoch of social revolution we were told about. To me it would be ironic for a class struggle organized to bring back toil, exploitation, and wage slavery, but again, maybe I’m wrong.

Toil, wage slavery and exploitation are signifiers for income inequality between classes. It sounds as if your view is that processes becoming automated would eliminate this. Is this really true? I myself have worked in places that underpaid and exploited workers which didn’t require traditional physical labour.

To say that there would be no more wage slavery if there were no more workers is a bit of a truism. It doesn’t tell us anything about the happiness of the workers but only the level of their existant exploitation; the negation of which could just as easily increase their suffering.

Can computer systems really create value on their own? I'm imagining all workers had made the transition to the so-called elite class with access to a universal education, non-physical highly abstract employment, etc. would the whole class of these people sit and stare at computer machines and just randomly determine who is rich and who is poor? — kudos

The change in value form isn't towards computers as analogous to the technologies that humans operated like machinery prior to the Information Age, but rather consists in the data itself encoded as abstract meaning within software and interfaces. The significance is that physically instantiated work is effectively excised in various ways from its role as focal point of social and economic organization, replaced by information as the engine that drives culture. This has all kinds of ramifications:

The economy can transform more rapidly, making job security vulnerable.
Citizens place less value on employment, giving rise to so-called welfare states.
Exploitative crimes by all classes are easier to commit, transitioning governments into police states with pockets of extremely antiestablishment community.
Demographics can be barred from civic participation via restricting access to information sources.
A majority of human jobs will be phased out by the next decade if automation increases uninhibited via legislation etc.
Communities become more impersonal because every interaction is mediated by software that utilizes remote interfaces.
Human psychology changes due to different forms of stimulation, primarily computer interfaces.
Citizens who have large amounts of access to information become much smarter, while those with restricted access are much less intellectual (but not necessarily less influential).
As computers become more sentient, social dynamics change in fundamental ways.
The huge proliferation of data makes it more possible to objectively track changing social and environmental conditions, but also extremely complex.

Some of this is basically common sense at this stage, well within our means to manage, but it is obvious to anyone that civilization is going to be altered dramatically. Giving a Das Kapital style analysis of these trends would be cool, determining what will happen to class organization, who will be rich or poor and in what percentages.

The change in value form isn't towards computers as analogous to the technologies that humans operated like machinery prior to the Information Age, but rather consists in the data itself encoded as abstract meaning within software and interfaces. The significance is that physically instantiated work is effectively excised in various ways from its role as focal point of social and economic organization, replaced by information as the engine that drives culture.

It still seems like more explanation is needed to fully explore how information can become the equivalent of labour as a source of value. In labour, both worker and employer engage in a multi-faceted unexplainable phenomena known as ‘work.’ In it both entities enact and reflect it’s qualities. The performance of the work implies a mutual determination that the item or service has acquired a value and exists partly in this determination, or identity, but not wholly. To a certain extent it hardly matters if my work for my employer is considered as work between us if we disregard how it compares against work elsewhere. This raises the inexplicability of how this work comes to be perceived.

When compared with information, I doubt how these two can be made into one. Information seems to me almost the complete opposite concept. What we call information or facts are our subjective determinations and can easily sway one way or another to become mis-qualifications and mis-delineations. It makes little difference if information is retrieved by a person or a machine. Where work is characterized by a certain narrative that is partly a form of expressing a social contract through its form and content, information on the other hand is characterized by almost pure transparent content; once we start to doubt its underlying form it becomes unstable.

Could you go into a little more detail about from where you are drawing their equivalency?

Could you go into a little more detail about from where you are drawing their equivalency? — kudos

The lack of equivalency is exactly what I would focus on: information is a completely new core of culture that is displacing (not blending with) human work as the source of economic and social leverage.

So like you say, the value form as information becomes characterized by skepticism about the social contract, instability, impersonality, subjectivity, basically the postmodern perspective. Rather than being of huge influence, perhaps the seminal postmodernists were way ahead of their time.

This can be contrasted with labor as based around civic reasoning, self-interest, cooperation etc., the Enlightenment perspective which when synthesized with Hegelianism and evolutionary thinking gave rise to a theory of dialectical materialism.

How a postmodern society will be rationalized in theory is uncertain: maybe dialectical materialism has a role to play, but the world has become much more complex. Applying dialectical materialism to the 21st century would probably require an army of intellectuals. The nature of human relationships and thinking are changing dramatically. It might be a radical rupture with the past, of the type described by Foucault, that is unless media can sustain a strong cognizance of history.

Applying dialectical materialism to the 21st century would probably require an army of intellectuals.

This made me laugh.

Well one need look no further than Marx’s Manifesto to see how just a few words can be more powerful than armies of hundreds of thousands. I do see how money can be made from machines, but they don’t generate value to us in and for themselves. Thus it sounds like both you and I have an idea of this as something of an eventual dead-end as far as capitalism is concerned if that’s not taking too many liberties.

This is limiting our sight to primarily those technologies whose general purpose is to reduce or eliminate some section of the working class. It makes me wonder why there exists this impulse to destroy certain jobs. More often than not the rationale is that it is one job being traded off to create other jobs though usually there is no real measure of these created jobs at hand. It seems unreasonable for individuals seek to lose money by paying more workers when they already pay less, so these new jobs must come as a result of increased overall activity. However, with that activity comes less overall human physical work as more and more of this is automated; and that work is traditionally done by the working class.

It seems to me that attempting to create by setting out to eliminate certain jobs without any clear proven plan for job creation is a failure strategy for creating working class jobs. When we set out to win a race we don’t try and do so by trying to lose as much as possible.

Interesting thought. Insofar as the human labor force is concerned, it now faces a severe threat from the money-driven partnership between capitalists and scientistss/technologists (automation of industry). It's fighting a losing battle - machines are better when it comes to sheer strength, cost, maintenance, etc.

My candidate for 'the biggest threat to labor' is customary or state regulated denial of easy / universal access to (a) clean water; (b) safe, effective, family planning; & (c) quality education of females of all ages. Y'know, because - Ignorance breeds surplus. Sickness breeds surplus. Poverty breeds surplus. But 'surplus people' are only a symptom (pace Malthus), like 'automation' (pace Harari) which compounds it, and not the problem: malign neglect ... abetted by the scale & complexities of technocapital societies. — 180 Proof

[ ... ] Surplus (economically unproductive) billions of people, however, are ethically and politically problematic, as is the technocratic prospect of how to humanely "thin the herds" in order to make humanity compatible with robo-automated global civilization. — 180 Proof

UBI + soylent green for the precariat masses ("the 99%") barely surviving global desertification. International Labor's revolutionary window, IME, opened in 1848 and closed in, or around,1948 (re: Eric Blair, Bretton Woods, NSA of 1947, Czech coup d'état / Marshall Plan 1948, etc). Almost three quarters of a century of post-Marxist, post-industrial capitalism so far – and the illiberal, anti-democratic, crypto-plutonomy is accelerating.

I do see how money can be made from machines, but they don’t generate value to us in and for themselves. Thus it sounds like both you and I have an idea of this as something of an eventual dead-end as far as capitalism is concerned if that’s not taking too many liberties.

This is limiting our sight to primarily those technologies whose general purpose is to reduce or eliminate some section of the working class. It makes me wonder why there exists this impulse to destroy certain jobs. — kudos

It's not the machines utilized in making money that are changing society, it's how every transaction or social interaction is encoded as information in order to be processed, worked with, so that civilization revolves around the psychology of information that you aptly summarized. Perhaps it is a case where economic value loses some of its natural psychological value, so that business is divorced of meaning. Without the meaning that labor as value form attaches to economy, atrocious events can take place, such as rapidly driving the majority of jobs out of existence without reconstituting social organization so that citizens can live securely while lacking employment.

Hypothetically, freeing a large segment of the population from coerced work could result in self-empowered actualization of the human race, but instead dialectical materialism runs its course absent much rational intervention by humans and the system changes as usual through arational upheavals, which are becoming more difficult (but perhaps not impossible) to navigate as even well-educated intellectual capabilities are stretched to the limit while we struggle to theorize these developments. Perhaps if we recognize and seek to understand it we can change it.

Maybe it’s side-stepping, but it sounds as if your approach to this is somewhat libertarian in style. You take the circumstance of the individual as to a certain extent bounded or fixed qualitatively and then the task becomes to find the actions required to alter the determination to suit the choice of certain groups or individuals. The choice of the individual seems to take ultimate precedence through the maximizing of subjects with equal powers as a collective made up of separate individuals.

While everything you say is true, and my understanding coincides that these power structures are involved in the relation that makes working class life an ugly and undesirable thing to be eliminated, I detect a certain fault in this as a pure approach being that the plutocracy is exhibiting the same apparatus in it’s motions and ideas only from the opposite point of view. Is your viewpoint in some way related to the dialectical materialism that Enrique is referring to?


While Hegel’s dialectic wouldn’t reduce the role of the material world in divisions of power, it seems almost oxymoronic to produce a purely material form with which to hold it fixed. Hegel’s approach seems inextricably related in concept with a clearly Christian ideology, which is really it’s ultimate source of strength. But isn’t this pure materialism inherently at odds with this diminishing of the role of our attitudes and mediations in the choices we make?

I don't have a deeply studied comprehension of the value form concept, but I think of it as the locus of collective psychology, the core dynamical agent that dictates how members of a social group intersect as they relate. Labor has been a centerpiece of "economy" - the production and trading of goods - since prehistory, and Marx of course considered work a concept that is key to understanding the evolution of social structures which he discerned as forming around it in a dialectical pattern (reciprocally parallel influences), all suffused with the material conditions of human life, in essence products and institutions generated by economies. So the value form is like a mutative core of society, and dialectical materialism is socioeconomic evolution. Probably much more nuance than that, but the basic idea.

According to this account, information is the value form of the 21st century because it is replacing labor as the locus of collective psychology. Paperwork, electronic interfaces, media generally are interposed into almost every civic interaction, changing the way we think, the way we act in many spheres, our ethics, our image of the world, what it is possible for us to do economically. Labor is being pushed away from the center of the evolutionary dialectic while information takes its place as the mutative core, the prime driver of socioeconomic change.

The Nietzschean would theorize this as memetic evolution, a culturally subterranean transformation, Freud as an outcome of unconscious drives, Foucault as a possible reconfiguring rupture in the episteme, all kinds of major thinkers might have a different conceptual framework within which to analyze, but it seems apparent that something must be added to Marxist thought if the connections of this dynamic with the past and future are to be explained.

In essence, I think the transition from art to media to information technology has to be subsumed by the Marxist narrative in order for this perspective to theorize where the Information Age is heading.

I don't have a deeply studied comprehension of the value form concept, but I think of it as the locus of collective psychology, the core dynamical agent that dictates how members of a social group intersect as they relate.

…According to this account, information is the value form of the 21st century because it is replacing labor as the locus of collective psychology.

Not sure I fully understand. “Information is the value form of the 21st century because it is replacing labour as the locus of collective psychology.” Do you mean to use ‘and’ here rather than ‘because’? I found the use of ‘because’ confusing since it’s like saying, “if we all believe it it must be true” which is certainly not true.

Take liberty for instance, if we all collectively determine it to be caused by locusts that doesn’t make it true does it? If we all believe value to be attributed to information or it takes up the attention of our psyche it must supplant the role of labour in value? Please clarify, now this isn’t making any sense. The attribution of labour to value is not arbitrary. We will need to expand on that point more if you don’t think this is so.

Is your viewpoint in some way related to the dialectical materialism that Enrique is referring to? — kudos

No. As I wrote: post-Marxist, post-industrial, capitalism that coopts (and commodifies) any "reforms" which merely tweak the "status quo" and that otherwise paramilitarily polices any "grass-roots" stakeholder opposition to, and defection from, exclusively shareholder-controlled systems. Capital long ago adapted by "pricing-in" (in it's post-1948 financializing models) the "antithesis" of Labor that's institutionally reproduced by Capital's strategic exploitation of Labor.

Discounting the imminent hazards of global heating, proliferating pandemics and reactionary populist outbreaks for the sake of discussion, industries dedicated to the pacification of the precariat (i.e. feeding the "junk equation" that conditions / disciplines masses "to worship their chains") continue to be indispensable, now explicitly accelerating, drivers of "economic growth" which, IME, only a global, rapid, demographic collapse ("crisis") can effectively sabotage this (post-"dialectical") Capital regime.

We will need to expand on that point more if you don’t think this is so. — kudos

May I have your hand in marriage first? lol

Capital long ago adapted by "pricing-in" (in it's post-1948 financializing models) the "antithesis" of Labor that's institutionally reproduced by Capital's strategic exploitation of Labor. — 180 Proof

Any recommended historical reading about Bretton Woods etc. which argues something along these lines?

:sweat: No, man, I was riffin' on historical events and the establishment of the post-WWII geopolitical "world order". Almost any decent history of the period will do. Just read the wiki on Bretton Wood and judge for yourself. It wasn't one thing, it was an ensemble of monetary institutions and strategic treaties and juridical conventions the US-led "Allied coalition" established right before the Cold War began heating up.