Roberts' cites Engels comments in The Condition Of the Working-Class that machines not only caused jobs to be shed, but also created new jobs in other spheres, but feels forced to counter it, by quoting Marx's comment, in Capital III, which, whilst reinforcing Engels' comments about the development of new jobs and spheres, also details the fact that those actually thrown out of work, at that time, were thrown into destitution and starvation. Roberts comments,
“The implication here is that automation means increased precarious jobs and rising inequality.”
Is that true? No. If we take the first introduction of machines, it required that capitalist production had reached a reasonable level of development and scale of production. Something like the power loom certainly impoverished the independent, self-employed hand loom workers, but for those now employed as machine minders of the power looms, their jobs and livelihood was, if anything, more secured, by the cheaper prices of cloth, and expansion of the market that resulted. Its also certainly true that the wages of these machine minders were less than the previous incomes of the hand-loom workers, but those incomes, as with all such craft labour, itself represented a higher degree of income inequality between workers. And, the reduction in the value of wage goods meant that all living standards/real wages rose. As Engels points out, in his Preface to the Poverty of Philosophy, capitalism brings about an equalisation and homogenisation of labour, resulting from competition, reducing it all towards a single universal labour.
Machinery and automation, Marx says, in opposing Proudhon, does away with “craft-idiocy”, and brings about greater equality.
“This is what the state of affairs in modern industry amounts to in the last analysis. It is upon this equality, already realized in automatic labour, that M. Proudhon wields his smoothing-plane of “equalization,” which he means to establish universally in “time to come!””
And, at the time he was writing, Marx says, that this was most clearly the case in the US, where the greatest use of machinery, and the modern factory was to be seen. And, what was true of the function of capitalism, was also true in relation to imperialism, as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky also set out, as industrial capital settled across the globe in search of exploitable labour-power. The Stalinists, and petty-bourgeois liberals and third worldists, with their theory of unequal exchange, and underdevelopment as the basis of imperialism, denied that, and continue to deny it, arguing that the concept of combined and unequal development was unknown to Marx.
Trotsky, responding to this claim by the Stalinists, noted,
“The law of uneven development of capitalism is older than imperialism. Capitalism is developing very unevenly today in the various countries. But in the nineteenth century this unevenness was greater than in the twentieth. At that time England was lord of the world, while Japan on the other hand was a feudal state closely confined within its own limits. At the time when serfdom was abolished among us, Japan began to adapt itself to capitalist civilization. China was, however, still wrapped in the deepest slumber. And so forth. At that time the unevenness of capitalist development was greater than now. Those unevennesses were as well known to Marx and Engels as they are to us. Imperialism has developed a more “levelling tendency” than pre-imperialist capitalism, for the reason that finance capital is the most elastic form of capital.”
Well, it may be argued, but does it not lead to an even greater inequality between capital and labour. Not according to Marx, who, in Capital III, Chapter 27, writes,
“The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.
Transformation of the actually functioning capitalist into a mere manager, administrator of other people's capital, and of the owner of capital into a mere owner, a mere money-capitalist. Even if the dividends which they receive include the interest and the profit of enterprise, i.e., the total profit (for the salary of the manager is, or should be, simply the wage of a specific type of skilled labour, whose price is regulated in the labour-market like that of any other labour), this total profit is henceforth received only in the form of interest, i.e., as mere compensation for owning capital that now is entirely divorced from the function in the actual process of reproduction, just as this function in the person of the manager is divorced from ownership of capital.”
The functions of the capitalist become those of paid managers, whose wages fall significantly due to competition in the labour market. Profit is the property of the company, and the private capitalist, now become coupon-clipping money-lender is only entitled to a small portion of it as interest/dividends.
“In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals. With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter's social property, much as they are their social products.”
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