Serving the System: The Fate of the Worker in an Economy of “Labor-Saving” Technology

            I haven’t been able to work for three weeks.  As a part-time server at a local, non-corporate BBQ restaurant, have no delusions that the labor I provide is unique or irreplaceable, and I’m sure my managers have found some other employees to pick up the slack while my broken hand heals.  But, in addition to tightening my budget for the month and worrying if I will actually retain my position, I also began thinking about what it is I actually do.  While reading Dwight D. Murphey’s article, “Robotics: A Route to the Survival of Advanced Societies” and C. George Caffentzis’ “Why Machines Cannot Produce Value,” I began thinking about how my job, what I do, is tied to technology and how that relationship effects and directs the course of my life and my other relationships. 

Murphey proposes that a viable remedy for the crisis of developed nations’ efforts to compete with low-cost labor is to develop and rely on labor-saving capital, to effectively employ capital instead of people.  He claims: “If the advanced economies move further into robotics and other such technologies, that will itself address the deindustrialization and hollowing-out we have noted by making their industry competitive both with cheap labor and other nations’ advanced technology.  They will be putting their capital to work rather than exporting it” (417).  Caffentzis, on the other hand, asserts quite the opposite: that all capital, including technological capital, cannot produce value, so capitalists are reluctant to invest in new technologies.  Technology only becomes attractive to capitalists as a means for working with the workers they already have and as an alternative to “find[ing] a completely new sector of the working class to exploit” (33) which is becoming increasingly difficult.  In other words, technology supports the continued exploitation of labor to extract surplus value.  Without extracting surplus value from the laborer, there is no profit, and further, without the laborer-as-consumer, products will not be sold and profits will disappear.

So which is it?  Will increased technology enable competition with cheap labor, replacing the need for most types of labor, thus freeing individuals from the work they don’t want to do anyway (Murphey 412)?  Or will increased technology lead to “an increase, not a decrease in work” (Caffentzis 31), albeit different types of work and, in particular, different means of exploitation?  Reflecting on my own job, I am inclined to go with the latter.  Yes, it is true that the technological capital “employed” at the restaurant enable me to accomplish my tasks far more expeditiously without a commensurate increase in wages, thus creating greater profits, and it could be said that this is not necessarily an unacceptable form of exploitation since it supposedly makes my own job easier.  But what it also does is effectively chain me to the technology developed to help me, and I lose more and more of myself in the process.

Specifically, as a service worker, my job is to facilitate consumption, and this insight was reinforced last night during an interaction with a Starbucks “barista."  Rather than gathering resources and producing products, we use the technology provided, acting as mediums between the technology and the material product and the material product and the consumer.  Without technology at this point, we would not be able help the consumer consume.  We do not have the skills to work in any other way than within the parameters defined by technology.  In effect, we lose whole parts of ourselves, whole ranges of ability, as we are funneled into performing tasks directly dependent on technology.  In fact, the only (limited) agency we have is in how we enact the transaction.  The barista was amused by some of my comments and said I was the most interesting customer he had experienced all day.  I said that was good to know, but thought to myself, “all day, he is so limited by his enslavement to technology that he rarely gets to be his human self, so much so that he relishes any extemporaneous, unscripted interaction.”  I then thought of my own job and how limited I am by the services I provide.  Although these limitations are materially different than the limitations experienced by laborers in technologically-poor industries and countries, psychologically, they have a similar effect.  I become what my job wants me to be, and I lose myself in the process.

Technology, then, is not the savior of the laborer.  It is just another means to enslave the laborer, to exploit her.  I do not have a suggested savior in its place, but I am thinking about it and questioning what I have for so long accepted uncritically.   There has to be a way for technology to foster the humanness of the laborer rather than dehumanizing her under the pretense of “liberating” her from labor.

             

Caffentzis, C. George.  “Why Machines Cannot Create Value; or Marx’s Theory of Machines.” 

Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution.  Ed. Jim

Davis, et al.  London: Verso, 1997.  29-56.  Print.

Murphey, Dwight D.  “Robotics: A Route to the Survival of Advanced Societies?” The Journal

of Social, Political, and Economic Studies.  32:4 (2007): 397-420.  ProQuest.  Web.  7 October 2012.