Technical innovation increases the productivity of labor in industry. If production shouldn’t be wasteful, there needs to be a reduction in workers. Where do all these workers go if there’s no unemployment? In a capitalist economy the workers are left to die on the streets but in a socialist economy they need to get a job again, right? Does the state take the burden of cost of reeducating these workers to enter another field and factor this into calculations when introducing new technology?

  • @HaSch
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    246 months ago

    The USSR and modern China practically eliminated the peasant and serf classes overnight, almost all of them became first agricultural, then also industrial workers, then also teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers etc. The unemployment that would have come with each of the technological advances was avoided by simply giving those workers the means and the leisure to educate themselves in the technology at hand.

    Humans are not lazy creatures. The laziness one may observe is in reality an abhorrence of exploitation, of a work environment where you labour not for your own enrichment, but for that of an exploiter whose interest are opposite to yours. It attempts an escape not from work itself, but from the conditions under which it brings forth pain, insult, fatigue, alienation, and terror. Once these conditions dissolve, people can contribute to society increasingly freely and more according to their own passions and interests, thereby slowly defeating their own laziness and becoming more open to change.

    Already now, most people work in excess of what must be done to ensure one’s survival, and don’t even regard it as work: To contribute to an association, to rear a child, to cook for your family, to maintain a garden, to dance and play music, to practice an art, to study and nourish your own mind - These are all things that present a great silent effort to massively improve and contribute to society. Even if you wouldn’t personally use it to contribute in such a way, increased leisure and cultural activity will stochastically lead to increased innovation.