Automation would increase productivity and replace workers in manual jobs, so we wouldn’t have to work as much.
Here we are in 2024 and we’re still working at least eight hours a day. We’re actually afraid of automation because it’ll take away our opportunity to work eight hours a day so we don’t starve.
Productivity has also increased exponentially (note: may not actually be exponential, just using the word as a figure of speech, but a math nerd can correct my use of scale here if they want), but has the average worker benefitted as much as they should have? Of course not 
It’s insane that you can automate work and the result is a shittier product and more poverty. Like why does automation mean a minimum viable product?
Wait, the capital I use to accelerate the pace of exploitation is also supposed to produce a USE VALUE!?
Sweaty work has changed. The shareholders are maximizing profits more than ever before! And they don’t have to work at all!
I don’t know when this stuff was promised to you but it certainly wasn’t anytime in the last thirty years that I’ve been alive.
it was part of the vague cloud of “promise” the west sold to the warsaw pact liberal intelligentsia, for example.
Whats also hilariously discouraging about this is how old this trope is. Upon inventing the Cotton Gin machine Eli Whitney had hoped it would reduce the need for slaves and hasten the decline of the institution. It had the opposite effect. It only reduced the number of slaves required for sorting cotton. Slaves that previously would have been used for sorting were sent to the fields, a much more grueling and physically taxing labor. More slaves in the fields = the capacity for larger and larger plantations. So not only did it not hasten the end of slavery it also made the lives of a lot of slaves worse while super charging the industry and making the slave owner class even richer.
:It’s True, All of It:
Capital: Volume 1
Reminds me of when I was a lib making software for construction workers to make their jobs easier on-site. It felt great for the first 2 months until I realized that it only helped the construction company
Workers were way more productive but they still got paid the exact same amount hourly, and that extra production of value per hour went straight to the people that signed the building contracts
Don’t worry, capitalism will gradually turn into socialism
And don’t trust the socialists, their system will turn into capitalism
