Peter Frase

Many of us have found ourselves in jobs where there just wasn't much work to do. We spent days sitting at desks surfing the Internet, while using innovations like the [boss key](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key), in case we needed to show our boss some pretense of being "busy." This is ultimately a demoralizing and demeaning existence of pseudo-leisure, time which is not our own but is not being used for any purpose.

Anyone who has had that experience no doubt smiled at the story of Spanish civil servant Joaquín Garcia, employee of a municipal water company. When he was considered for an award for 20 years of service, it was [discovered](http://www.thelocal.es/20160212/spanish-civil-servant-takes-6-years-off-work-no-one-notices) that he had not in fact shown up for work in 6 years, while continuing to draw his paycheck.

Garcia insisted that there was simply no work for him to do, and that he had been put in the job in the first place as political retaliation. Other sources [contested](http://metro.co.uk/2016/02/13/this-guy-didnt-show-up-to-work-for-six-years-and-no-one-noticed-5680048/) the original report, claiming that he did show up to work but merely spent his time reading philosophy---becoming an expert on Spinoza, according to Mr. Garcia---which would make him just another case of dreary workplace pseudo-leisure.

But it was the original vision, of a man simply walking away from the pointlessness of his work, that gave the story its viral appeal. It punctured the mystification of "work," that oppressive abstraction that I've tried to break down many times [before](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/work-it/). Garcia rejected the "work" of dutifully showing up for a job that had no reason to exist, in favor of the self-fulfilling "work" of reading philosophy. What might we all do if we could do the same?

The "work to rule" action is a popular labor tactic, an alternative to going on strike. It involves carefully and literally following every rule in the contract, which in most workplaces has the practical effect of slowing work down to a crawl. But perhaps we need something like the opposite: "work to need." If everyone with a pointless, wasteful, or destructive job simply refused to show up to it, we would learn a lot about how much of our time is taken up with "work" that has everything to do with our dependence on wage labor, and nothing at all to do with the things we need to run a decent society.

It never fails that when I get around to writing something, I'm immediately inundated by directly related news, making me think that I should have just waited a few days. The moment I commit bits to web servers about the [robot future](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/new-yorker-lingerie-automation-frase/), I see the following things.

First, the blockbuster *New York Times* [story](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html) about Amazon and its corporate culture. The brutality of life among the company's low-wage [warehouse](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor) employees was already well covered, but the experience of the white collar Amazonian was less well known. The office staff, it seems, experiences a more psychological form of brutality. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my point that "the truly dystopian prospect is that the worker herself is treated as if she were a machine, rather than being replaced by one". To wit:

> Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.

On to number two! Lydia DePillis of the *Washington Post* [reacts](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/minimum-wage-offensive-could-speed-arrival-of-robot-powered-restaurants/2015/08/16/35f284ea-3f6f-11e5-8d45-d815146f81fa_story.html?postshare=6371439925549885) to efforts to raise the minimum wage in exactly the way I mentioned in my post: by raising the threat of automation. She notes various advances in technology, while also observing that in recent times "the industry as a whole has largely been resistant to cuts in labor . . . the average number of employees at fast-food restaurants declined by fewer than two people over the past decade". But, she warns, that could all change if the minimum wage is raised to $15.

Liberal economist (and one-time adviser to the Vice President) Jared Bernstein responds [here](http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/minimum-wages-and-capitallabor-substitution/). He makes, in a slightly different way, the same point I did: "one implication of this argument is that we should make sure to keep wages low enough so employers won’t want to bother swapping out workers for machines . . . a great way to whack productivity growth." (Not to mention, a great way to make life miserable for the workers in question.) He then goes on to argue that higher wages won't really lead to decreased employment anyway, which sort of undercuts the point. But oh well.

Finally, we have the *Economist* [weighing in](http://www.economist.com/node/21661017). This little squib on "Automation angst" manages to combine all the bourgeois arguments into one, in a single paragraph:

> [Economist David] Autor argues that many jobs still require a mixture of skills, flexibility and judgment; they draw upon “tacit” knowledge that is a very long way from being codified or performed by robots. Moreover, automation is likely to be circumscribed, he argues, as politicians fret about wider social consequences. Most important of all, even if they do destroy as many jobs as pessimists imagine, many other as yet unimagined ones that cannot be done by robots are likely to be created.

So, to summarize. The robots won't take your job, because they can't. Or, actually, the robots *can* take your job but they won't, because we will make a political decision to disallow it. Or no, never mind, the robots *will* take your job, but it's fine because we will create lots of other new jobs for you.

This summarizes the popular approach to this problem well, from a variety of vantage points that all miss the main point. Namely, that if it *is* possible to reduce the need for human labor, the question becomes: who benefits from that. The owners, of the robots, or the rest of the working masses?

The current issue of the *New Yorker* has a story about the odd phenomenon of Chinese [lingerie merchants](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/learning-to-speak-lingerie) in Egypt. These immigrant entrepreneurs are apparently ubiquitous throughout the poor, conservative districts of upper Egypt, where they dispense sexy garments to the region's pious Muslim women. The cultural and geopolitical details of the story are interesting for a number of reasons, but I was struck in particular by a resonance with some debates that have recently flared up again about labor and automation, for reasons I'll get back to below.

"Robots will take all our jobs" is a hardy perennial of popular political economy. Typical of the latest crop is Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, who wrote an article (in which he quotes me), speculating about a ["World Without Work"](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/) in the wake of mass adoption of robotization and computerization. Paul Mason gives a more leftist and political rendition of [similar themes](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun).

As I note in my recent Jacobin [editorial](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/), this kind of thing is not new, and is in fact an anxiety that recurs throughout the history of capitalism. Two decades ago, we had the likes of [Jeremy Rifkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work) and [Stanley Aronowitz](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-jobless-future) musing about the "end of work" and the "jobless future".

And these repeating waves of robo-futurism call into existence the same repeated insistence that robots are not, in fact, taking all the jobs. Doug Henwood was [on this beat](http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Jobless_future.html) twenty years ago and remains [on it](http://lbo-news.com/2015/07/17/workers-no-longer-needed/) today. Matt Yglesias, [likewise](http://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9038829/automation-myth), calls fear of automation a "myth".

One of the specific things that people like Henwood and Yglesias always cite is the productivity statistics. If we were seeing a wave of unprecedented automation, then we should be seeing rapid rises in measured labor productivity---that is, the amount of output that can be produced per hour of human labor. Instead, however, what we've seen is historically low productivity growth, compared to what happened in the middle and late 20th Century.

All of which leads commentators like Yglesias and [Tyler Cowen](http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS) to fret that the robots aren't coming fast *enough*. Typical of most writers on this subject, Yglesias just worries vaguely that increases in productivity won't happen for some unspecified reason.

I've argued a number of times for an (http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/03/technological-grotesques/) that connects the question of automation and productivity growth directly to wages and the general condition of labor. The basic idea is very simple. From the perspective of the boss, replacing a worker with a machine will be more appealing to the degree that the machine is:

* Cheaper than the human worker
* More convenient and easier to control than the human worker

This implies that if workers win higher wages and more control over their working conditions, their jobs are more likely to be automated. Indeed, arguments like this frequently crop up among critics of things like the [Fight for 15](http://fightfor15.org/) campaign, which demands higher wages for fast food workers and other low wage employees. Prototypes for automatic [burger-making](http://momentummachines.com/) machines are cited in order to warn workers that their jobs are at risk of being automated away.

I regard such warnings not as arguments against higher wages, but arguments for them. Workers, in the course of fighting for their interests, drive the [dialectic](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/) that forces capitalists to find less labor-intensive ways of producing. The next political task, then, is to make sure that the benefits of such innovation accrue to the masses, and not to a small class of robot owners.

What I fear most is not that all of our labor will be replaced with machines. Rather, like Matt Yglesias, I worry that it *won't*---but for a slightly different reason. Again, bosses prefer workers to machines when they are cheaper and easier to control. Hence the truly dystopian prospect is that the worker herself is treated as if she *were* a machine, rather than being replaced by one.

Which brings us back, finally, to the Chinese lingerie merchants. The article's author, Peter Hessler, speaks to one such merchant, and asks him to comment on the biggest problem facing Egypt. To his surprise, his subject, Lin Xianfei, has a quick answer: gender inequality.

But the point turns out not to be that Lin is some sort of secret passionate feminist. Rather, his perspective turns on the exigencies of capital accumulation. For it turns out that while one kind of patriarchy is an impediment to business, another kind can be quite valuable to the shrewd businessman.

The problem, from Lin's perspective, is that Egyptian women in his region don't work in wage labor at all, or if they do they only do so for short periods of time, before marrying and retreating into the home. Even worse, local norms about proper female behavior preclude taking women out of their homes to live on site in massive dormitories, as might be done in China. Thus it becomes unfeasible to run factories on 24-hour production cycles.

Hiring men, meanwhile, is out of the question---another man, Xu Xin, tells Hessler that Egyptian men are too lazy and undisciplined for manufacturing work. Hessler goes on to note that "at the start of the economic boom in China, bosses hired young women because they could be paid less and controlled more easily than men".

He proceeds to comment that female Chinese workers turned out to be "more motivated", as though he is identifying something distinct from their weaker power position relative to men. But it is really the same thing. "More motivated", here, refers to the motivation to work hard for the boss, for someone else's profits and someone else's riches. To behave, in other words, like obedient machines. The Chinese capitalist objects to the patriarchal structure of rural Egyptian society not because it is patriarchy, then, but because it is a form of patriarchy that is inconvenient to capital accumulation.

And sure enough, faced with recalcitrant humans, the textile magnates of Egypt turn to the same solution that the Chinese electronics firm Foxconn [adopted](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/05/05/foxconns-robot-army-yet-to-prove-match-for-humans/) in the wake of worker uprisings there. Wang Weiqiang echoes the other industrialists' complaints about Egyptian labor: the men are lazy, the women "will work only during the daytime". As a result, "he intends to introduce greater mechanization in hopes of maximizing the short workday".

Greater mechanization and the maximization of a short work day might seem tragic to the capitalist, but it summarizes the short term goal of the post-work socialist left. Ornery, demanding workers work to drive technological developments that further this goal. And the socialist-feminist rendition of this project insists that we can prevent workers from being treated as machines not by shielding them with patriarchal and paternalistic morals, but rather by insisting that men and women alike can recognize their paid and unpaid labor in order to better [refuse it](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/).