Wow! A Self-Service aisle in the supermarket where I can code-bar swipe and bag my items on my own! This promises to save workers from performing such mindless drudgery like swiping and bagging my items for me!
I check out my items under the watchful eye of the clerk. I ask her what she is doing there if this is a “self-service aisle.” She replies that while she no longer has to perform the code-bar swiping and bagging functions, she must spend her day watching customers self-service to ensure sure no-one steals the goods.
So a trivial and boring job in capitalism which at least involves some conversation with customers and their children, physical activity, and at least potentially customer-friendly interactions of other kinds surrounding bagging, gets replaced by an even more trivial, boring, and more completely isolated job with improved technology! Only in capitalism, my friend, does human technology possess such a perverse relationship to the humans.
In socialism, with money abolished, such technology could be a blessing in informing the common store’s computer of what items are close to depletion and must be reordered. But in capitalism, labor-saving technology is always at a cost to the working class whose job duties might be altered detrimentally or outright unemployed despite the need for money to live half-decently. Workers are basically like machines in capitalism, but machines who get paid in order to purchase their own lubricating oil (slavery was when the master purchased it). The worker is as much a machine serving the interest of the master’s profit as the machine itself.
Basically, profit is self-serving in any aisle.
Dr. Who (Chicago)
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