Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

// Automation replaces men. This of course is nothing new. What is new is that now, unlike most earlier periods, the displaced men have nowhere to go. The farmers displaced by mechanization of the farms in the 20's could go to the cities and man the assembly lines. As for the work animals like the mule, they could just stop growing them. But automation displaces people, and you don't just stop growing people even when they have been made expendable by the system. Under Stalin the kulaks and all those who didn't go along with the collectivization of agriculture were just killed off. Even then, if they had been ready to go along, Stalin could have used them. But in the United States, with automation coming in when industry has already reached the point that it can supply consumer demand, the question of what to do with the surplus people who are the expendables of automation becomes more and more critical every day....

...As automation spreads, it will intensify the crises of capitalism and sharpen the conflicts among the various sections of the population, particularly between those working and those not working, those paying taxes and those not paying taxes. Out of this conflict will grow a counter-revolutionary movement made up of those from all social layers who resent the continued cost to them of maintaining these expendables but who are determined to maintain the system that creates and multiplies the number of expendables. This in turn will mobilize those who begin by recognizing the right of these displaced persons to live, and from there are forced to struggle for a society in which there are no displaced persons. //

James Boggs, _The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook_, 1962(!!)

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/amreboggs.html

Another argument for basic income? The displacement of any worker who drives for a living as at our doorstep.

Yeah, I think that's actually the _main_ argument for UBI that's getting tech sector people and YCombinator interested in it.

Or severely limiting automation a la the Dune universe.

I think that sort of depends on your perspective. Some critics of UBI would say it's basically a scheme to keep a capitalist system and a ruling class in place that we'd be better off doing away with.

This is literally the first time I've seen someone call UB I a capitalist scheme, as the absolute most of these capitalists would call UBI a socialistic measure.

I know it sounds odd, but the idea is that while it is a socialist program, it actually helps maintain a capitalist system by preventing that systems failures from leading to it's demise. A UBI paid for with a tax system similar to our current one wouldn't really harm the ultra rich much, it would be paid for by the middle class and wealthier people who still work for a living, rather than just sitting on a giant mountain of cash and collecting interest.

Edit: plus, if everyone views it as socialism, and then they eventually get it 20 years from now, maybe that will keep them from pursuing the real thing. Although I'm getting to be a bit of a paranoid conspiracy theorist with that line of reasoning.

> Another argument for basic income?

Another argument why some sections of the population should not have kids.

>> The farmers displaced by mechanization of the farms in the 20's could go to the cities and man the assembly lines.

Things like this are not necessarily true; some displaced farmers moved into cities, but many did not and have been toiling away since then.

We really whitewash history

They said that farmers "could go" not that all did.

If they were still making a living farming, they were not 'displaced by mechanization', of course. But there's obviously been a huge urbanization wave in many/most parts of the world over the past 100 years.

The Luddites have been saying that for years, though the exact nature of the displacement from which there is no place to go is different.

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