Comment on How in the hell

• unfreeradical@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Buddy if you “we” could do that “we” never would have been employees in the first place.

  Workers already build and design machines, but our capacities are constrained by business owners, who control the resources of society, including the enterprise that conducts research and manufacturing, and who direct the labor of workers for using the resources they control.

  If you think automation is not profitable then you vastly underestimate the costs of running a business and hiring human employees.

  You are attacking a straw man.

  Some automation is profitable, at any particular time, but some automation may improve the experience of workers without being profitable.

  Various relevant factors include the availability of technologies previously developed through public investment, the degree by which private enterprise is competitive versus monopolized, the structure of the labor pool especially in its degree of stratification, and the relative profitability of other investment opportunities, such as those more overtly framed around speculation, predation, extraction, or exploitation.

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  • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Workers already are the ones who design and build machines

    Engineers design machines, not sewer cleaners.

    You are attacking a straw man.

    I don’t know what you meant by this if not to imply that it’s not profitable:

    Business owners are bound by the profit motive, not by a motive to improve the experience of workers.

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    • unfreeradical@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Engineers are workers.

      Sewer cleaners are workers.

      Neither are business owners, who make the decisions within enterprise, about how workers use enterprise.

      If business owners decide that engineers may design machines, that factory workers may then build, and that sewer cleaners may then utilize, then the events may occur. Otherwise, not, and the determining force is the profit motive, not the will or workers.

      At any particular time, some automation may be profitable, and some automation may not be profitable.

      The straw man you attacked was my alleged claim that no automation is ever profitable.

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      • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yes but sewer cleaners do not have the capacity to create automations…that’s why they clean sewers. That’s what we were discussing.

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