Capitalism threatens our survival

John Stewart Mill observed that despite a plethora of labor-saving innovations promised to reduce toil, the evidence showed that labor’s load was increasing, not decreasing.

In response, Marx said that labor’s load was worsening because such innovations were never intended to lighten the load of workers.

Under capitalism, labor-saving innovations aim to increase capitalists’ profitability, not improve workers’ lives. Moreover, such improvements to the means of production are also intended to undermine workers’ power relative to capitalists.

Although capitalist innovations have created a cornucopia of new products and services, they’ve also lengthened the average workday and worsened the alienation of workers.

Through deskilling, compartmentalization, and, therefore, the acceleration of exploitation, many innovations have severely compromised workers’ creativity, agency, and independence.

Thus, workers are becoming increasingly unhappy, causing an increase in antisocial behavior, such as racism, sexism, and violent behaviors like road rage and mass shootings.

That isn’t to say that we should shun these and future innovations, not at all. On the contrary, we, the working class, should wrest ownership and control of the means of production from capitalists so that labor-saving creations would finally do just that — reduce human toil and eventually eliminate the need for work.

Capitalism was once a progressive force that opened vistas for humankind that were previously unimagined. But, in outliving its social usefulness and aggregating the lion’s share of its vast material benefits into the hands of a few, capitalism is threatening our very survival.

The capitalist system contains the possibility of creating a new form of civilization built around the latest technologies that could lead to the emancipation of humankind.

In such a world, each one of us could realize our potential as human beings rather than spending our lives as appendages of the means of production. http://www.slp. org/

Guy Marsh

Lancaster