Activity

These sorts of activities, however necessary they may be for the reproduction of capitalist class relations, are always the last to be rationalized, that is, made more efficient, and less onerous, by means of labor-saving innovations. I have already discussed in detail the reasons for this. In some…

The bottom tier of the job market made up in large part of service occupations is resistant to wholesale automation because labor-saving innovation is happening elsewhere in the economy: labor-process refinements in other sectors shed workers who, because they must work to live, are shunted into …

Here, though, we must be careful not to confuse jobs or occupations with tasks. What a particular occupation “does” is never one thing. A job is only ever a specific grouping of discrete tasks, some of which are more repetitive and easily mimicked by machines, others of which are more intuitive, su…

Marx’s approach allows us to understand that the rising proportion of the labor force working in circulation and supervision represents an increasing cost to the system as a whole. This introduces an added complication to Marx’s theory of the tendency for the average profit rate to fall. What if a …

In the first half of 2018, as stock market indexes (especially the tech-heavy NASDAQ) blew through historical highs, a total of six companies, all usually lumped in the category of the “tech”—or, more broadly, the “Internet”—sector, generated a full 99 percent of the S&P 500 index’s gains for the y…