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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…

[...] In 2007, only one of what are now called the “Big Tech” firms made the list (Microsoft); today, the top seven slots are occupied by such firms, the first five nominally u.s. companies, the other two, Chinese. Apple entered the list in the last quarter of 2009, as the “recovery” began, its mar…

The argument I make in Smart Machines and Service Work takes a different tack altogether. I make the case that there are three primary reasons for the relatively insignificant impact new forms of automation are having on labor productivity growth rates in the world’s advanced economies. First, the …

Meanwhile the clock of “modern times” is running down. Within Western culture, that is the very civilization that in recent centuries has dominated a quarter of the world and acquired so little consciousness in its experience with the rest, what once were but faint signs of breakdown are now in bol…