From the late 1820s, the weavers brought forward three consistent proposals.
First, they proposed a tax on power-looms, to equalize conditions of competition, some part of which might be allocated towards the weavers’ relief. We should not forget that the hand-loom weaver was not only himself assessed for poor-rates, but paid a heavy burden in indirect taxation:
Their labour has been taken from them by the power-loom; their bread is taxed; their malt is taxed; their sugar, their tax, their soap, and almost every other thing they use or consume, is taxed. But the power-loom is not taxed ––
Two other proposals related to the restriction of hours in power-loom factories, and the employment of adult male power-loom weavers. The first of these was a powerful influence leading many hand-loom weavers to give their support to the 10 Hour agitation. Heavy weather has been made of this, from the 1830s to the present day, with the men coming under the accusation of ‘sheltering behind the skirts of the women’ or of using the plight of the children as a stalking-horse in their own demand for shorter hours. But, in fact, the aim was openly declared by factory operatives and weavers. It was intrinsic to their alternative model of political economy that shorter hours in the factory should at one and the same time lighten the labour of children, give a shorter working day to the adult operatives, and spread the available work more widely among the hand-workers and unemployed. In the second case, whereas mule-spinning was generally reserved to male operatives, the power-loom more often was attended by women or juveniles. And here we must look further at the reasons for the hand-loom weaver’s opposition to the factory system.
Thompson, E.P.. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage, 1966.
At the time he submitted his report (in June 2014), Pisani-Ferry could not have been unaware of these forecasts made by the very institute he helped found in 2005. How did he allow himself to so dissimulate? The reality is that, like Greenspan, he internalized a calamitous situation that he continues to misunderstand thanks to a deeply flawed analysis, thereby preventing France from taking stock of a highly dangerous situation: ‘[C]ashiers, nannies, supervisors, even teachers […], by 2025 a third of jobs could be filled by machines, robots or software endowed with artificial intelligence and capable of learning by themselves. And of replacing us. This is a vision of the future prophesied by Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of research at Gartner.’ We shall see that this ‘vision’ is shared by dozens of analysts around the world - including the firm Roland Berger, which released a study arguing that ‘by 2025, 20% of tasks will be automated. And more than three million workers may find themselves giving up their jobs to machines. An endless list of sectors is involved: agriculture, hospitality, government, the military and the police.’ To conceal such prospects is a serious mistake, noted by an associate of Roland Berger, Hakim El Karoui: (block quote begins)
‘The tax system is not set up to collect part of the wealth generated (by the digital), and the redistribution effect is therefore very limited.’ Warning against the risk of social explosion, [El Karoui] calls for ‘anticipating, describing, telling the truth […], to create a shock in public opinion now’. Otherwise, distrust of the elites will increase, with serious political consequences.
(page 6)
21: https://www.lejdd.fr/Economie/Les-robots-vont-ils-tuer-la-classe-moyenne-696622
Like Gorz, we think that it is not a matter of creating a third sector out of the social and solidary economy. And we do not think that creating a negative tax, that is, a guaranteed minimum income, meets the challenges we face. Of course, we are not against the social and solidary economy – quite the contrary. Nor are we against a guaranteed minirnum income, which we have always supported. But we argue that in addition, we must now invent another society founded on a contributory income, in an economy totally rethought in contributory terms on a macroeconomic scale – and not just in the non-market sector described by Rocard as an extended third sector.
(page 180)
The liberation of work is not a question of ‘reducing work-time’ in order to share it out and thereby reduce the rate of unemployment: it is a matter of eliminating unemployment by eliminating employment as the key status and function of a macroecononic system that was conceived and implemented by Keynes and Roosevelt but whose effects have been reversed. Maintaining the same discourse on wage labour and purchasing power allows those who extract profit to constantly exert downward pressure on the cost of labour in the employment market, in order to increase their profits still further. Unions have become complicit in this situation by perpetuating themselves in the ways that Trentin and Gorz have described.
(page 236)
Stiegler, Bernard. Automatic Society vol 1. Polity Press, 2016.
definitely worth following the thread of “whereas mule-spinning was generally reserved to male operatives, the power-loom more often was attended by women or juveniles”
I think Sianne Ngai explores the gender aspects of automation (the force-feminization of work lmao marx) in the zany section of Aesthetic Categories?
web go here