That tyoe of progress makes use-values cheaper tho, coz each - say - kilogram of flour contains less labour-time
Yes, and thus there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
The real problem I see all the time is people keep cutting this story short, the rest goes:
Workers: oh fuck no, I’m out, see ya.
Capital: wait, not like that. Please. What do you want? We can talk. Please … please come back.
Weird to me that last bit gets left off, especially in subs like Socialism and Work Reform.
Don’t forget how the story ends.
Edit: everyone commentong below about how the story can’t go this way is a reason solidarity and unity are so hard. Capital wants very badly for workers to forget that workers are where the power is…Keep telling youself all the reasons you don’t matter if you want, but not everyone believes their bullshit.
That’s one potential ending. The other is making people homeless than then making being homeless illegal and using that as a threat against the remaining people…
If that’s how the story ended then the standard of living wouldn’t continue to decline for the workers.
Someone didn’t read about how automation serves to discipline workers and make it even harder to collectively bargain I see
Yeah, that will not happen. People need security, either for themselves or for their family, then you have peer pressure and social obligations. People rarely quit nowadays. Why would they in the future?
We have a falling job rate, and a highly globalized workforce that is still climbing the population curve. Do the math.
nah what actually happens is that capital brings out the pigs and the army and the propaganda and most of the time win, its almost like we need to organize on a bigger scale and all work together and hold the power of the sate ourselves rather than letting capitalist run a dictatorship, idk maybe something like a dictatorship of the workers or something.
There’s one before that too:
Workers: well at least prices will go down in aggregate, so our dollars will be worth more due to deflation
Deflation is really really bad. On a societal level, if people expect prices to fall, they will withhold spending today in favour of tomorrow. This decreases demand, decreasing prices, accelerating deflation until collapse.