1.

Whether it's camp Japanese robots, or super-intelligent extraterrestrial lizard men, or AI -generated Twitter accounts having conversations telling you to put Maynard's Wine Gums in everything that you eat and cook and take pictures of on instagram, or the fucking foreigners of course, if you have a job, somebody, or something, is going to try and take that away from you.

The weird thing is that the shittier that job is, the more likely it is that somebody will replace you. In Nottinghamshire, 1,700 idiots applied for 8 jobs in Costa Coffee.

The only people in society who don't want your job are zombies. One of the more bitter ironies of the contradictory working-class psyche is that, because they're a workshy bunch, zombies are generally hated even more than people who are in direct competition for a limited amount of available work. This isn't because of their flesh-eating ways or anything. It's because they're deadbeats who don't want a job, and actually openly admit to the fact. Apparently, these people are bad because they do fuck all, take money off the government, and spend it. Instead of, say, working in the public sector, taking money off the government, and spending it. Which is much better.

Zombies can usually be found in any suburban Wetherspoons pub on a Monday afternoon. They often discuss Schopenhauer and astrophysics, and spread tuberculosis.

I am now a zombie. I tried not to be, but denying my true calling in life for 10 years resulted in me becoming a fully paid-up mental case - a bulldozed, steamrolled 110% alcoholic drug-addled wreck of a human being. With a beard, no less.

One of the side-effects of long-term chronic illness was that I finally acquired that quintessential zombie look, and now my aversion to work is more pathological than ever - the mere mention of jobs pages in newspapers drives me to Vietnam-style flashbacks and projectile vomiting.

Fortunately, I don't want money, status or prestige. I want to be left the fuck alone.

The main driving force behind my life has been this: I don't want photographs to exist of me smiling, with other people in them that I don't like very much because I have evaluated them as middle class. That's about it really.

Being a member of the living dead is a bit like being gender fluid. Only slightly older and probably even more annoying and pretentious, with a bit of anger about young people and their stupid gender-bending nonsense even though I did it all myself. Also, the big difference is that I generally fluctuate between being alive and dead, rather than male and female.

"No. I am not being a lazy fucking cunt for never getting out of bed. I am, in fact, suffering from mortal dysphora. I am going through a dead phase right now, which is why I can't do anything while the snooker's on. Sorry."

2.

Anyway, this whole "the robots taking over" thing crops up every few years for whatever reason. It probably has something to do with lizard overlords. As Infowars says

"There is a war on! A war for your mind!"

Right on. Anyway, some people think if robots do all the work, that will mean human beings will have loads of spare time to do productive, high-brow shit that tweedy old Professors with physics and philosophy degrees would do if they weren't busy shagging their students all the time. Humans could spend their spare time getting into deep Eastern meditation techniques, reading up on Byron, Shelley, Keats, Shakespeare, all that lot, they could research interstellar travel, and also promote intergalactic peace and interracial harmony. The problem is that those similarly tweedy internet utopians said the same thing about the internet.

"What a marvellous global research tool the internet will truly become. The finest minds of humanity combining forces for the benefit of humankind as a whole. The liberty of an infinite cornucopia of knowledge in the living rooms of every family."

Of course, what we've ended up doing is filling it with absolute total shit. Videos of cats running, people setting fire to their own farts, a website devoted to dogs that look a bit like Bob Holness, making jungle remixes of every single song ever recorded, ordering experimental mind-altering drugs, and machine guns, off the dark net, inventing new and interesting acronyms like OMG!, LOL!, WTF!, and putting faces next to sentences instead of full stops.

To continue with what people have done with this astounding resource, they've used it to join Islamic death cults for a laugh, film and promote beheading videos, and, of course, the biggie, used it to unceremoniously wank off to shitloads of hardcore pornography. That's what the men do. Women don't go on the internet because they get too many death threats from the people who have just joined Islamic death cults.

Women have got ironing to fucking do.

3.

Other people think that when the robots take over the jobs it will be absolute shit for humans. This is because human beings won't be needed any more by the super-rich evil bastard elite who own everything, so they'll basically be left to fend for themselves. Also, they'll probably get bored, and when men get bored and start to feel useless, they usually feel the overpowering urge to declare war on something or they start thinking everything is a massive conspiracy against them. Since the planet's gone to the shithouse as well, we'll probably end up starving to death, resorting to cannibalism and stuff like that. Chuck in a nuclear war and you've got yourself a pretty accurate portrayal of the year 2050.

So that wouldn't be so good.

4.

At the Labor Committee For Full Employment, Dr. Arthur Carsters said that it will be possible, within the next decade, "to produce all the goods we need in the U.S.A. with two per cent of the working population."link. That was written in 1963.

So it never quite came into fruition. But it didn't stop the bastards putting it forward by just a few years every time.

"Oh. Well. Yeah. We'll all be free to doss about in erm, yeah, another 6 years maybe?

Keynes predicted similar things. Nowadays people have kind of wised up to it and most films and TV shows about the future concentrate on how appallingly shit everything is going to be. Buck Rogers, my arse.

Anyway, Kaynes argues that more automation and higher levels of productivity in the workplace would shorten the working week and give us loads of spare time to bugger about in. It kind of worked for a bit, until Thatcher totally shat on the plans and just get businesses do whatever illegal shit they wanted to do, just as long as Britain got some of blood money.

5.

Unfortunately, increased automation has not had an impact on the number of hours worked per week. In fact, since the dawn of the neoliberal period (from about 1980 onward), working hours have steadily increased in the United States from about 19 hours to about 23 hours per person, although more generally it has stayed more or less the same.

According to the OECD, increasing automation within the workplace has not led to a major decrease in the number of hours people work. Although this figure has reduced gradually since the 1960s, it has not reduced dramatically and since the neoliberal period from 1980s onward, working hours have either stayed the same or increased. Given the seismic advances that technology has had on our productive capacity, why are we continuing to work harder than ever before?

Michael Roberts draws attention to this contradiction, and argues that it is at the heart of the capitalist system itself.

In spite of massive increases in productivity achieved per labourer, the labour time worked does not fall. This is because capital is in control of the means of production, and what is important is not the use value of labour, but the exchange value of it (the surplus value that the capitalist can get). In other words, capitalists compete with one-another to accumulate capital and make profits. This is the essence of capitalist logic.link.

When productivity increases as a result of automation, the amount of labour required to sustain similar levels of productivity is reduced. This leads to a process of "labour shedding." This shedding of labour has a direct effect on the profitability of capital. Because labourers also buy products on the exchange markets, the exchange value that generates the surplus for capitalists reduces, because less money is being paid out to labourers for producing all the stuff.

Because labour, according to Marx, is the only form of value, the less labourers are compensated for their direct input into the production of a commodity (the commodity's use value), the less profit capitalists will be able to make from those commodities (the commodity's exchange value). Especially when they are operating in the same markets.

In short, even though productivity is rising, profitability is falling.

This profitability crisis can reverse the productive gains made by the new technologies, potentially triggering a crisis within capitalism. Because capitalists are competing with one-another for productive advantages , and can only do this by squeezing labour or by introducing new technologies to improve productivity, there is no way for them to prevent the rise of productivity. As such, capitalism is prone to states of constant crisis.

The only conceivable alternative to this is a system where the means of production no longer operates in accordance to the dictums of competition and private ownership. What this requires is a worker-controlled system of production, where commodities do not separate into use value and exchange value. The alternative is to drive towards ever greater productivity within a crisis prone system - this creates huge amounts of waste, as well as considerable human and environmental destruction.

In short, the capitalist system drives the massive overproduction of junk. The production of landfill threatens the future habitability of our planet. On top of that, capitalism is also prone to crisis and unpredictability - a situation that is likely to get worse as our resources which keep productivity (and profit) as high as they currently do become more scarce.