The Digital Disruption Technology & Economics for the 99% What are the roots of this crisis, and how do we solve it? Is the current crisis another "business cycle", from which we'll eventually recover? Can our system be reformed or changed to solve our problems? This workshop explores these questions, proposing the following: 1. Any society has at its foundation an economic system. An economic system is defined as how we produce and circulate the things we need to live and thrive. 2. Our capitalist system, a corporate market commodity system, is based on a level of technology requiring many people employed to operate machinery to manufacture goods & provide services, with enough people earning enough money to consume what is produced. 3.Robotic, fully automatic technology of the computer age now dominates all levels of manufacturing, service and communications. Any manufacturer has at least a portion of their plant which runs "lights-out", with few or no workers, and many have entire factories which operate day and night with few or no workers present. 4.This permanently ruptures the capitalist economic cycle in three fundamental ways; a.There are less jobs, and jobs pay less now. Goods and services cannot be circulated; if workers can't buy, owners can't sell. b.Exchange value of commodities is the basis for a commodity market. Required human labor is the foundation for all exchange value. As human labor required to produce goods & services is drastically reduced, exchange value of all commodities is undercut, including the value of human labor. c.Since profits are a particular segment of the exchange value of a commodity, as value is reduced so are profits. More significantly, as human labor is reduced the rate of profit falls. Rates of profit in production have dropped 70% since 1970 (Deloitte Shift Index). 5.Because of this, there will be no recovery in any real sense of the word. Recovery no longer means a recovery of jobs. 6.Unlike the "boom & bust" business cycles of old, this rupture does not have an upswing. From here on, the only thing they can offer the 99% is Austerity. 7.The problem is not the technology, but the inability of the capitalist system and the billionaires who control it, to utilize it for the good all people. 8. The destruction of exchange value is the key to understanding the irreversibility of this process. The system can recover from a simple excess of goods; it cannot recover from the destruction of its root, exchange value. 9. This, and the accompanying drop in profit rates from manufacturing and services, drives investors to search for new sources of highest profit, which has led to massive dominance of speculative investment and the drive to turn everything public into an avenue of taxpayer funded profit. 10. Because of this drive, corporations and the corporate system as a whole are completely interwoven into our government and have almost complete control over it. 11. Since public education has been defined as providing an educated workforce for the labor market, education is being reorganized to educate fewer people. Those whom they cannot employ & will not educate, they intend to control. 12. We will find no safety in trying to "return to the old days". There is no common ground, and no compromise between the people and the corporations. Either the people will take over the corporations, or the corporations will take over the world and destroy it. 13. We need a path independent of the corporate vision for America. A non-corporate, non-market, non-commodity-driven world is now possible, one in which all share freely the resources which can no longer be sold, only given away. Everything about the new technology implies a new economy, a "gift" economy based on compassion, sharing and trust. This is what will work. It is the only thing that will work. 14. How can we get there? Knowing that we need a revolution is not enough; calling for one is just an abstraction. Revolution is a process which moves forward through the fight for reforms, but reforms do not become a revolution. Revolutionaries grow out of these struggles as they confront a system that does not allow them to survive. Every action, every strategy, must help us to form ourselves into a political force that can take the offensive. Every level of government must be held accountable to serve the public, not the corporations. Every issue must be used to directly challenge the right of capitalists to rule and expose the question of political power; the 1% have it and we, the 99%, need it.

• published: 09 Mar 2012
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