marxvx:

The notion that we are in a post-work society is myopic and only plausible from the perspective of detached academics and suburban professionals; i.e. “I don’t see any factories in my neighborhood, and everyone I interact with is a professional or self-employed, so I’m quite sure the industrial working class no longer exists.” This is why legitimate social analysis - especially if you’re analyzing mathematical phenomena like the global rate of profit, the global organic composition of capital, and global employment by major industry - actually requires quantifiable data behind it, or else the “analysis” just becomes a documentation of whatever the analyst personally comes into contact with.

If you live in a city or in the northern United States generally, of course it looks like there is no manufacturing anymore. Manufacturers are relocating production (both domestically and internationally) to escape unions and high labor costs. If you are looking for major cities with large amounts of industrial employment, that isn’t the case anymore - but that is because of decades-long trends in rural-urban migration. Domestically, most manufacturing occurs in rural areas now. There are still plenty of “company towns” in the United States, towns where the whole social and economic life is determined by employment in a couple of production facilities; just because you don’t live there (or because the people who do live there don’t look or think like you) doesn’t mean they don’t exist anymore.

Furthermore, there’s no reason to believe that the decrease in industrial employment in the United States is solely due to automation. Domestic industrial employment has been falling in recent decades (which is no secret), but foreign relocation and decreased capacity utilization is just as much a factor as automation. From 2000-2010, American manufacturers decreased domestic employment by 2.9 million jobs… and increased foreign employment by 2.4 million jobs. Clearly the jobs weren’t automated out of existence.

In the United States, goods-producing industry (agriculture, mining, manufacturing, construction) still constitutes 14.1% of total employment (source: BLS) and 19% of the GDP in the United States (BEA). As a comparison, retail (which common knowledge assumes is like 95% of domestic employment) constitutes 10.2% of total employment and contributes 5.8% to GDP. Internationally, goods-production is 30.5% of world GDP and 22.5% of world employment (ILO).

Making this point is tiring because at the same time, I’m not trying to say that manufacturing hasn’t changed since the 1930s. Automation has happened. What I am saying is if you’re going to try to analyze the abstract concept of “work” on a global level, much less write a book about it (like The Coming Insurrection) you probably actually need to consult data rather than basing your theory on “I don’t work because I spent ten years in college, live in a gentrified urban area, and have tenure in a research fellowship, so since I don’t work nobody else does.” It requires minimal effort. All of this information is accessible on the internet. You can find total and percent figures on employment, output, output-per-worker, and capacity utilization pretty easily. I don’t see why more people actually consult this information…