Automation is now the main reason for the loss of jobs in the US, yet no one, either on the right or the left, is critical of it. President Trump and his supporters are vocal about wanting to deport illegal immigrants and engage in trade wars, but about automation they are silent. The sociologist Herbert Gans has called for ameliorating the effect of automation by shortening the workweek to 30 hours and by economic stimuli for labor-intensive industries, but the value of automation itself he doesn’t question.
Automation is an old sacred cow. The term for a small-minded person who opposes progress is “Luddite,” a member of the band of early nineteenth century English workers who destroyed machinery – machinery they thought was destroying their jobs. Although Marx recorded in great detail the misery and starvation that automation inflicted on workers, he nevertheless saw the Luddites as misguided. He thought automation was a good thing, so long as the method of its control passed from bosses to workers.
But in fact a lot of automation is harmful, and its blanket endorsement is dangerous. Automation is harmful when it pollutes the air and soil and it is also harmful when, in order to facilitate it, the products it creates must be altered in undesirable ways. Cases of harmful automation are all around us.
The bar-code sticker that is glued to every tomato, apple or pear we buy is perhaps the most visible case. This sticker is made of paper and ink and glue,…