The labour-theory-of-value says automate everything as much as possible to make everything as cheap/available as possible. That’s correct as far as it goes. It should be done. It’s the only way we can beat poverty. But when automation becomes extreme, you can’t keep labour-theory-of-value and principle-of-equivalence (i.e. paying according to labour-input). You can compromise on labour-theory-of-value and create a medium-labour society of handicrafts, small farms, and other pleasant, fulfilling jobs; this is a sort of pro-work communism. You can compromise on principle-of-equivalence, and give people free money with which to buy the fruits of the robots; this is a sort of anti-work communism.

I think the anti-work movement is really being propelled by the volume and quality of the proverbial Bullshit Jobs. When administrative overhead, speculative investing, marketing, and debt-servicing/collection fill increasingly large roles in the economy, there's a sense that a lot of what we're doing in our careers ranges from pointless bureaucratic make-work to outright predatory and destructive.

In that sense, the issue isn't one of Automation versus Income-Support, it is simply allocation of labor resources.

iv) As robotic automation eats most jobs in the means of producing, caring professions (childcare, elder care, etc.) could perhaps expand. This would be a communist version of the jobs guarantee proposed by Pavlina Tcherneva), providing automation-resistant government-issued jobs to everyone who wants them.

Absolutely. The notion that there's some sort of Jobs Shortage has always been total horseshit. What we have is a divide in the Real Demand for professions driven by human need relative to the declining Induced Demand that results from wealth aggregation and rising poverty. The free market economy does not recognize the demands of empty stomachs, only full wallets. So we get to witness a steady rise in untreated medical problems, uneducated children, ghettoized and disenfranchised residential districts, and even whole cities cut off from utilities by austerity politics.

Highway congestion, electric grid collapse, a methamphetamine crisis driven by untreated chronic physical and mental pain, a steady rise in wrongful convictions, real estate demolished by preventable (or at least mitigable) natural disasters - all signal a significant demand for human labor in a host of historically well-paying fields. These aren't indicative of a jobs crisis nearly so much as an allocation-of-labor crisis.

Even if we apply automation technology to the problems at hand, we are still left significant value-add lifelong careers in engineering and administration that will materially benefit the region, the nation, and the continent. But because these careers don't come with a strong profit motive attached...

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Decent post. I'm personally wary of any discussion of the future that takes increasing automation/labor productivity as a given. Moore's law isn't. There may indeed be a practical cap to our tech-base and I think were already seeing the flattening of this S curve. I have very serious doubts about self-driving cars ever being actualized, much less fully-automated farming.(especially given we're just now getting used to the idea of how badly the biosphere is fucked)

Grunt work & shit jobs are here to stay. There are limits to how hyper-optimized you can squeeze a system, at some point its more practical to just have people on standby/rotation for seasonal or labor-intensive work. I think you're on the right vibe with Schumacher. A reserve army of labor doesnt have to be a bad thing.

deskilling could become a problem Could we reduce work to 800 hours a year, so every employed person is working what we would call a part-time job? Maybe not, because people like doctors wouldn’t get enough work experience to get enough skills to be effective.

For such professions you could have a lower retirement age to make up for their longer work days and work weeks.

As robotic automation eats most jobs in the means of producing, caring professions (childcare, elder care, etc.) could perhaps expand.

I like this idea. It would certainly improve quality of life (no more ridiculous student to teacher ratios!). The socialization of childcare would also advance the abolition of family as well as advance the status of women. More people working in elder care would also be necessary to deal with a decreasing population.

But when automation becomes extreme, you can’t keep labour-theory-of-value and principle-of-equivalence (i.e. paying according to labour-input)

Maybe I missed something but I don't see the contradiction? If automation is so high in this society that the average working week has trended towards zero, then the cost of goods will have also trended towards zero. This is the highest stage of communism where there is no longer a need for all who can to contribute work.

Also, insofar as some level of socially necessary work exists, the people who are working a few hours a week and being taxed for a basic income would still be making more than those who don't work.

So hear me out: We employ about half the population as party planners, bar keepers, DJs and rock musicians and such, and the other half work at rehab facilities.

How can an economic planner respond to technology-induced increases in the number of unemployed people?

Could we not simply divide the existing demand for labor more evenly? I know you mentioned deskilling and in some occupations there is that issue, but there's plenty of work that doesn't need extensive training to be done but requires a lot of labor-hours.

Something I'm thinking about now in regards to deskilling is the possibility to replace productive labor hours with education. Why shouldn't every worker be given the opportunity to take classes or go to conferences to improve themselves and their industry? Why should they not be paid to do so? Why shouldn't this be something that is done continuously throughout someone's lifetime rather than just for a few years after secondary school?

I think that our ability to conceive of answers to these kinds of questions is limited by our having been born in a capitalist world. "Human Nature" is of course not some essential set of beliefs and behaviors, but a series of reactions to the environment a human has grown up and/or currently lives in - what would be the "human nature" of a generation that grew up in true post-scarcity? The Soviets imagined their system producing a "New Soviet Man", but I think history has shown that their system for all of its incredible achievements was still too similar to the system of wage labor to coax out a new set of behaviors from the people living under it, but a system with both Soviet social welfare and incredible wealth (perhaps as a result of not needing to dump so much production into the military) might be so different from any society currently on this planet that the people who grow up and live it that society become completely alien to us.

That said, from my limited view of humanity from my limited experience, I think that there is utility to giving people a certain amount of make-work. Not bullshit jobs as we currently imagine them, where everyone spends their day in a cubicle intentionally looking very busy but accomplishing nothing, but work as a community- and skills-building effort. So as automation increases and industries reach the point where more production simply isn't worth pursuing and people get more and more time off, it will eventually become incumbent on that society to put idle people to work so that they don't simply sit in their rooms doing solo activities and spiraling into increasingly extreme antisocial behaviors.

The most utility could probably be had training and regularly recertifying idle people in emergency work. A post-scarcity communist society won't be immune from natural disasters, pandemics etc so if you had a reserve army of people trained in nursing and other skills it would be very useful to be able to activate them on demand. Besides ensuring that essential skills are kept up throughout society, such an arrangement would involve organizing people into cadres of peers, which would hopefully build solidarity at the lowest levels of society and be maximally effective at preventing antisocial behavior.

As to how society might be organized along this paradigm, I imagine a constant push from the post-State bureaucratic apparatus to get people into "hard" jobs, like doctoring/nursing/engineering. This might include social and material incentives for people who do that work, because while there are people who would self-select into those kinds of careers simply for self fulfillment I just can't imagine that there would be enough to fill society's needs. Aside from that, the bulk of jobs would probably simply be filled by regular social pressure - you grow up in a town with an auto factory, you get a job working at it. Humanity has self-organized in this way since long before capitalism, and I don't think it goes away after capitalism either. A moderate number of people then become "self-employed", as artists, artisanal work, high level sport/game players, etc - unlike self employment under capitalism, your success isn't measured by sales, it's measured by how what you do relates to your community. The last group, which might be the smallest or might be the largest and it's impossible to say which, would be the people who don't select into a career path and who need the bureaucratic apparatus to put work in front of them and say "do this twenty hours a week please". Social pressure would push people into doing something, even if it's just being a part of the reserve labor force because there's nothing left to do, but society would also understand that a certain number of people simply aren't going to do anything, and that's fine too.

wow, ur like relly smart and stuff

because people like doctors wouldn’t get enough work experience to get enough skills to be effective.

I disagree with the concept of "deskilling". Doctors already have continuing education requirements. I think, if we have somehow increased either average health or doctor supply to the point that doctors are doing 800 hours of work per year, we're going to see average competency increase due to increased continuing education and because, to some degree, doctors are knowledge workers too. If you're not cramming patients in every minute of every day, you're going to have more time in your off hours for those epiphanies to form about the patients you are working with. Less burnout, more quality.

Suppose that one man, working for one day, can produce enough food for ten men to eat for a year. Food will be very very cheap (by the labour-theory of value). That makes everybody more food-secure and is something to be celebrated. The challenge it brings is that we can’t employ a large amount of our workforce in agriculture.

I chose food as an example deliberately because the demand isn’t very elastic. We can’t quintuple the amount of food produced to increase wage-labour (because I’m already stuffed man no thanks).

I know you're simplifying bc it's not your main point, but I think it's worth noting that you don't produce food by going to the food factory and turning a big crank labelled "food" until food pops out. There are many types of food and many different approaches to producing them, which each have benefits and drawbacks,

Industrialized farming means sowing a large number of crops over a large area with very little effort, but because so little manpower goes into caring for the crops, they tend to be weaker and more vulnerable to pests and insects, making the process heavily dependent on pesticides. Compared to small scale farming, it consumes more resources and is less sustainable, for the tradeoff of reducing labor costs. We can also compare both of those approaches to something like an herb garden in someone's window, or a hydroponic system with artificial lights and stuff, which packs even more labor into an even smaller area.

If we wanted to, we could reduce the amount of farmland that's required to produce the same amount of food by pouring more labor into it, with the added benefit of more sustainability and hardier crops (which might become more important with climate change). In that sense, there's no real limit to how much work we can put into agriculture - and that's even more true if we include things like de-desertification as part of the process.

But there's more work to be done with food than just growing it. First it has to be shipped, then it has to be prepared by a blue-haired barista (goes without saying, since under socialism everyone will be a blue-haired barista). The processes also involve tradeoffs. Roads can be thrown down everywhere so that things can be shipped by truck, while a rail network requires more upfront cost and is less flexible, but is cheaper over the long term and more environmentally friendly. If we wanted to invest more labor into expanding our freight network, there's no real limit to how many trains we can build. Then, as for preparation, if we wanted a wide variety of restaurants with highly trained staff, there's no real limit to... you get the picture.

That's all I wanted to contribute, I'm not really making an argument on pro- vs anti-work. I'm just pointing out, like, if you're looking for stuff to do, and you're not constrained by capitalism/bureaucracy, you'll always be able to find something.