Why not go further and reintroduce works councils to gradually transfer control of wages/benefits/hours to the workers themselves, by first giving them an enforceable voice? China had to suspend these measures while it was catching up, but it can do all sorts of things to assuage the common worker now that it’s more secure.
Chinese Economics Thread
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Thats a huge decline in industrial workforce. In 1 aspect it shows that assembly is being automated, which is good. However it also shows that large capital goods, which are usually hand assembled due to low volume and high customization, still has room to increase in volume.
Huawei has that and is a strong innovator, far from what is imagined to be a worker's cooperative. That is why it is ideologically dangerous to them.
FriedRiceNSpice
Major
The reality is with continued advances in automation, robotics, and AI, we may eventually arrive at a point in the future where full labor participation is no longer necessary nor desirable. It is the responsibility of policymakers to anticipate this eventuality and gradually roll out changes in socio-economic policy to ensure society and the economy continue to function harmoniously when this point is reached.
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Pursue:
(A) reduce socially necessary labour hours (aka wage labour)
And:
(B) grow/maintain real income levels and affordability
Eventually you get:
(C) class society ceases to exist, utopia.
If things get in the way of doing A while also doing B then you solve those things and then continue with A and B until C.
that's the communist manifesto basically.
FriedRiceNSpice
Major
Yes, very similar to true communism. The principal distinction would be that in communism, everyone is a worker, whereas in a future highly automated economy, most people would no longer need to work.Pursue:
(A) reduce socially necessary labour hours (aka wage labour)
And:
(B) grow/maintain real income levels and affordability
Eventually you get:
(C) class society ceases to exist, utopia.
If things get in the way of doing A while also doing B then you solve those things and then continue with A and B until C.
that's the communist manifesto basically.
Yes, they teach that in Economics 101 but they are wrong. In most US cities when they raised the minimum wage so that some low-wage employers had to reduce workforce the overall employment either stayed the same or improved. Demand and supply based analysis typically fails when used in national economics. Empirical studies are more reliable. Old Keynesian economics tells that in some situations increasing employment necessitates increasing demand for work, say demand for services as people have money to spend. Unfortunately I can't formulate this exactly but so it is.
The minimum wage is a sunk cost and it affects all business. No companies will increase the wage by themselves because they has no incentive to do so in such a fierce competition. Therefore, wage increases in large scale must be carried out by the government. But Chinese government is very reluctant to change the minimum wage. The minimum wage has stagnated for years already.
With the introduction of mandatory schooling + retirement (though economists are talking about revoking the latter) the amount of time an average person has to work in their lifetimes is steadily decreasing. Some people even fantasize about retiring in their mid 30s via rapid capital accumulation.
Before communism is achievable, higher and higher stages of socialism must be achieved first. Guaranteeing that everybody has housing/food in a new urban society would remove a lot of coercion implicit in wage labor.
Coops are quite common, but a large, strong coop in technology is unheard of. The only other example I can think of is Mondragon. Such a corporate structure is anathema for a startup-based tech world, and thus the failed attacks.
