The walls and foundations of a 3D-printed home can be completed in two days with a three-to-four-person crew and reduces the production costs down to as little as $4,000 per unit. In Los Angeles alone, 1,500 homeless people died on the streets during the pandemic.
According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States. That does not exist in any budget being put forth. The U.S. government budget for military spending in 2022 is $778 billion.
So why are there so many people homeless and hundreds of thousands more on the verge of losing their homes?
Every social upheaval today is defined by the tremendous changes that have taken place in the way humans produce what they need. Labor-replacing means of production, hostile to the existing productive relations, have created an epoch of social revolution. And it has created a new class in the United States and the world, that cannot survive within a system based on buying and selling. It is stripping away the economic inequalities that have existed among the working class, as workers of all ethnicities, colors, genders, and backgrounds find themselves without, in an increasingly desperate situation.
Since 1980 about 7.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost in large part through automated, robotic production. It is no coincidence that homelessness in the United States became the fate of many of those affected. At the same time, the government made huge slashes to the “social safety net,” essentially taking away any means of survival from those who no longer contributed their labor to the economy. With no job, there are no wages, and no way to pay for a home, food, healthcare.
In 2021, approximately three million robots are in U.S. factories performing the work with little to no human labor involved. As many as 30 percent of jobs will be replaced by automation, especially the repetitive ones. It is projected that 375 million jobs worldwide will be lost by 2030, with up to 80 million U.S. jobs at risk of being automated.
Eleven million children in the United States do not receive adequate food and nutrition. Millions of young people, our future generations, have lost or are losing any ties to the economy. World-wide, twenty-three per cent of young people aged 18-24 who were working pre-pandemic are now unemployed, and those who are working have reported reductions in hours and income.
An International Labour Organization (ILO) study found that “the impact of the pandemic on young people [is] systematic, deep and disproportionate. Students’ perceptions of their future career prospects are bleak, with 40 percent facing the future with uncertainty and 14 percent with fear,” the report adds. “Globally, young people are feeling more uncertain about what the future holds.” (Youth and Covid-19, Impacts on Jobs, Education, Rights and Mental Well-Being, ILO)
The Brookings Institution estimated that 36 million workers will lose their jobs because of artificial intelligence. AI and automation go beyond simple job replacement.
“While AI has yet to attain human-like cognition, artificial neural networks that replicate language processing – a system thought to be a critical component behind higher cognition – are starting to look surprisingly similar to what we see taking place in the brain. … In November, a group of researchers at MIT published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrating that analyzing trends in machine learning can provide a window into these mechanisms of higher cognitive brain function. Perhaps even more astounding is the study’s implication that AI is undergoing a convergent evolution with nature – without anyone programming it to do so.” (“MIT Researchers Just Discovered an AI Mimicking the Brain on Its Own,” Eric James Beyer, Dec. 18, 2021 Interesting Engineering)
The developments we see are far beyond past improvements in human productivity like the industrial revolution. This revolutionary process unfolding in the economy is creating a huge leap forward in human development, resulting in the social and political disruptions we experience now, international in scope. The capitalism we are so familiar with is being undone by this leap. The qualitatively new means of production are in deepening antagonism with private, capitalist ownership of socially necessary means of subsistence.
Every day, wage labor is being replaced with automation and with the internationalization of production. We are seeing a new corporate state emerging – a state that guarantees the corporate well-being of the capitalists as a class, not so much as individual corporations as they have in the past. Today the rulers are protecting the well-being of their class to maintain control over the new means of production and the wealth it creates.
The ruling class is reorganizing itself around the new reality. We must do the same. Those struggling to address the increase in homelessness, hunger, poverty, and social injustices – and for a better world – are shaped by this situation.
The coronavirus pandemic is hastening this process as more corporations introduce robots to clean hospitals, hotels, and offices, to transport and distribute goods, and take over healthcare duties.
What is being called the Great Resignation, reflects the 18 percent of healthcare workers who have left the field, the one in three women who considered leaving or changing their jobs in the last year in large part due to childcare availability and costs, and those leaving low-wage jobs rather than risk becoming sick or dying. Some left because of losing pay increases referred to as “hero pay.” One thing is for sure. Very few of us can stay unemployed for long without risking homelessness and greater poverty.
The ruling class of America understands that it faces a problem of having narrower parts of the population here, and in the world, which can buy the tremendous amount of goods being produced. The natural solution would be to distribute these goods to those who need them, those being pushed out of the economy. Anyone can see that is not happening. Instead, the rulers are compelled to put in place laws, use force and historical divisions to prevent the new class of workers from uniting to challenge their power.
The police killings of citizens, arrests, and beatings of those who protest, the imprisonment of millions, the criminalization of the homeless and the poverty-stricken, and the irresponsible response resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands from Covid-19 show us how the ruling class is going forward.
The destruction of the economy is forcing society to reorganize. Fascism and the amassing of ever greater wealth by the ruling class is their answer. Our class must fight to change the forms of ownership of socially necessary property from private to public. Only then will the economy conform to the productive capacity of robots and computers. RC
March/April 2022 Vol2. Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades
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