On the afternoon of May 14, an eighteen-year-old gunman tragically targeted and murdered ten African Americans and injured others at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY. He said his motive was to prevent “eliminating the white race.” This young man’s online writings show he endorsed the baseless white supremacist “replacement theory,” which states that Jews and people of color, especially immigrants, are taking jobs and political power away from Anglo Americans, orchestrated by liberal elites to replace “white” voters with voters and immigrants of color.
Why is the “replacement theory” gaining attention today?
The “replacement theory” gives a false explanation for the real decline in living conditions for most workers. People of all colors are having a harder time making ends meet and want to know why. Millennials are on track to be the first generation not to surpass the incomes and job status of their parents! This is not just happening to white people or just to people of color. People of all colors are suffering from unemployment and underemployment, housing insecurity, hunger, police violence and mass incarceration, COVID, and many other preventable afflictions, including drug addiction, mental illness, and suicide.
We are struggling. And our government is doing little to help. But the theory that our fellow workers intend to replace us is a lie.
The “replacement theory” misdirects the workers’ anger about their economic situation toward other workers rather than toward the system and ruling class that is dispossessing all who must work to survive. “Replacement theory” rests on lies about scarcity and competition, an approach known from years of social science research to divide people. It is not an accident it is being promoted today.
Such theories aid the ruling class’s defense of a dying system. That system was challenged by the response to the police murder of George Floyd in summer 2020, when 26 million Americans of all backgrounds stood up against police violence and systemic racism and began to crack the rulers’ shield of white supremacy, a major method of class control.
The ruling class attacks our unity because it threatens their power.
Rather than replacement by fellow workers, the actual cause of the decline in our earnings and quality of life is the displacement of human labor by automation, computers, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI), with no adjustment to how we obtain the necessities of life. If we can’t work, we can’t survive under capitalism. A digital revolution is daily replacing the need for human labor by automating more jobs and parts of jobs. Digital technology cannot only make cars, it can drive them.
Years ago, automation began displacing manufacturing jobs. Now, they are also displacing white collar jobs, including tasks previously done by lawyers, doctors, nurses, and teachers. In A World Without Work, Oxford economist, Donald Suskind (2020), writes “…as we move through the twenty-first century, the demand for the work of human beings is likely to wither away, gradually. Eventually, what is left will not be enough to provide everyone who wants it with traditional well-paid employment.”
The technology is controlled by a small ruling class and their corporations, and society is organized around their interests, not in the interests of humanity and the earth. Jobs are being displaced by advanced technology, and this requires restructuring of the economy and society.
The technological displacement of human labor is an economic revolution that offers the possibility of the distribution of abundance to all. Imagine if the technology were owned collectively by humanity, used wisely and fairly to benefit all, to protect the earth and all life on it. The people would decide how to sustainably produce and distribute what we need for a good life. A united fight will be necessary to achieve this. Understanding that the problem is displacement by technology in a system of private property, not replacement by our fellow workers, helps develop that unity.
July/August 2022 vol.32. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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