Review

Gary Roth:

"Smith’s Smart Machines and Service Work is less tightly structured, and in another era might have been titled Towards a Theory of Machines and Work. The data-laden sections in the first few chapters are the most difficult, although they cover similar terrain to Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work.

Particularly illuminating are the passages which provide descriptions of low-wage jobs that defy attempts at automation, for example, when the tasks performed are too local in nature, like neighborhood restaurants, or too complex, like lifting and bathing ill patients without bruising them—jobs “identified with unpredictable, highly intuitive decisions and activities that are nevertheless deemed ‘human’ or ‘natural’, instinctual or innate, even though they tend to be subtle, learned capacities cultivated within the context of private or family life rather than in school or at work.” Personal services represent economic areas somewhat immune to mechanization, and consequently serve as a drag on attempts to enhance the economy’s overall productivity and effectiveness.

Smith is best as an analyst of theory as demonstrated by his many excellent essays over the years. Early on in his book he turns to the misleading nature of economic statistics, itself an indication of the blinders with which analysts of the economy function. Within a specific branch of industry, for instance, productivity can be measured by comparing hours worked with output. An increase in the latter indicates enhanced productivity, either because the workforce has been sweated more intensively, other costs reduced (less waste, for instance), or because of newer and efficient technologies.

Creating a productivity index for an entire economy, however, proves elusive without first resorting to a universal equivalent (e.g. money) through which rates of productivity for specific products and services can be compared. These indices, however, must control for price fluctuations, and since rates of inflation and deflation vary from commodity to commodity and on a daily basis, this transforms the best methodologies into informed guesses. The price of crude oil is a well-known example, and what’s true for oil is true for every commodity for which oil and its byproducts, such as fuels and plastics, are components.

Along with productivity rates, business costs as well as business profits are also “best” estimates. To approach this same issue from another perspective: an automobile contains some 1,800 discrete components, which can be further broken down into 30,000 separate pieces. Calculating the exact cost is an impossibility, no matter how large or dynamic the spreadsheet. If costs aren’t accurately calculated, neither are profits. Smith, though, like everyone else, has no choice except to resort to these data to describe economic trends.

The discussion of data takes us squarely into the strongest sections of Smith’s book, where he uses key concepts from Marx’s Capital to explain the dilemmas within which automation and the economy at large remain trapped. The difficulty for economists to distinguish between the physical and value aspects of the economy, as in measures of productivity, gets to the heart of Marx’s brief formulation of the “organic composition of capital,” a key concept largely overlooked within the history of Marxian economics but which should have been crucial in deciphering the twentieth century.

The bifurcation between manufacturing- and service-oriented jobs is reframed by Smith in terms of the Marxian concept of unproductive work: employment that even when it produces surplus value, no longer contributes to the process of capital accumulation. Smith’s discussion is based on relevant passages from Marx’s Grundrisse, although just as helpful is the extensive, albeit also incomplete, discussion in his likewise posthumously published Theories of Surplus Value.

These distinctions are especially appropriate for the service sector, where small and mid-sized businesses continue to exist in large numbers. Small businesses especially have long been stuck in the revolving door of simple reproduction. At best, they are able to pay their staff, their owner-operators, and their expenses, but thoughts of expansion and renovation, as opposed to survival, are unrealistic. Smith analyzes these businesses in terms of the types of work performed, rather than the more customary approach which focuses on the size of the establishments that offer services as commodities.

From the historical sections of Marx’s Capital, Smith draws our attention to passages that describe the impact of mechanization on other non-mechanized sectors. For Smith, this points to “a core contradiction of the capitalist use of machinery: the very productivity of capitalist industry consigns a larger and larger portion of humanity to low-productivity, and often unproductive in Marx’s sense of the term, laboring activities.” This theme, shorn of its foundation in Marxian value theory, is important to Benanav as well. In Marx’s day, it was cheaper to hire destitute women to pull barges along inland canals than to purchase the machinery that could perform the same function.

These days, employment precarity accompanies futurist visions of a fully mechanized singularity in which machine knowledge (artificial intelligence) would have the ability not only to replicate and repair itself but also to self-generate new modes and levels of functioning. Smith notes instead the huge expansion of supervisory and managerial labor that has accompanied the intensification and marginalization of work at all levels of the socioeconomic continuum.

These insights, along with other discussions throughout Smart Machines and Service Work, lend it a freshness unusual for books that address such ponderous topics.

In politics, Smith takes us to the abyss of revolutionary upheaval and social transformation by distinguishing three types of protest, each of which carries profound implications. The technical division of labor is focused on the production process and associated with the traditional labor movement, which with deindustrialization has found its realm of action severely restricted. The second arena of protest is newer in genesis and is centered on a social division of labor, in which teachers have played a prominent role in recent years. Here, “jobs remain largely invulnerable to both automation and offshoring…because the tasks performed do not admit replacement by even the most advanced technological innovations [and] because these are in-person services performed on site.”

A third, less easy-to-define arena of protest is typified by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and the Yellow Vests in France, the latter largely rural and suburban supply chain employees who are not clustered at work and who nonetheless conducted a long series of widely popular actions. Smith does no more than categorize these protests, in part to show that the ongoing fixation on the old labor movement of unions and political parties is out of touch with the tactics and centers of activity that have recently emerged."

(https://brooklynrail.org/2021/06/field-notes/The-Future-of-Automation)

More information

Book on the same topic: Aaron Benanav. Automation and the Future of Work. Verso, 2020

Smart Machines and Service Work

Review

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