Cutting Out the MiddleMan

The whole time I was reading Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolutions, I kept trying to think of an example of what the end of capitalism-- due to automation-- would look like (Morris-Suzuki 14). The best thing I could come up with was the opening scene of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (staring Johnny Depp): the complete automation of the chocolate factory overseen by a handful of workers (the Oompah Loompahs):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_GyQt7PyF90

I also remembered that protagonist's father in the movie loses his assembly line job at a toothpaste factory (placing the caps on the toothpaste tubes) to a robotic arm, and it is only when the arm is in need of repair that Charlie's father gets a new job repairing it. And though not quite the “managerial capitalist” of the “information society” envisioned by Daniel Bell and others, it is easy to imagine that society is truly moving in that direction as Charlie’s father is now only one of a handful of employees left on the assembly line floor that once held hundreds of employees (Morris-Suzuki 14).

Yet, like the movie depicts, I find it difficult if not impossible to envision a world where the human worker is rendered completely "obsolete/redundant," (Morris-Suzuki 13) if only for the fact that humans are the creators of the automation and must at the very least maintenance and repair it; thus, they can never be completely excluded from the equation. Yet you can't help but wonder: what happens to all the other workers that automation replaced--those that are not lucky enough to get retrained?

Works Cited

Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. "Robots and Capitalism." Davis, et al. 157-174. Davis J., T. Hirschl, and M. Stack,

eds. Cutting Edge:  Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution. London: Verso, 1997. Print.