Bread and Robots: Automation, urban farming and the abolition of wage labour.

?Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy.?
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing ---- ?Tea, Earl Grey, hot?; I?ll have an Americano, double 
shot. If I had the chance to sit down for a coffee with Star Trek's Captain Jean Luc 
Picard, after he poured scorn on my choice of beverage and I asked some awkward questions 
about the need for military rank in a communist society, we may turn to discussing the 
technology that allows the citizens of this future utopia to live as free people, released 
from the chains of wage labour, housework and other forms of drudgery. What would it be 
like to live in such a society, a society where the provision of everyone?s needs and 
desires were taken for granted? Could the good Captain imagine a situation where the 
acquirement of a cup of his favourite hot drink, required one to sell their labour, to do 
anything, regardless of their interests and skills?

A disastrous dogma

It is the opposite for us, now, a decade into the 21st century. Work is in and of itself, 
seen as a virtue, a requirement if one is to be a valued member of society. Those who 
don't work are often vilified as lazy or as welfare scroungers in the media. Job creation 
makes the headlines, both in the local and national press. To receive social welfare 
payments, the unemployed person must be ?genuinely seeking work?. To be known as a hard 
worker, is to be respected. But, why do we work? And for whom?

Do we work for ourselves? In capitalist society, we work to obtain income for things like 
food, clothing and lodgings. Necessities, without which life would be unbearable, even 
impossible. If I were to decide tomorrow, that I no longer wished to work, I would find it 
very difficult to procure these things. In this case, work is a necessity; But what if the 
necessities of life could be produced without labour? After all, most people in Europe 
work in jobs that do not directly contribute to the production of anything. Many work in 
what David Graeber, described in an article in Strike Magazine, as ?bullshit jobs?.?Over 
the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in 
industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, 
?professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers? tripled, growing ?from 
one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.? In other words, productive jobs have, 
just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers 
globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not 
nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).?i

If so many jobs are unproductive and unnecessary, and industrial production could be 
largely automated, couldn?t we just stop working and let robots do the work?

Robots of dawn

The word robot, conjures up images of science fiction, of the imaginative output of 
individuals whose feet are not resting firmly on solid ground. Yet, few would dispute the 
reality that much of the industrial production that was once carried out by the oft- 
vaunted blue collar worker, is now carried out by machines. The first industrial robot, 
Unimate, went to work in a General Motors factory in New Jersey in 1961. It was a 
primitive machine that consisted of a drum memory box, that stored systematic tasks, which 
was connected to a robotic arm. It's job was to carry die-cast moldings from an assembly 
line and weld them onto car bodies.

Since Unimate, advances in robotics mean that single machines, with high powered computer 
brains and sensors that act as eyes, can carry out multiple tasks. In 2011, in Tianjin, 
China, Great Wall Motors opened a plant with thirty workstations occupied by twenty seven 
robots that can perform four thousand different welding operations. They can complete the 
welding of a single SUV in eighty six seconds. The implication of these advances in 
robotics is far- reaching. Any task that requires an assembly line is suitable for robot 
labour. Even the notorious Foxconn corporation, manufacturer of iPhone's and iPads, in 
2011, announced that it would install up to one million robots in its factories in the 
next three years.

In construction, much prefabrication is already carried out by machines. We may soon, 
however be able to replace construction workers with robots. Last year, in a Paris 
warehouse, a team of flying robots were the first of their kind to construct a tower. They 
?seamlessly worked together with the help of a group of motion cameras installed in the 
ceiling of the art space to place the bricks in order one by one until the tower was 
built. The robots each have a suction device on their underbelly that grabs onto bricks 
and allows the robots to fly with them. When a robot gets tired it automatically plugs 
itself into a charger to juice up while another robot taps in and takes its place.?ii In 
the same year, another construction prototype, that operates by moving along trusses was 
developed. This robot can move, horizontally, vertically, make ninety degree turns and 
flip itself over on a beam.iii

Robots at point zero

Of course, labour is not just something that occurs in the factory, in the office or in 
the fast food restaurant. Due to the fact that many of the revered thinkers of the 
socialist movement were men with extravagant beards, few stopped for long to consider the 
issue of housework, long deemed to be the domain of women. The feminist writer, Silvia 
Federici, wrote in her 1975 essay, Wages against Housework: ?The difference with housework 
lies in the fact that not only has it been imposed on women, but it has been transformed 
into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an 
aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character.?iv

Federici argues for demanding wages for housework, not as a narrowly economic demand for 
remuneration, but as a means of recognising housework as labour. In a world where men 
still dominate both the corporate world and left political organisations, it remains a 
crucial demand. But while we argue for this recognition, like all labour, we argue for its 
abolition. The material means already exist to make this a reality. Washing machines, 
dishwashers, microwaves, self cleaning ovens all exist in the here and now. The unequal 
system we live under, however, means that these products are luxuries that the majority of 
the world's population can not afford.

Even more out of reach of the average household, are devices like robotic vacuum cleaners 
and floor cleaning machines. A company called iRobot, produces compact robots that vacuum, 
sweep, mop and clean gutters. The cost of these items however, means that the closest most 
of us will get to see one in action is the web-famous video of a cat dressed in a shark 
costume riding one around a kitchen.v Further developments in humanoid robots, like 
Honda's Asimo, could lead to the possibility of robots to dust, do dishes, iron and hang 
up clothes. Of course, with the abolition of housework, along with wage labour, there 
would be more time to share out more equally, currently gendered work like childcare, that 
we probably wouldn't want to leave to robots.

From the plough to the stars

While it is true, that it is possible to automate most industrial production and 
housework, it is also true that we can't eat cars, or spotless houses. Agriculture, 
however, is nowhere near as labour intensive as it used to be. Large fields can be 
ploughed and grain can be harvested by a single individual driving a piece of agricultural 
machinery. Even at that, this work could be automated too. As of now, General Motors, 
Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Audi, Nissan, Toyota, BMW, Volvo, and Cadillac are all 
testing driverless cars; i.e. cars that are driven by computerised navigation systems. If 
these machines can navigate complicated road systems, they should have no problem 
ploughing and harvesting.

Another solution to the world's food problems could be to build upwards. Urban vertical 
farms, green- house skyscrapers, have their detractors, but there have been significant 
advances in the field in recent years. In Singapore, Jack Ng's ?Skygreens? development is 
the world's first commercial vertical farm system. ?Trays of Chinese vegetables are 
stacked inside an aluminum A-frame, and a belt rotates them so that the plants receive 
equal light, good air flow and irrigation. The water powering the frames is recycled and 
filtered before returning to the plants. All organic waste on the farm is composted and 
reused. Water wheels are gravity aided, which take little electricity. According to Ng the 
energy needed to power one A-frame is the equivalent of illuminating just one 60-watt 
light bulb.?vi

There are still concerns about energy costs for larger facilities, however solutions such 
as pyramidal structures, using mirrors to reflect sunlight and rotation systems have all 
been put forward as solutions. In the society we long for, one without borders, nations 
and wars, a fraction of the research that goes into military technology, including drone 
aircraft that bomb civilians, could quickly solve any outstanding problems. We could live 
in a society where automated vertical farms, grow grain that is harvested by robots, 
packed by robots, transported by driverless truck to factories where robots make bread.

The players of games

It may seem now that a life without work is something unnatural, yet do the rich work in 
any way that we would recognise as labour? Do millions dream of winning lotteries, so they 
may be freed of the necessity to toil for the right to exist? The work ethic, has only 
been ingrained in our psyche for a few hundred years, and only so that those of wealth and 
power can live in luxury without labouring. As Paul Lafargue wrote in The right to be 
lazy, ?The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone 
were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. And so it 
was in this era that men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among 
the people; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed the hordes of 
Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for 
work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the 
Gods.?vii Even the god of the old testament worked for six days, then rested for eternity.

In the era of robots, vertical farms and libertarian communism, a life of leisure will not 
just be the preserve of a small elite, luxury will be the birthright of all. Under 
capitalism, automation drives up unemployment or drives people into ?bullshit jobs?, in an 
anarchist, post-capitalist society, the slogan, ?from each according to their ability, to 
each according to their needs?, would be a reality. How we organise to overthrow the 
capitalist system and how we replace the functions of the state, is another day's 
discussion. Here, the line is drawn at the fact that the material conditions to realise 
the abolition of labour and a society of abundance, exist in the here and now; If we want 
such a society, it is up to us to ?make it so?.

Words: Mark Hoskins

References:
i Graeber, David, On the phenomenon of bullshit jobshttp://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
ii http://inhabitat.com/the-worlds-first-tower-built- by-flying-robots-rises-in-france/
iii http://technabob.com/blog/2012/02/20/autono- mous-truss-robots/
iv Federici, Silvia, Wages against housework, Rev- olution at point zero, (PM Press)
v http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLt5rBfNucc
vi Singapore?s vertical farms http://www.amus- 
ingplanet.com/2013/08/singapores-vertical-farms. html
vii Lafargue, Paul, The right to be lazy, http:// 
www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ ch01.htm