I always answer that with this question: When was the last time that productivity gains translated directly into a quality of life increase for the workers?
Never, of course, you just have to do more work in less time and the win materializes in lower costs and higher profits for the capital owners. Workers may get some crumbs that fell from the table as an unintended side effect.
Not never, but never in recent history. I'd say the cut off point was when we moved most of our factories to cheaper countries and made our economies reliant on services instead of goods.
I'm sure a worker in the peak of the industrial revolution had a much worse time than I do now. But I'm also equally sure my parents and grandparents had it much easier in term of purchasing power, work/life balance, job stability, being able to afford a home on a single income, being able to afford kids, being able to retire at a somewhat reasonable time, &c.
Basically everything after the digital revolution disproportionately benefited a very small percentage of people, while previous advances benefitted the masses (agriculture, train/cars, factory automation, &c.). We got a lot of new shiny bells and whistle to regularly pump up the dopamine but we lost a lot of basics
> According to skeptics of the "late capitalism" idea, so far there just has not been any real evidence of:
> (1) long-term economic stagnation or prolonged negative economic growth in the advanced capitalist countries;
> (2) pervasive social decay and persistent cultural degeneration that just keeps getting worse and worse, and
> (3) pervasive and persistent rejection of capitalism and business culture by the majority of the population
(all three of the skeptic points seem ripe to be re-analyzed)
> For many Western Marxist scholars since that time, the historical epoch of late capitalism starts with the outbreak (or the end[9]) of World War II (1939–1945), and includes the post–World War II economic expansion, the world recession of the 1970s and early 1980s, the era of neoliberalism and globalization, the 2008 financial crisis and the aftermath in a multipolar world society. Particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, many economic and political analyses of late capitalism were published.
> When was the last time that productivity gains translated directly into a quality of life increase for the workers?
It's easy to be cynical, but productivity gains in agriculture are the main reason why we have enough to eat. Less obviously, they led to a huge improvement in quality of life for workers across all levels of society. The effect played out over hundreds of years.
US farms produce more than enough food for the entire population with less than 2% of the work force. [0] Surpluses of capital as well as increases in available labor from improvements in agricultural productivity were among the many factors that enabled the industrial revolution. [1] The root causes of the English industrial revolution were many, but it's hard to escape the importance of agricultural productivity in the mix.
Never, of course, you just have to do more work in less time and the win materializes in lower costs and higher profits for the capital owners. Workers may get some crumbs that fell from the table as an unintended side effect.