Carryfast:
Rjan:
Better than the fate of those who don’t automate though - by continuing to engage in labour-intensive production, they forfeit their capital when the time comes to sell their labour-intensive products on a market awash with cheap, automatically-produced goods.
^ That based on the premise that automating the driver role will actually be cheaper for the operator than employing drivers.
Well, I would suggest any “automation” that doesn’t lead to reduced costs, is not automation at all. Maybe the employer in such a case has just reshuffled the labour costs of his operation - I’ve certainly seen that happen myself.
When example suggests that automation for the sake of it does nothing to reduce factory gate and retail prices in real terms.While the net effect is to make what jobs remain either lower paid and/or lower quality reducing spending power to buy the goods and less attractive to the employee.Such as the example of the move to CNC machine tools reducing the amount of skilled labour required for manually operated ones.But making the remaining human input an even more boring,relatively less attractive job,requiring a net increase in wages to retain the required human intervention but with an overall net reduction in staffing levels and therefore spending power in the economy.In addition to more expensive to buy and more complicated to maintain,tooling.All of which resulting in a net loss to the economy. 
I can conceive ways in which automation can unbalance the capitalist economy if it is used to attack bargaining power - for example, if they use automation selectively to undermine the wages of a part of the working class, which also then undercuts the scale of their own consumer mass market (because the only buyers left are the ones who haven’t had their wages attacked).
I know your fond of Henry Ford - he recognised that if he paid his workers substantially less, he’d undermine the buying power of many of his own consumers, and therefore would undermine the scale of his operation (and his operation required scale, in order to make the production lines profitable).
The key in your quoted case, however, is that replacing expensive workers with cheap workers is not automation. Much the same amount (or even, more) labour is required for the operation to work. That’s why productivity is flatlining in Britain (but not elsewhere).
But poor productivity is not itself a systemic problem (except to the extent it undermines international markets - putting Britain in the situation of the capitalist who fails to invest in automation whilst his competitors do. But the system will eventually right itself as foreign business with foreign managers conquer the British ones, and soak up the workers.).
The actual dysfunction arises because the capitalist has been successful in attacking the wages of his own consumers, without the capitalist himself using his newly-acquired funds to make up the lost consumption. That is, if half the people in society suddenly can’t afford cars, it doesn’t follow that the other half suddenly buy twice as many (especially if they are made to feel insecure themselves, by conditions of widespread poverty).
As the economy then faces a crisis of consumer demand, capital “goes on strike” and is hoarded, previously profitable production is ceased as consumer markets evaporate, in a vicious cycle. This type of crisis does not right itself through market-like mechanisms (except, at the very extreme, by political conquest, if the capitalist state fails to act).
It’s the classic case which Keynesianism is designed to solve, where taxation is used to remove excess capital from the capitalists (without compensation), and force it instead to be spent acquiring goods and services which workers are unable to afford from their wages (because of the initial capitalist attack).
Wars for national survival have also had the same effect in the past, by justifying both capital appropriation and increased wages in the national interest.
As the economy regenerates through Keynesian measures, and as the remaining private capital becomes able to generate a return again (because the demand is created, via the state appropriating the excess capital which should have originally been paid as wages), private capital “returns to work” again.
Like my previous post on casualisation, it’s another example of where the capitalists getting what they thnk they want, is the source of the systemic dysfunction, and it is the state that has to break the spell and intervene for the health of the system.
That’s basically why the IMF now decries austerity, because they recognise that they’re in a crisis of effective demand caused by the strength of capital against labour. And even the Tories (the sane, patrician ones) are arguing for more effective collective bargaining to redress it.
