hedges is asking some important questions, but they're not the kind of questions you ask octogenarians. chomsky is still pretty sharp, but you can't expect good responses out of him on this. you're better asking him about the past than the future.

the reason manufacturing is coming back to the united states is twofold. the first is that the prison-industrial complex is offering slave labour prices, allowing firms to cut out transportation costs. the second is mechanization. neither of these will create jobs. conditions in china are improving, but not for their large prison workforce, which american industry takes massive advantage of.

if the future is mechanization and automation then we need to nationalize them. that's stated simply, but it's not a worker struggle - there aren't workers involved. so, we really need to be looking towards an understanding of labour in a post-industrial economy. it's not even about retail workers. it's about an economy with structural levels of unemployment pushing 40% because anything a worker would otherwise do is done by a machine.

my experience is that the left has been highly resistant regarding this discussion, because it threatens their entire intellectual framework. but, it's a very important psychological shift and the longer we wait the worse the consequences will be.

tersely stated, it's a choice between genocide and utopia.