By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Strange are the ways of progress, and strange the ways of God.
During my two-month stay in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, I was going to the nearby ‘SPAR’ to buy supplies which, unlike contemporary visual art, I was interested in.
SPAR actually watches over Vienna’s Museum area: two of its shops as guard of honor with raised spears (see SPAR logo: it’s not a conifer, it’s a weapon ready to defend art), guards in front of the entrances to buildings where they keep numerous masterpieces, buildings which used to be barns, because in the heart of Vienna – they criticize me for cursing – horses used to poop. As you know, if you’ve ever gone to Vienna, horse manure near Stephansdom is still considered a tourist attraction today.
The SPAR guard on the left watches over his side of the MuseumQuartier and oversees much of Mariahilfer Straße, where I used to go to Kafka every day, where smoking was still allowed at the time, while another store of this socially responsible, art-friendly corporation watches over the right entrances.
Why am I telling you this all? Because the SPAR shops near the Museum area taught me that Slovenes, and Slovenes are ours, and ours is we, have progressed much more than Vienna residents in terms of technology. Well done.
You can still see employees in Vienna shops: women working behind pastry counters and cash registers, some middle-aged men wearing boxes and bottles.
When I found myself in Maribor shortly after the trip to Vienna, I discovered that there were no people in SPAR there. You take what you need yourself, you pay at the cash register yourself – the man is, perhaps, in the control room and monitors your stay in the dehumanized store through the cameras hanging everywhere.
The store was untidy (items were scattered all over the shelves and there was no one to put them back in place) and the atmosphere in it was extremely unpleasant. I’m not sure anymore – I’m not sure about anything anymore – but I think I gave up shopping when I realized where I went.
In Maribor, I realized the future of my country. I didn’t find it difficult to look for official data on the structure of employees in Montenegro. A quarter of Montenegrin employees work in trade, of whom 26.100 are women and 20.100 men. So, 46.200 people: in small Montenegro, it’s a real army.
I read about the conditions in which these people work: “It’s a public secret that employees working in stores have only two days off during the month, they often work overtime, that they have only seven to ten days of annual leave. The saleswomen work for 250 to 330 euros, they often sign so-called blank dismissals, so the employer can fire them whenever they want”.
I’m not an ominous prophet, I’m just stating what is obviously coming: in a few years, the people in trade won’t have a job. The future will not be merciful to cashiers either: their work will be done (it’s already done) by machines. When we travel to the West, we travel not only through space, but also through time: we go into our own future. Which won’t be like Cameron’s ‘Terminator’: the machines will not be like Schwarzenegger and won’t come for our lives, but for our job.
We’ve finally come to the reason for my writing about SPAR. Google says it’s a large and renowned European trade chain which generated EUR 34.5bn in 2017. As I said, there were no employees in their store in Maribor. You pick what you want, go to the machine, pay for it and go out.
The same is at McDonald’s. There is no future for the people who receive your orders at the checkout in that company: the machines in which you type the order have already been set up.
It’s what happens when you “visionarily” decide that the future of your economy is in “tourism and services”: a quarter of your employees’ competitors are machines, which are cheaper than them, have no idea of unions or labor rights and do not ask for those two days off a month.
If the people we are talking about unite around their own economic good, this, or some other government, would have a serious problem.
However… Despite almost half a century of Yugoslav socialism (or perhaps because of it), the materialist understanding of history and political processes here is practically banished from public space, as it appears there only occasionally, only as part of right-wing populist manipulative strategies, and the governments respond to it with their own manipulative strategies.
Much depends on the outcome of the conflict of these manipulations, but one thing does not: machines will meet you at the checkout, one way or another.
What bothers me is a simple question. In the name of the promised democracy and capitalism, we easily gave up on the means of production that were in our hands. What was the transition, if not our expropriation, the destruction of our means of production, the annihilation of our trade union rights – our transition from the proletariat to the precariat?
To the promise of true democracy and “uncorrupted” capitalism,” I wish to say even though too late: you know what – give me a permanent job, free health care, education and trade union rights, and you take all democracy with its political freedoms.
But it’s a false dilemma. Because… Why did we think, if we thought anything, that after they took everything away from us, they would leave political rights in our hands?
Why would there be a room for free voters in a world where there’s no place for cashiers and writers (because prose, and even newspaper news, are written by algorithms today)? Why, when the logic of the process is to replace them with voting machines? Why would not anyone think that, when machines can work instead of them, machines will vote for them, too?
A man is needed only as a consumer, because they still don’t buy the machines. And capitalism, as we know it, doesn’t exist without consumption. A man is certainly not needed as a voter.
