Fully Automated Luxury Communism

This demand for constant offerings from taxpayers, hardworking families or ‘strivers’, all while living standards stagnate, means we are now experiencing what Eastern Bloc socialism endured after the 1970s. Two conspicuous hallmarks of that era similarly characterise our present: falling economic growth and crumbling ideological hegemony. The words

Because behind such entreaties – whether from Erdoğan, Trump, Theresa May or the European Central Bank – is an esoteric caste of administrators that nobody else can quite understand. Their language of mathematical economics resembles the high Latin of Europe’s priests as they explained the nature of things to illiterate peasants who could never hop

Once again similarities between Drucker’s thinking on the matter and that of his predecessors, particularly Marx, are clear. As Marx would write in the Grundrisse, But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set

And while countries like China and South Korea benefitted from the global relocation of production after the 1970s, the same will not hold true for today’s lower GDP countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia. This time, capital’s ‘fix’ is primarily technological rather than spatial. That has stark implications for how poorer countries might navigate

Nevertheless, space must remain for ‘grassroots’ campaigns which advance the post-scarcity alternative while attacking a broken status quo. Campaigns around divestment from fossil fuels offer one example of how that will work. Rather than calling for climate justice through appeals to turn down the volume on modernity here, criticism of fossil fuel

almost every time. And yet a paradox has emerged. It has become clear that more ‘processor power’ is actually required for managing what we have historically considered to be low-level tasks for humans, such as motor-sensory coupling, spatial awareness and unanticipated responses. In other words, it is harder to build a machine that can wash the di

In response to that admission, an assertion: any successful politics that seeks to submit the possibilities of the Third Disruption to the needs of people rather than profit must be populist. If not, it is certain to fail. Capitalist realism is simply too adaptable for a radical politics of management and technocracy, meaning any rupture must be un

For Drucker, knowledge and its application changed significantly with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, after which it went from being a private good to a public one, something applied to doing rather than being. With Watt’s steam engine and the new society it fostered, the meaning and the purpose of knowledge fundamentally c

Today it seems undeniable that Ford intuited how industries based on mass consumption, like the embryonic car industry, require ordinary people to enjoy leisure as much they endure work. That would explain why Ford also supported the eight-hour day and the five-day week, writing of the latter, in 1926, ‘It is high time to rid ourselves of the notio