Fully Automated Luxury Communism

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

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

Unlike Marx, Keynes viewed capitalism as inevitably shifting to greater abundance, this resulting from its ability to become ever more productive over time while reducing the demand for labour. In Economic Possibilities his claim was that this would translate to a shorter working week, with improvements in productivity as technology progressed bene

While the tendency to extreme supply means everything will become permanently cheaper – from food to transport and clothing – all as a result of each factor of production falling in price thanks to the central role of information, in the absence of an appropriate politics this will only lead to novel forms of profiteering. Marx expressed this perfe

For Marx, however, these new industrial feats were just the tip of the iceberg. He believed that such changes in technology, production and social life, would come to form the basis of an entirely new society. This reflected his view of history as unfolding through an ensemble of fields encompassing not only technology, but also politics and our id

And yet this never came to pass. There was never a workers’ revolution that overthrew the system – at least not on a global scale. The reason why was that contrary to Marx’s predictions capitalism could ‘fix’ – both spatially and technologically – the very problems it generated. The ‘spatial fix’ is what underpins contemporary globalisation, charac

The present conjuncture offers a rupture just as significant as these two earlier moments. As with the Second Disruption it will offer relative liberation from scarcity in vital areas – energy, cognitive labour and information rather than simply the mechanical power of the Industrial Revolution. As with the First it will signal a departure from all

The most detailed data available in the UK only serves to confirm a historic shift has taken place over the last decade, with those in relative poverty more likely to be in a working household than not. Most troubling of all is that this is accelerating: by the end of 2016, 55 per cent of people in poverty were in a household where someone was empl

If Fukuyama’s words were naive in 1992, then in the decade that followed the financial crisis of 2008 they became positively ridiculous. Indeed, he admitted as much in a book he published on identity in 2018.