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

But even among those who accept that common jobs like warehousing, retail, logistics and taxi-driving could be eliminated by advancing technology, there remains an insistence that jobs in ‘high value’ services will somehow remain immune. Here too, however, the evidence increasingly indicates the truth is rather different. Speaking at a technology e

The most frequent rejoinder to all of this is that while the jobs of today may well disappear, others will emerge in their place. After all, that is what has always happened in the past. And yet that isn’t quite true. Eighty per cent of today’s professions existed a century ago, with the number of people employed in the 20 per cent of new occupatio

Marx could not have been any clearer: competition compels capitalists to innovate in production. This leads to permanent experimentation with workflows and technologies, all in the pursuit of ever-greater efficiency. The logic of market demand means capitalists must produce goods and services as cheaply as they can, forcing them to constantly reduc

To the green movement of the twentieth century this is heretical. Yet it is they who, for too long, unwisely echoed the claim that ‘small is beautiful’ and that the only way to save our planet was to retreat from modernity itself. FALC rallies against that command, distinguishing consumption under fossil capitalism – with its commuting, ubiquitous

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

But besides those issues are challenges seemingly harder to overcome. In isolation each is historically significant, yet taken together they can be viewed as threats whose scale is civilisational, holding the potential to undermine the ability of capitalism to reproduce itself as a system based on infinite growth, production for profit and wage-lab

Keynes was an open critic of Marx despite also claiming to have never read him. And yet here one sees remarkable parallels between the two. For Marx, communism was a condition of abundance, a society where labour and leisure dissolved into each other, and where our natures were developed in a manner consistent with play. This was a world where scar