Will Abundance overcome Greed?
A review of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” by
Aaron Bastani
Several thoughtful reviews of Bastani’s new book have appeared. E.g.
Here is my take.
Is Communism dead? Nope. It turns out that Marx not only described the class system that dominated early Capitalism, but in the “Grundriss” laid out how Capitalism effectively created the germ of its own destruction, and those principles Marx explored, are now coming to pass. As Marx so memorably put it in the ‘Fragment’, Capital employs machinery to replace labor and increase the power of capital. Through this process, the amount of labor necessary for the production of a given object is steadily reduced to a minimum until labor is no longer needed. Eventually, this will emancipate and free labor.
In the last decades this process is moving along inexorably. Millions of jobs have been displaced by robots and more jobs are on the verge of ending forever. Car manufacturing was the great success/ failure story of the last half century. A success because in the beginning it made way…