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

This condition presents arguably the most pressing crisis of all: an absence of collective imagination. It is as if all humanity has been afflicted by a psychological complex, capitalist realism making us believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it – as if it were not our ancestors who created what stands before us now. As

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

Even Marx, a profound critic of the new system, was in awe when he wrote in 1848: The bourgeoisie … has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations an

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

For a long time things seemed to go to plan, with improvements in productivity feeding through to higher wages and an increasingly widespread abundance.

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

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

As Larry Summers and J. Bradford DeLong would write in August 2001, just a month after the file-sharing service Napster was taken down, ‘the most basic condition for economic efficiency … [is] that price equal marginal cost.’ They went on: ‘with information goods, the social and marginal cost of distribution is close to zero.’ This held true not on