How far down the road to Totalitarianism has our contemporary elite community of fashion gone? This far.
Aaron Bastani says:
The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat. We could provide for the needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination. …
But there’s a catch. It’s called capitalism. It has created the newly emerging abundance, but it is unable to share round the fruits of technological development. A system where things are produced only for profit, capitalism seeks to ration resources to ensure returns. Just like today’s, companies of the future will form monopolies and seek rents. The result will be imposed scarcity — where there’s not enough food, health care or energy to go around.
So we have to go beyond capitalism. Many will find this suggestion unwholesome. To them, the claim that capitalism will or should end is like saying a triangle doesn’t have three sides or that the law of gravity no longer applies while an apple falls from a tree. But for a better world, where everyone has the means to a good life on a habitable planet, it is an imperative.
We can see the contours of something new, a society as distinct from our own as that of the 20th century from feudalism, or urban civilization from the life of the hunter-gatherer. It builds on technologies whose development has been accelerating for decades and that only now are set to undermine the key features of what we had previously taken for granted as the natural order of things.
To grasp it, however, will require a new politics. One where technological change serves people, not profit. Where the pursuit of tangible policies — rapid decarbonization, full automation and socialized care — are preferred to present fantasies. This politics, which is utopian in horizon and everyday in application, has a name: Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
“Just abolish freedom of choice and market capitalism, just surrender all decision-making power to us scientific experts, the Nomenklatura, and the world will be different.
We’ll abolish scarcity and inequality and with our great big brains and unlimited benevolence, we’ll create heaven on earth. Of course, you better not disagree, or criticize our vision, or try standing in our way.”
It’s been tried before, of course, in lots of places.
Seattle Sam
The reason that capitalism works well and socialism does not, is because the former leverages human behavior, while the latter tries to thwart it. So all the author is doing is positing that human behavior can be changed by technology. Makes for good science fiction, I suppose.
Anon
Last Thursday I went to the DMV to renew my license. I know it was Thursday because that is the one day that they are open here. I got there at 8:30 AM because they open a 9:30 and I knew the lines would be long at 9:30. Well the lines were long at 8:30 because everyone else in the world knows that the lines at the DMV will be long. While waiting outside the door with 35 or so of my neighbors I speculated that when the DMV workers showed up that there would be no place for them to park. But They were already there, inside the building. I’m guessing that they show up at 8:00 AM and get paid to sit and wait until 9:30 when they open the doors. But I’m sure they had stuff to do; rearrange chairs, swap driving test stories, etc. I get inside and take a number and take one of the 25 chairs before all of them are gone. While waiting 10-20 more people show up. We wait… I’m wondering what is it about the DMV that always requires a 2 hour wait (sometimes much longer)? And of course the answer is that they are non-profit and the workers cannot be fired (unless they don’t bow down to the LGQBT crowd). If the state hired a private small company to do the job and the company depended on profit and be logical extension decent service, I bet that it would cost the state less AND the DMV would no longer be the butt of jokes about the government.
But after thinking that all through the next number was called and I was still 20 numbers away from being called. Needless to say I was there all morning. But I was one of the lucky ones because they close from 12:00-1:00 for lunch and I made it out of there by 11:00. Whoop, Whoop!!
jwm
I’ve noticed a couple of neologisms recently It seems that global warming has now expanded into “Climate Crisis”. Here, in this post, I just found the solution to the “Climate Crisis” which is :”Decarbonization”. You gotta’ admit, that’s some double-plus word smithing. A scary CRISIS! and really scientifical remedy that only scientsts can do.
I’m impress.
JWM
gbear
Happy Flag Day!
While we still have one.
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