For example, recent fast food strikes brought forth numerous predictions that raising the minimum wage would lead to automation. Given how deplorable these jobs are, we consider their automation an unambiguous positive.
The standard Marxist response to full automation is to point to its ‘objective’ limits by arguing that capitalism will never eliminate its source of surplus value (i.e. labour). But this argument confuses a systemic outcome with an individual incentive, an internal barrier with an absolute limit, a…
[...] We must expand our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows. Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power, the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonising the economy, space travel, robot economies – all the traditional touchstones of science …
a post-work world may generate immanent dynamics towards the rapid dissolution of capitalism, or the forces of reaction may co-opt the liberated desires under a new system of control. Concerns about the risks of political action have led parts of the contemporary left into a situation where they de…
[...] A technical understanding of machines like these is essential to understanding how to interrupt them, and any future left must be as technically fluent as it is politically fluent. In the end, what is required is an analysis of the automation trends that are restructuring production and circu…
