Garry
Glass discusses how advances in automation are disrupting class
relations.
Part
2 - Fully automated luxury Communism
The
contemporary left, which let’s face it is on the back foot, has
been searching for a new leit motif. It has grasped at its utopian
past, recasting soviet science fiction with the import of advances in
robotics and artificial intelligence, branding it “Fully automated
luxury communism”. The promise is essentially that humanity could
escape the drudgery of work entirely, live in material abundance and
have machines take up the heavy lifting.
This seems
like a nice idea on the surface. Marx described human work in a
factory as a symbiosis of man and machine, effectively bone and sinew
were as cog and piston. The only difference was that humans
experience misery and would one day seek emancipation as a
dialectical inevitability.
Encumbered
by drudgery, leisure time was a dream for most early industrial
workers. The idea of a life of leisure was a paradise afforded only
to the bourgeois. Later leisure time would be a functioning part of
the work week, as noted by the Situationists, we would spend our
earnings in our time off work. The threat of starvation gave way to
the threat of boredom.
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