Garry
Glass discusses how advances in automation are disrupting class
relations.
Part
5 - Infinite luxury?
The question
over the legitimacy of fully automated luxury communism is
fundamentally one of democracy, specifically of whose brand of luxury
we are expected to aspire towards. A post-capitalist project that
puts unbridled consumption as a central guiding principle is
uncannily similar to the current offering from wage-slave,
debt-cycle, eco-catastrophic late-capitalism. The accoutrements of
the capitalist spectacle may have less meaning to a culture with
different values and incentive structures. With the liberal-left
focussed on the inequality discourse little has been made of the need
to discuss more thoroughly what material requirements are actually
necessary for life satisfaction. It is content under its current
rubric to envisage everyone on earth owning a smart device, whilst
there is little concern on the left with the actual metrics of
material scarcity, in this case the abundance of rare earth metals.
The fragile
post war agreement of social democracy between the welfare state and
unions sought to overcome the first contradiction of capitalism and
appease the power of organised labour. The second contradiction of
capital is the material and energetic limitations of infinite
expansion of production on a finite biosphere.
Prophetically
in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Henry Ford is presented as a
religious icon in a society that mass produces people in test tubes,
as well as things. Huxley understood that a society based around
consumerism would lead to an inversion where the population had to be
produced as consumers otherwise the entire industrial system would
collapse.
The more
reliant we are on centralised automated production the less political
agency we shall have. Compliance is purchased via the convenience of
a domino’s pizza delivered to your doorstep by drone.
Industry
requires a state because of the scales of social organisation
required to maintain the necessary infrastructure. Increasingly we
are tied into the global supply chain. Our machines don’t work
without their chips made in China from rare earth metals mined out of
the Congo. Smart cities and mega-projects demand it. Corporate
fascism is interested in automation because it removes human
uncertainty and error – a computer program might need a patch but
it is not going to get sick or go on strike.
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