(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Political utopia has long been deferred, and the utopia's defenders referred to the sham hook from which they could write sentences from The Black Book of Communism and enumerate their share in everything from Stalin's to Pol Pot's crimes. But today, just four decades after Margaret Thatcher popularized the famous neoliberal "There Is No Alternative" doctrine in the XNUMXs, we can once again witness an opening of the political horizon and a reactivation of utopian imagination. The openly destructive rampage of capitalism in terms of climate, nature and people has meant a huge dent in the mirror-smooth surface of neoliberal ideology. Many, especially younger people, have difficulty recognizing themselves in the notion that capitalism is without real political alternatives. The historical settlement of neoliberalism has spawned a stream of literature that more or less openly acknowledges a neo-Marxist orientering against utopia. One of the most recent shots at the stem of political future literature is Peter Phrase's book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, published in 2016.
Luxury Communism. Phrase enters into an ongoing discussion about the unleashing potentials of technology, where the common assumption across different positions seems to be that capitalism, despite itself, provides the means for its own overcoming. British BBC journalist and debater Paul Mason stands with his bestseller Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (2015) as a banner for this new genre literature, where speculation about automation of production meets the more traditionally socialist notions of a different and more equitable distribution of labor, income and social goods.
At the heart of Frase's book, as well as in other literature in the field, is the idea of the blessings of automation – that advanced technology and machinery will replace, in whole or in part, the hardships of working life with a kind of fully automated luxury communism. Whether we are actually heading for a "communism de luxe" can of course be debated, but much does indeed indicate that the conditions for a fully automated production are well underway. The full automation forecast is backed by a 2013 Oxford study, which indicates that up to 47 percent of all US jobs will be redundant by 2050. Thus, there seems to be grounds for optimism if, as the proponents of a fully automated luxury communism – not seeing massive structural unemployment as a problem, but as a condition of opportunity.
Automation is, as Marx pointed out in his infamous "machine fragment", an inevitable consequence of the effects of competition, where the individual capitalist is forced to introduce labor-saving technologies in order to be competitive in the market. This eliminates human work, which from an automation optimistic point of view (which can only be attributed to Marx himself to a limited extent) means an ever-increasing liberation from the yoke of work. Phrase endorses, in its own words, the post-capitalism literature's widely spread optimism that "within a few decades we could live in a Star Trek-like the world where […] robots can do everything humans can but without complaining ”, and“ where scarcity of ordinary consumer goods belongs to the past ”.
"Performing according to ability and enjoying as needed" interprets the author as "just do what you feel, man, and it'll all be cool".
Yes to planning economics. Phrase presents us, as the title indicates, for four possible scenarios of the future: communism, racism, socialism and exterminism. The four futures are thought of as "simplified ideal types to illustrate fundamental principles", and thus must be taken with a grain of salt, as the playful and sometimes (slightly too) handsome writing style indicates.
Communism, the first of the possible futures to be outlined, is thus characterized by Marx in the role of a crooked hippie philosopher who preaches the socialist doctrine of "giving as ability and enjoying as needed", which Frase rather well interpreted as "just do what you feel, man, and it'll all be cool ».
The second future, racism, is a different dystopian scenario, which is based on already known societal trends towards gated communities. In the realm, most of the work (the bit that has not yet been done mechanically) consists in maintaining the order of safety of the super-rich, and in the protection of private property against an ever-growing impoverished housing proletariat of homeless people, aid recipients and abusers. As Frase points out, this trend is already quite extensive in the United States, where in 2011 over 5,2 million employees were registered in the watch industry alone.
The third future, which seems to be the phrase hopes to propose as a real alternative to the existing order's disintegration, is unfortunately a rather fanciful re-actualization of a planned economic socialism, with full automation and citizen pay. It is not without a certain comic when Frase presents core traditional social democratic notions as a result of his own speculative extrapolations from the capitalist contemporary. But Phrase's social democracy reloaded does not really amount to much more than a traditional defense of the welfare state's historic class compromise, now just plus automation, nuclear power and a bit of geoengineering to save the climate as well: «When the technologies we have created end up with unforeseen and frightening consequences – global warming , pollution, extinct species – are we clouding anxiety for these technologies. But we cannot, and should not, leave nature to itself. We have no choice but to become even more involved in the conscious transformation of nature. We have no choice but to love the monster we created ourselves. ”
A political question. With the Frankenstein metaphor behind us, we come to the fourth and final future: exterminism – and here we find at once the decisive theoretical contribution of the book and the (unfortunately) most realistic picture of the future we are steering towards with ever-accelerating momentum. Phrase here marks the kind of automation that consists in the annihilation of people from the standpoint of capital. The chapter draws lines from Gaza to prisons in the United States, and emphasizes how the management of so-called surplus populations, whether under Israeli occupation or the world's most developed prison system (which currently has more than two million inmates) tends towards the genocide category. It's scary reading.
Whether we choose one or the other future is first and foremost a political and not a technological issue, Frase argues, who, with his involvement in the automation debate, wants to stimulate the political imagination to avoid falling into exterminism, for example. But whether technology is truly "neutral" and whether it is merely a matter of restructuring the political course can be relatively easily problematized. If Frase's book is justified in the growing market for post-capitalist "social science fiction", it is obviously not because of its technology-philosophical insights that are very limiting, nor to its ritual repetition of the sacred trinity of plan socialism "reform, citizen pay and automation" but only to highlight how current capitalist production conditions through automation take the form of a racial segregation race, in which the struggle for the preservation of "the blessings of work" greatly helped to bring a political demagogue like Trump to power in "God's own country. "
