Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years - Economist Magazine.
Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.
The article isn't lamenting capitalism, it's lamenting that we're leaving it behind and have no idea what to do next.
> Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years
But it has been done without generating the sort of full-time blue collar employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one generation, skipping most the wealth-building industrialization phase Western Europe and North America went through in the last century.
The global creed is "you're not worth something without work", yet we are, for all purposes, running out of work. The computer revolution is optimizing away all its menial jobs already – just how much have trends like virtualization, clouds, infrastructure orchestration and so on reduced the demand for warm bodies to throw at hardware issues in the last few years? – while education systems still haven't finished ramping up the creation of more and more menial labourers. The earlier industrial revolutions have, quite soon, created more jobs than they destroyed, but this does not seem to happen any more.
We've reached the point where we have, globally, more people of working age than we can possibly need to satisfy all global needs, and this trend is not going to reverse.
And the problem is: We have no idea what to do about it. The left is blabbing "muh robots" and "muh basic income", but nobody has a consistent, practicable theory of what a post-full-employment society (which is something entirely different from a post-employment-at-all society) could look like. We're still going to need menial labour, blue collar work, white collar… but not enough. What do we do with all the excess population?
There are two popular models to predict long term employment trends.
Model 1) There's a finite amount of work out there. Computers will replace mental jobs just like robots killed physical jobs. We're all heading towards unemployment.
Model 2) Employment is determined by the value of an employee. Technology makes employees more valuable, not less. Employees will get more bargaining power as technology improves, not less.
The economic consensus is with #2, because feedback systems appear to drive down high unemployment over time (though bad governance can definitely interfere). One feedback system might be: idle people will eventually conspire to discover and meet the wants of others.
That's abstract though, it might be helpful to look closer to home.
Consider the fear that software will take over everyone's work. It's easy to forget that programmers know exactly how this goes. They have already cannibalized a lot of their work with software. The last fifty years of programming language (IDE, engine, ...) development has been a steady progress of finding ways to get software to write software, to do all the annoying grunt work of the job.
As programmers became more efficient, and crank out more and more complex tools over time, has the demand for code steadily decreased? Have we now solved all the world's problems that can be solved through code? Or has the problem space expanded to meet our capacity? Has the demand for programmers increased because their time is now much more valuable than it was in the era of punch cards?
Note more broadly, jobs are picking up right now as part of the recovery, despite continual technological improvement.
I think the economic consensus is with #2 because so much of the available data so consistently points that way, so it's easy to dismiss the other model as just natural human pessimism about the future. Maybe the pessimistic model is right and we just don't know it yet, but I think it currently has the weaker case.
Arts, sports, and leisure are the most likely candidates. People will both create and enjoy code, music, drawing, digital art, memes, funny cat gifs, endless videos, etc. Sports probably need no additional explanation. Leisure will mean a great deal more time spent out in nature, walking city streets, focusing on relationships, etc.
Just speculation but isn't that already the case? I don't have the numbers but I wonder what percentage of the human population is in the working force or, better yet, what percentage of our collective "waking hours" is spend working, with or without monetary compensation.
Because it seems to imply a post-work, not a post-full-employment society.
We're still going to have a lot of jobs in the mid-term, probably even long-term. 70%, 60% of the working populace in the mid-term maybe, and not too few of those in menial/blue collar jobs. We still need to fill these jobs, and a generous basic income would make these jobs highly unpopular. So we can either set a basic income that is not high enough to solve the problem it was trying to solve, or we create a situation like in Saudi Arabia – where all the undesirable jobs are taken by foreign jobbers (from nations without basic income, or war zones, or…), while the natives grow fat and lazy.
Not exactly an economic policy I'd have expected from the Left.
"We still need to fill these jobs, and a generous basic income would make these jobs highly unpopular. So we can either set a basic income that is not high enough to solve the problem it was trying to solve, or we create a situation like in Saudi Arabia – where all the undesirable jobs are taken by foreign jobbers "
Or we could just let the wage for those undesirable jobs rise to a level that someone will take them, even though they're getting the basic income.
Why shouldn't someone get paid a lot of money for (e.g.) trimming my toenails? Someone else would have to pay me a lot of money to do that.
Basic income doesn't have to be set at post-work levels to provide benefits to an employment-starved population. Even a small amount will reduce the number of hours that people are willing to work.
While birth rates are lowering enough that the population based on current projections will start dropping in a few decades, UN projections also clearly indicate it will start increasing again soon enough, albeit at a slower rate.
To avoid that would take substantial further reductions in birth rates beyond that which is baked in based on current trends.
EDIT: Let me adjust this a bit. UNs World Population Prospects 2015 [1] says "Continued population growth until 2050 is almost inevitable, even if the decline of fertility accelerates." and their middle and top estimates shows continued growth until 2100, though rapidly shrinking growth. The low end estimate shows a reduction in the latter half of the century. Almost all of this growth is expected to be in developing countries, however.
So the people predicting a financial catastrophe in the next 20 years because of the demographic nightmare of the boomers leaving the workforce and not dying for 20 years, so we become a society with too few workers are wrong?
Awesome!
Seriously, which is it? Either capitalism is going to fail because there aren't enough workers, or it's going to fail because robots are taking all the jobs. Can't have both!
Because, of course, having both would be fine... no catastrophe, life continues as normal as it has in the face of every prediction of imminent disaster. We have less workers due to demographic changes, but that's cool because we need less workers. We sort out the political problem of how to stop all the money going to to <1% of the population, we're all good.
How does that help long-term? Let's say we, somehow, reduce the world's population to one billion. Great, so we only have one one seventh the workers to keep busy… but also only one seventh the market size. We're back to square one: Still the same unemployment rate, even if the total amount of unemployed is smaller.
You take it as a given that capitalism was the savior. What if The Enlightenment, mathematics and science, egalitarian laws and democracy were actually greater contributors to lifting humans out of poverty? All the greatest advancements in law, mathematics and science don't appear to be profit driven, while exploitation of people has always been driven by profit.
And even if capitalism did deserve much of the credit, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be criticized or that we should stop looking for better. Feudalism may have lifted more humans out of poverty than any other system that came before it by leaps and bounds. It's a good thing we didn't decide to stop there.
Communism, oligarchy and dictatorships (the first really being a special case of the latter two) are supremely harmful and stupid. I wish people would stop using them as straw men to prove that capitalism is great.
I don't think of Capitalism as being a political agenda or agency in that way. I think of it more as a law of nature. You can't say that Capitalism deserves credit for anything, or saves anyone any more than you can say that gravity or Newtons laws of motion deserve credit for anything. In this account, political ideologies or principles that attempt to replace or supersede citalism end up just reorganising it. So communism doesn't get rid of capitalism at all, it just harnesses it to the party in the form of state capitalism.
Looking at it this way, you're quite right that The Enlightenment, science, egalitarianism and democracy deserve the credit because they are choices we make. They are motivating and organisational forces we have control over and so can be credited with achievements. When an Engineer builds a bridge we celebrate the skill of the engineer and the educational and organizational forces that made the project possible, not the laws of physics.
In this way of thinking, there is no such thing as an end to capitalism. Anyone talking about the future in that way is simply asking the wrong questions. They can't see the wood for the trees.
If you use the word "capitalism" to refer to some set of actual or proposed "laws of nature" (presumably, about the operation of economies) you aren't using the word to mean either what the critics that coined the term of the modern proponents of "capitalism", or basically anybody else talking about it mean by the term, which has always referred to an economic system, that is, a set of high-level policy covers about how the economy should be organized and governed. So, on this regard, you are literally not speaking the same language as any body else when it comes to that issue.
That's probably true, but many of the people I read criticizing capitalism don't actually seem to be proposing abolishing all personal property and all privately owned businesses. In fact I've been downvoted in the past for challenging critics of capitalism and characterizing them in that way as using a straw man argument.
But if capitalism isn't private property and business ownership, what is it? That's certainly what Marxists* mean by it. If anti-capitalism isn't about abolishing those things, what do it's proponents advocate? A political or economic agenda characterised purely in terms of being anti-something with no proposed alternative is just nihilism. What are anti-capitalists for? What do they propose? What is their actual agenda? I've yet to see that coherently laid out. I can understand anti-corporatism for example because that still allows for alternatives. But other than actual honest to goodness communism, what is the alternative to capitalism that it's critics want to replace it with? Some pointers on that would be greatly appreciated.
*Of course it would help if Marx had actually given an account of how he thought a communist economy would function. Other than vague pronouncements that production would be regulated by 'society' and that individuals would have complete freedom as to what pursuits they engaged in from day to day, he never to my knowledge actually gave an account of how it would function either. But at least he gave a very clear and specific account of what he was against.
> But if capitalism isn't private property and business ownership, what is it? That's certainly what Marxists* mean by it.
Marxists (and more specifically, Marx) certainly meant more than the mere existence of private property and business ownership, he meant the system organized around a particular model of private property rights. (Both private property and privately owned business existed in the pre-capitalist feudal economy from which capitalism emerged, but under a very different model of property rights and very different economic relations between participants in the economy.) [0]
> If anti-capitalism isn't about abolishing those things, what do it's proponents advocate?
Mostly, altering the conception of property rights and economic arrangements to de-emphasize the role of profit to be captured by capital in some significant (but not always all, or even most) economic interactions, increase social control of some of the rights associated with ownership in the capitalist system (though not necessarily to the exclusion of private ownership rights) of productive
capital.
Anti-capitalists are a fairly diverse lots, so the differences will be fairly stark without a lot of commonality. Opposition to capitalism doesn't mean supporting the same alternatives to it. (Strictly speaking, supporters of the modern mixed economy are a kind of "anti-capitalists" who support a particular -- and currently dominant -- replacement of capitalism.)
A fair number of those lifted out of poverty were in China. Haiti is still the poorest country in the western hemisphere, despite having capitalism forced on them. A black-and-white view of the world misses a lot. Economies wouldn't function without public utilities, roads, militaries, etc.
Corruption is highly correlated with poverty. If you play the "no true Scotsman" fallacy with capitalism, where only the least corrupt countries are capitalistic, then by definition they will be wealthier as well.
The USSR was capitalist too, it's just that the government held all of it. You have various kinds of capitalistic models, there is no "true capitalism" so I'm not claiming that all. You have mixed economies like France, Germany or the US where capital is shared between the private sector and the public one, then you have more free market oriented capitalism where capital flows more freely such as Switzerland or Singapour or Hong Kong where public sector holds much less capital. Note that mixed economies also have a decent amount of free market depending on the country. Crony capitalism is when most of the capital is held by the government and its cronies almost exclusively, this is probably one of the worst kinds of capitalism second only maybe to the Soviet model (and yes, they all have elements of cronyism but mixed and free market have much less).
tl;dr: the freer the market the better capitalism works. Just have a look at the top freer economies here, they're also the wealthiest http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
> Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it?
Yes. Mining and drilling have obliterated the natural resources of hundreds of millions of people around the world. That's why oil spillage in Nigeria is called an environmental disaster.
> Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.
Not when capital is turned into a commodity that has necessarily less value, which are then still traded on the market as securities with no regulation. Then you end up with scenarios in which political intervention is the only method for preventing the entire global economy from collapsing. That's already happened once, which is evidence that this article's fairly milque-toast thesis is correct.
What does Capitalism have to do with your example?
Capital has always and will always be a traded good. Nothing about that can ever change. Unless you plan to return humanity to the most basic of existence, living day to day, scrounging, trying not to starve without reserves.
No regulation? Please point me to the industrial economy without financial regulations on any major specific thing.
What happened with the global financial meltdown was very obviously not due to lack of regulation. It was caused by the Fed encouraging reckless behavior by intentionally inflating asset bubbles as an attempt to accelerate recovery from the 2000/2001 recessionary economy. Hint: they're doing the exact same thing all over again right now, they're doing it on purpose and have been for over half a decade, and they're openly admitting it.
You're equating "capitalism" with "exactly what we have now". They're not the same. Capitalism is a small subset of what we have now. It's quite possible, for example, to have free market socialism; everyone trading with everyone else isn't exclusive to capitalism.
I think you're missing the point. If I could summarise:
Capitalism generates capital. Yay for us, we now have lots of capital. But once you've generated all the capital, and maximised all the profits to the point of driving surplus value to 0. What then?
* Also a major nitpick, most of that billion were brought out of poverty in China in the 1950s at the peak of Maoism/Communism... so you're point is kind ironic, no? The majority of the remainder were also in China during DengXiao ping driven state run capitalism or "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics"... So even if you weren't missing the point, the point you are making is still very moot.
"Also a major nitpick, most of that billion were brought out of poverty in China in the 1950s at the peak of Maoism/Communism."
If you're talking about the "Great Leap Forward" years (late 50s-early 60s), somewhere between 18 and 45 million Chinese people died, most of them by starving to death. The Chinese economy did not grow during that period. It shrank.
That's an odd definition of "brought out of poverty".
> But once you've generated all the capital, and maximised all the profits to the point of driving surplus value to 0. What then?
You're assuming you will be able to keep this capital forever. History demonstrates that most of even the richest families don't stay such after 3 or 4 generations.
Ask any Family Office managing finances for HNW investors and they'll give you examples.
* Decreasing marginal utility of wealth.
* Difficulty investing as wealth increases.
Capital accumulation lowers rates, incentivizing individuals to spend (h/t Reisman)
* Empathy and philanthropy (one can't just ignore this, it's human action all the same).
* The calculation problem builds in inefficiencies as organizations grow (h/t Peter Klein).
Intergenerational differences in ability and goals and the squandering of inheritances.
Entrepreneurship and innovation. Punctuated equilibrium (h/t Schumpeter).
After what exactly? People will keep exchanging goods and services voluntarily in a free market for a long time. That's like worrying about what we'll do to deal with over-population on Mars. Let's focus on trying to get there first?
The article is echoing a pretty well trodden train of thought on the ultimate conclusion of capitalism. Which no one has seriously been able to refute. Wasted time is a bit harsh.
Catchy one liners "Wealth creation through creativity" might help you sleep at night, but seriously, our creative endeavours have never produced anywhere near the amount of capital the resource sector has... What happens when we either get so efficient at resources that they cost nothing, or we run out of the resource?
It's trivially easy to refute the conclusion in fact. Fortunately history has already provided the refutation, dozens of times, and history will continue to prove that Capitalism is the only system that works long-term. All other systems rot and collapse, requiring constant reform back towards Capitalism (see eg: Sweden since the 1980s, UK since 1970s). There isn't a single example in world history of Socialism, Fascism, or Communism working. Every example of heavy welfare state systems has resulted in eventual stagnation and decline.
There is no ultimate conclusion to Capitalism, the system continues to create more prosperity, and capital continues to seek higher forms of productivity and profit, which perpetually raises the standard of living for any nation that deploys Capitalism with its well understood requirements (which include a strong judicial system, property rights, et al). New innovations and breakthroughs perpetually lead to new industry and expansion, creating perpetually greater numbers of jobs (which is why America doesn't only have 500,000 jobs available today; and America isn't even a properly functioning Capitalist nation, it's a poorly functioning highly regulated mixed economy).
So Sweden, Denmark and Norway have stagnated and declined? Can you be more specific?
More generally, Malthus had much more historical support for his thesis (that population would quickly grow to consume all the food available). But the rules changed.
A point made by Engels in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State is that over the past 10000 years, the economic system has been completely upended several times.
10000 years ago hunter gatherers lived in primitive communism. Then slave empires arose in the fertile crescent. After Rome was sacked, decentralized feudalism became dominant. We still see its vestiges, England and Japan are ruled by royals, officially. Capitalism began taking hold only a few hundred years ago. It may be permanent in our lifetime, but it will surely be replaced in time. I doubt production will be for the purpose of enriching heirs 10000 years from now, or even 1000 years from now (perhaps even sooner).
Marx said capitalism will run its course, until its doing more harm than good. Then it will be replaced by a different system of production.
Hunter-gatherer primitive communism is alive and well. It's called "family". At that scale it's easy to do business without money.
Capitalism as in money, trade, loans and private property date back at least to ancient Babylon. If you wish to include "modern" banking in the mix with currency exchange rates, then you go to 1157 Venice or Genoa.
Such drivel. There is no "after capitalism," unless the concept of economics disappears completely.
Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree. As long as there is supply and demand (finite resources) there is capitalism.
We have democratic socialism to make capitalism less brutal (read: less efficient but more humanizing) but demand is too fickle for most economies to be centralized much beyond that.
> Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree
Not really. A lot of today's capitalism is based on concepts such as copyright, patents and trade secrets, which are definitely not "natural" - in fact, they are directly opposite of "free market".
Personally, I believe that a capitalistic system where these three are eliminated or at least severely restricted would be much preferable to what we have today.
They are not "the" rights of ownership, they are a particular set of rights of ownership.
Once upon a time people were included in the set of things people had a right to own, and ideas weren't. These things can change. The rights we have now are just those we currently think of as most correct.
No, it's not the right of ownership it's the right of enforcing a monopoly. If I copy something you own, you still own it, I'm not taking anything away from you...
It would be amazing! Basically what we have now, but (1) noone would go to jail for piracy, and (2) all research would be shared much sooner, and you wouldn't need to worry which spurious patents your original research is infringing.
>it's not the right of ownership it's the right of enforcing a monopoly.
Ownership is a form of monopoly as well.
Just because a resource is rivalrous doesn't mean more than one person couldn't be permitted to use it, particularly when you're talking about capital goods.
> Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree.
No, that's just a market. A necessary, but by no means sufficient condition to label an economy capitalist. That's why the new word "capitalism" has been introduced to describe the difference.
> Point being, markets are inherently capitalistic. Would you disagree with that?
Yes, absolutely. For a system to be capitalistic, you also have to have at least capital intensive means of production (hence the name), a real labor market and more or less free access to the market both as a consumer and a producer. Capitalism only started existing with the onset of the industrial revolution.
Reductio at absurdum: A Greek citizen in 200 BC is buying fish from a fisherman, with coins, at freely decided prices. Thats the market at work, but no capitalism at all.
Markets don't necessarily have to involve property, which is generally considered a key element of capitalism.
You could imagine (as a quick, not particularly explored example) a society where there's only a market for labour, and the state leases all durable goods, and sells or provides all consumables.
> Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both parties agree.
That depends on your definition of "capitalism" and "economy".
If you use "capitalism" in contrast to Mercantilism and feudalism – which seems to be a rather unpopular view in English-speaking countries for some reason –, then it makes perfectly sense.
The majority (representatives) vote a law that says we take money from some and give it to others. Democratic socialism seems like a reasonable name for it, even though it's not necessarily taking from the owners of the means of production nor necessarily giving to the working class. Though I guess welfare state is more "official".
For those struggling with this, the last three paragraphs sum up the author's thesis pretty well.
It's actually more of a critique of current leftist ideas (from a Left perspective) than anything.
quote:
Getting less work seems unlikely to come about without the fight for solidarity, the chief intellectual achievement of the workers’ movement, and one that none of the accelerationists see fit to mention as an ideal worth preserving or even renovating. This is despite the fact that automation—or, more broadly, the increasing precariousness of labor through technologically assisted means—has always been dialectically connected with it. What tech enthusiasts call“disruption” is in fact almost always directed at forms of organization that preserve a modicum of workers’ control over knowledge and the products of labor. Because London taxicabs are controlled by people who have built up impressive maps of one of the world’s most complex cities in their brains, they ought to be replaced by self-driving cars operating on Google Maps. Because high school teachers have professional systems of accreditation and training and have unions to protect these, they must be replaced by lower-paid short-term Ivy-League graduates and cyber charters.
Automation isn’t a neutral, inevitable part of capitalism. It comes about through the desire to break formal and informal systems of workers’ control—including unions—and replace them with managerially controlled and minutely surveilled systems of piecework. An entire political and legal infrastructure has been built up to make these so-called tendencies seem like the natural progression of capitalism, rather than the effects of fights—sometimes simple, sometimes violent—to deprive people of whatever sense of control they have over their work. The only reason such work has ever not been totally shitty is that some attempt to preserve such control was made. This — not some implausible notion of a fully automated postwork future—still remains the surest of utopian impulses, the one most likely to deliver the things we want.
Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the left will get better simply because it can, in principle, get better. An imaginative (if implausible) account of the future, accelerationism is a weak account of how anyone might be persuaded to get there. We recall Lenin’s comment about how communism would be “Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” The accelerationists seem to be telling us: forget about the Soviets, the electricity will do that work for us! But politics can’t get done by machines.
The way forward is not techno-communism. The problem is not over-competition or over-coorperation but over-centralization.
We can get the imagined benefits of techno-communism by getting better at systems integration through wider adoption of improved common technology platforms. For example, what if web assembly had a registry and semantic versioning like Node.js, and that became the standard for integrating B2B, government, and IoT? This would be a programming-language agnostic system. Systems for things like digital democracy, smart contracts, etc. could be easily deployed, integrated, and evolved.
The following link is another review of the same book by Paul Mason http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue73/Gillies73.pdf but it focuses more on the economic idea, apparently discussed in his book, that the digital economy features a zero marginal cost of production. Now, if the purpose of the economy is to allocate scarce goods what happens when digital goods dominate the economy and have zero marginal cost (wikipedia, arxiv, github, free software, etc.)? The idea that scarcity might disappear would seem to undermine the very foundation driving economic transactions.
I tried, honestly I tried. I tried to read it. I wanted to see the arguments because this is an area of interest to me.
But I can't write a tl;dr - it would not sink in my brain. Part overview of the area, part, something else, I really have no idea what the author was trying to say
> Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market capitalism’s erstwhile boosters.
I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it means. The same holds for entire paragraphs.
> > Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market capitalism’s erstwhile boosters.
> I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it means. The same holds for entire paragraphs.
Is that sentence really that hard to read? I mean, it's definitely overly flowery, but it means almost word-for-word "After many financial crises, there is a lot of economic pessimism around again, even among free-market capitalism's biggest proponents."
I didn't know an "erstwhile booster" is a person. Therefore, I thought "pronouncements" referred to something legal, instead of just a complicated word for "opinions". My best guess at the meaning of the sentence, therefore, was something completely different and nonsensical.
The whole article is like this. Misunderstand one flowery phrase, misunderstand the entire sentence, misunderstand the whole paragraph. It's like the author hates convincing people.
/shrug If those are familiar words to you, then I think it's a little harsh to say that they "hate convincing people" because they use them. Totally agree that a good author edits out rarer words to reach a broader audience, but I think that's a very weak vector of critique for the article as a whole.
TL;DR: The article is lamenting the inability of the modern, technocratic left to offer compelling paths forward out of the current economic stagnation.
* The editors point to previous boom/bust cycles, and the tendency of strong workers movements & chains of strikes/riots/unions to emerge during the bust periods and demand an economic shift towards greater workers rights / less control by capitalists.
* They then point out that no such strong workers movement is emerging in this bust cycle.
* They claim that this is because there is a strong line of "accelerationist" thinking among the modern left (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism). TL;DR on accelerationism: most of HN's libertarian leftism -- embrace automation, adopt basic income, make everyone their own producer (3D printing, off-the-grid electricity, etc.).
* The article claims that this movement will not succeed without significant political change alongside its technological advances, and that no such political effort is currently happening, as far as the editors can tell. "The potential alone for this sort of mass liberation isn’t a guarantee that it will ever take place"
" The old divisions of left and right seem to be falling apart and we don't know what's going to replace it yet"
The right is now collapsing into isolationist farce (Trunp being the epitome of what has happened across the Western world), the left is, well we aren't sure what. I agree with the final ideas - utopia is not destiny.
He's saying that peoples' rights will be protected through the action of the worker, not through new technology. There is something of a meme right now that we will singularity our way into a utopian era of plenty. The author is saying that this isn't something we get automatically, that the middle and lower class have to continue to struggle in order to benefit from advances in automation and dramatic increases in productivity.
The article is a lot of incoherent rambling indeed.
My interpretation: Capitalism is on its last legs, but the "new left" has no idea what will be next, other than there will be robots, there is basic income and it's better than what we have now, just because.
He is strongly critiquing the notion that "there will be robots, there is basic income and it's better than what we have now, just because." He labels this notion "Accelerationism", and then the final section tears it apart (even the section discussing it is constantly pointing out its flaws). To wit, the closing paragraph: "Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the left will get better simply because it can, in principle, get better. An imaginative (if implausible) account of the future, accelerationism is a weak account of how anyone might be persuaded to get there. [...] The accelerationists seem to be telling us: forget about [political effort], [automation] will do that work [of distributing power to the masses] for us! But politics can’t get done by machines."
> Democracy is simply voting, which can easily be handled by machines.
Voting is simply voting. If you insist on inventing a new definition, Democracy is a specific mode of a) gathering and representing the political will of the population; and b) a specific mode of forming that political will by the civil society. Voting is just the rather banal part of making the present aggregate political will visible and quantifiable. The most defining part of Democracy happens before the vote.
> I'm not sure b) is generally included in the definition of democracy. Could you reference something that implies that?
Its in most political science textbooks, and even on wikipedia, hidden in point 2 of the 4 point definition at the top.
Have a look at most socialist eastern european countries in the 1980s. You had multiple parties, and you could vote. But surly we both wouldn't describe that as democracy. What was missing? Formally, there wasn't much of a difference. Sure, you often had compulsory voting, but Australia has that too.
The missing part was the lack of an independent civic sector. You had no politically relevant NGOs, no independent unions etc. You couldn't simply create a new political party at will. The government was the only actor able to meaningfully influence the political landscape.
Ballot issues today can be passed directly by voters even when they are blatantly unconstitutional. Then the judicial branch sorts out the conflicts. That is essentially already a primitive example of democracy being run by voting machine.
Just because you are used to the current legislative system doesn't mean it isn't replaceable.
Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially, isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be got to work for everyone's advantage.