Well, Iain M. Banks' SF - the 'Culture' with orbitals and AIs as adult supervision, sort of - had at least three of the adjectives checked, and seemed past concern about the fourth ...
- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors
- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.
- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera
- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.
- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily
I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.
I’ve been enjoying Karl Widerquist’s “Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No”, which notes that access to natural resources is an important input as well. That is, one form of freedom is a freedom to use a proportion of Earth’s natural resources to meet one’s own needs. While many may contract into a system to provide e.g. defense or luxuries, the lack of choice in the “social contract” as regards property rights can nonetheless be interpreted as a regrettable loss of a form of freedom.
In other words, while labor is required to sustain human life, different forms of labor should not be considered fungible — I am happy to labor to directly feed and shelter myself, but may be less accommodating to serving others in exchange for a form of these benefits.
Marx begins to deal with this in his theories of rent; a more accurate criticism of Bastiani would be that he believes one can have profit without surplus. It is obvious, and was so when Marx was writing, that not all profit is due to exploitation of labour.
While there might be some puritanism in there, I think the implication is these theoretical errors lead to erroneous conclusions. I.e: Bastani is using certain conclusions from Marx, while changing certain premises, and not doing the work to then argue the conclusions still hold. I didn't read the piece closey enough (and my Marx isn't strong enough) to really go in-depth there though.
But the exchange of labor has nothing to do with profit, since financialization. There have been many smart people for decades now, making this be so. It's very important today to come up with profit scenarios that don't depend on labor in any way.
'nothing to do with profit' is a pretty strong claim. I think Marxists (and others) would argue that the two are stochastically linked. Decreases in the value of a good (the amount of labour-time used to generate it) roughly tracks with a decrease in the price (and thus amount of profit that the producer gets for each item) over longer time frames. I think that's what the author was implicitly referring to but I may be wrong!
As for financialization and profit: I think contemporary labour-value theorists, and even Marx, talk about fincancialization as 'fictitious capital'. The 'value' of financial instruments comes from the claim on future labour-time, and is thus generally parasitic for a well-functioning economy. Cedric Durad is a recent example of this. I'm stepping into territory I know very little about though, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt / generously.
It's worth adding to this: even if the LTV would not hold in its "quantitative" form, which it is often only taken to be, even given the power of financialization in the last century there is reason to believe it would hold at least qualitatively. Several leading Marx value-theorists argue that the theory does not work (or could not work) on the level of the individual commodity, as illustrated by Marx, but only on an aliquot representative of the lot.
Next, theories of exploitation regarding labour are going strong; they don't feel challenged by the idea of the financialization of social labour. For example, there is the theory of unequal exchange (UE) exploitation in which one agent (the exploiter) among other factors contributes less labour than the exploited, but receives the same or greater amount of labour back (i.e in the form of goods and services). There are two principles at work by which analytical Marxists have analyzed exploitation: the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle and the Class-Exploitation Correspondence Principle. I'd recommend looking at the work of Roberto Veneziani and Naoki Yoshihara (both academic economists) on this matter.
Finally, there is some work arguing for the fact of exploitation or the status of the LTV in financial capitalism[0][1][2]. I would not say that financialization poses a serious problem to Marx's value theory, which is primarily a social theory of production - any society must reproduce itself through labour, which forms the material basis of survival of all within that society. There is disagreement as to how the LTV works regarding "non-freely reproducible" commodities, which in today's capitalism come in the form of goods protected by copyright and trademarks. The theory Marx proposed was never meant to deal with this, so I wouldn't say it's a defect in the theory, only that the theory lacks some explanatory power. But neoclassical theories of value also lack the ability to explain the price of such goods.
If current population growth estimates are to be believed, the world population is projected to peak at around 12 billion people. The fertility rates in large parts of the world (North America, Europe, East Asia) are already below replacement level and others around the world are falling.
It’s a reasonably interesting topic and an important one to discuss - but I’d caution that Aaron Bastani is generally a bit of a controversial left- wing provocateur figure with a knack for mis-predicting events, and his book mostly has middling reviews.
None of that is to say you shouldn’t read it and consider it in the context of the future of automation, but expect a somewhat over-earnest political manifesto rather than a critical analysis.
> In the twenty-first century, new technologies should liberate us from work.
No they won't, because if you don't own the machines or robots or whatever it is that makes automation do its thing, you won't be liberated from work.
> Technological advance will reduce the value of commodities—food, healthcare and housing—towards zero.
Maybe the author should contemplate what happens with market price of inputs (such as labor) when selling prices of final products and services drop to almost zero.
That's right, your paycheck would also drop to almost zero.
> showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone.
Meaningful freedom (as defined by redistributionists): don't work, leech off other people's work or property in order to enjoy and prolong your useless life. I say useless, because if you don't work and have never produced anything you could sell or charge for in free market, what is your use or value to the world?
At least one thing is clear: they call for communism. Which means the only way it can work - for a few years anyway - is they steal, redistribute and consume wealth created by others, until it's all gone. But maybe we worry too much - it's going to be automated (AI, sensors, smart algos, what-have-you), so it can't possibly fail. Right?
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/fully-automat...
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