What is Reddit's opinion of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work?

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I recommend reading Inventing the future. It argues for full automation and universal basic income. If we tax the robots it will discourage automation and productivity increases which will be detrimental to everyone's standard of living. Instead we should encourage automation and the sharing of the gains made by it.

As for the first part of your post, two points.

1. I suggest you read (if you haven't already) Srnicek & Williams -- Inventing the Future. It revolves around criticism of the "localist" politics you speak about. It's pretty to the Left, and since I'm not familiar with your political views, it might not be your cup of tea. Still, it covers a lot of good material.

> Meanwhile the rest of the global population is rapidly crawling out of poverty. They want electric light after sunset, they want a washing machine, they want a refrigerator and they want a bus-stop near their house. Most of all they want food, sanitation and medicine.

I agree completely. However, it seems to me that most reasonable people who argue for green and degrowth policies are aware of this, and limit their arguments to rich, industrialized countries.

Similarly for the second part, and here's where Srnicek&Williams' book comes in, it's possible to lead sustainable, high tech, and eco friendly lives in the cities. There needn't be only one, reactionary, "rural" flavour of green policies. But again, I'm sure most of the green economists are aware of this -- we just don't get to hear them often enough.

For some further reading on this topic I recommend Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. They do a great job of explaining how our current neoliberal global economy was established and what the implications of automation are in the 21st century.

Submission Statement

In essence this article is a book review of <em>Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work</em> by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, but delves deeper into the themes discussed in the book. The article talks about the history of neoliberalism and draws some interesting parallels with it as a utopian concept as much as any left wing ideals of the post-war period.

Quite a long read, but insightful. First of a series on the site discussing neoliberalism.

Totaly agree. Maybe you heard about the book called 'inventing the future' it talks about full automation :) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inventing-Future-Postcapitalism-World-Without/dp/1784780960

Accelerationism when taken to its logical conclusion certainly eludes categorization along left-right lines, this often leaves people with the impression that it, for whatever reason, relishes in inequality. Such was the case with all of the Yudkowskian right-accelerationists from almost a decade ago; media outlets are just now getting onto the bandwagon in smearing transhumanists as fascists as a result.. justifiably so. Recent left-accelerationist currents, exemplified in the works of Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek fall prey to reterritorializing arguments which leaves us with the urcC's even more recent notions of "unconditional accelerationism" which in many ways takes a closer of look at Landian analysis of capital and tries to bring it forward in a way that's actually conducive towards something substantial. Although as far as I'm concerned, how much it differs from the more radical elements of left-accelerationism remains to be seen.

> The regressive left isn't just unable to tell the difference between Muslims and Islam, they have don't believe Islam is a problem at all. This is because of cultural relativism - all ideas are valid, including Islam. In addition, they are very Euro-centric. They think that supporting secularism, feminism, etc is "cultural imperialism," because they think that those are Western ideas. I can name many cultures and places which had versions of those ideas long before the modern West. I call this the Western monopoly on good ideas, and the regressives fully embrace it. At the same time, they can't imagine that many people around the world would like secularism, feminism, etc, because they think those are Western inventions and thus Western exclusive ideas. > So while I recognize that the regressives may be helping fight bigotry, they are not only doing it the wrong way, they are part of the problem. Euro-centrism combined with cultural relativism (odd to see them together) don't help secularists outside of the West.

In my experience, such cultural relativism/euro-centrism is so minimal in its existence and effects, that it is negligible in the struggle to liberate free thinkers in Muslim World. I'm telling with all honesty, it is mostly hyped rhetoric. It seems to have amounted to scapegoating, out of fear of truly challenging the real decision makers (capitalist class).

I am sincerely and fully assuring you, as a person immersed in Western society and politics, that the so called 'regressives' are just an illusion. A strawman. To move towards any meaningful change we need to re-prioritize our finite energy and not use it all up attacking the strawman.

>It's important to note, which those on the Marxist side usually don't, that these are not "goals" of capitalism.

No Marxist analysis of Capitalism declares the three problems you listed as "goals". Instead, according to Marxist framework they are inevitable consequences of Capitalism due to it's built in inherent mechanism of capital accumulation.

A passage from here clarifies:

>The desirability of monopoly, from the perspective of a capitalist, is self-evident: it lowers risk and increases profits. No sane owner or business wishes more competition; the rational move is always to seek as much monopoly power as possible and carefully avoid the nightmare world of the powerless competitive firm of economics textbooks. Once a firm achieves economic concentration and monopoly power, it is maintained through barriers to entry that make it prohibitively costly and risky for would-be competitors successfully to invade an oligopolistic or monopolistic industry—though such barriers to entry remain relative rather than absolute. Creating and maintaining barriers to entry is essential work for any corporation. In his authoritative study, The Economics of Industrial Organization, William Shepherd provides a list of twenty-two different barriers to entry commonly used by firms to exclude competitors and maintain monopoly power.

>Monopoly, in this sense, is the logical result of competition, and should be expected. It is in the DNA of capitalism. For Karl Marx, capital tended to grow ever larger in a single hand, partly as a result of a straightforward process of concentration of capital (accumulation proper), and even more as a result of the centralization of capital, or the absorption of one capital by another. In this struggle, he wrote, “the larger capitals,” as a rule, “beat the smaller…. Competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the rival capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their competitors, and partly vanish completely. Apart from this, an altogether new force comes into existence with the development of capitalist production: the credit system.” Credit or finance, available more readily to large firms, becomes one of the two main levers, along with competition itself, in the centralization process. By means of mergers and acquisitions, the credit system can create huge, centralized agglomerations of capital in the “twinkling of an eye.” The results of both concentration and centralization are commonly referred to as economic concentration.

Now as far as transforming this mechanism that is driven by social relations of Private Property, Wage Labor and Rent, again I agree with the two things you listed. In some ways similar to ideas laid out in this book:

Inventing the Future

More on the mechanism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_mode_of_production_(Marxist_theory)

Nice to see what looks like a poster plug for this excellent book.