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https://dissidences.hypotheses.org/14627
"Finally, I am indebted to the many people who fought for a political settlement which gave me free healthcare and cheap Without you I would not be alive, let alone writing a book. There is no greater source of inspiration for the struggles that lie ahead than your accomplishments, which, although in the past, abide in the present."
"We have faced changes as momentous as those which now confront us twice before. The first was around twelve thousand years ago as Homo sapiens, our ancestors, began to engage in agriculture for the first time. This consisted in the domestication of animals and crops, practically grasping how biological features can be bred both in and out of species. It wasn’t long before we had farming, animals performing labour and a relative abundance of food. This in turn created the social surplus necessary for the transition to sedentary society and with it cities, writing and culture. In short, life would never be the same again. This was both the end of something – hundreds of millennia of human ‘prehistory’ – and the start of something else. It was the First Disruption.
After that not much would change for thousands of years. Yes, there was progress, as civilisations emerged and empires conquered, but fundamentally, the same sources of light, energy and warmth were available five thousand years ago as five hundred years ago. Life expectancy depended more on geography, social status and war than on technology and, until the last few centuries, most people ’s ‘work’ involved subsistence agriculture.
Then, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a new transformation began. The steam engine – along with coal – became the backbone of the Industrial Revolution and the first machine age. While it had taken all of recorded history for the world’s human population to reach 1 billion, it would take little more than a century to double once more. Now, new vistas of abundance opened up, with extended life expectancy, near-universal literacy, and increased production of just about everything. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was once again clear that something so seismic had taken place that, for better or worse, there was no going back. This was the Second Disruption.
The present conjuncture offers a rupture just as significant as these two earlier moments. As with the Second Disruption it will offer relative liberation from scarcity in vital areas energy, cognitive labour and information rather than simply the mechanical power of the Industrial Revolution. As with the First it will signal a departure from all history before it, heralding a beginning more than a final destination. But this Third Disruption – now in its opening decades – is still to be contested, and its consequences remain uncertain. While the forces underpinning it are already present – as will be highlighted over the following chapters – an appropriate politics remains unclear. Importantly, its possibilities are such that they call into question some of the basic assumptions of our social and economic system. Thus, far from being confronted with a choice between change and inertia, a world dramatically different from our own is both inevitable and near at hand. The key question is this one: In whose interests will it be created ?" (pp.10-11)
"We examine seemingly disparate technologies – in automation, energy, resources, health and food – before concluding that the foundations are cohering for a society beyond both scarcity and work. Nothing is certain about where these technologies will end, nor whose benefit they will serve. What is discernible, however, is that a disposition can be drawn from them – if only they are allied to a political project of collective solidarity and individual happiness.
This is why Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) is a politics rather than some inevitable future. To that end, it requires a strategy for our times while carving new figureheads for utopia, outlining the world as it could be and where to begin." (p.12)
"‘Brexit’ was the most important political moment in Europe for a generation." (p.21)
"The Trussell Trust, which operates the largest food bank network in the country, claims to have delivered around 41,000 food packs in 2010. By 2017 that had risen to 1.2 million after nine consecutive years of rising demand for their services. While the increased use of food banks in the UK is partially the result of disastrous welfare reforms, it also reflects something observable on both sides of the Atlantic: being in work no longer guarantees escaping poverty – quite the opposite." (p.24)
"Since 2008, real pay in Britain, which takes inflation into account, has dropped by more than 10 per cent. It should come as little surprise, then, that nearly 17 million Brits of working age have less than £100 in personal savings. In the United States it’s a similar story, with 63 per cent of Americans saying they have $500 or less put aside.
The other pillar of consent for twentieth-century capitalism, of property-ownership as the complement to democracy, is in similar retreat. In Britain, where the Conservative Noel Skelton coined the term ‘property-owning democracy’ in 1923, home-ownership is at its lowest level since 1985 and continues to fall. It’s even worse in the US, though, where a combination of high prices, low wages and little credit means the average American is less likely to own their own home than at any time since 1965." (p.25)
-Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism : A Manifesto, Verso, Londres / New York, 2019, 278 pages.
https://www.marathi.tv/political-analyst/aaron-bastani-novara-media/#:~:text=%20%20%201%20Aaron%20Bastani%20was%20born,dad%20was%20born%20in%20Iran%20and...%20More%20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novara_Media
https://www.anti-k.org/2019/11/29/aaron-bastani-nous-sommes-en-train-de-vivre-les-dernieres-decennies-du-capitalisme/
https://novaramedia.com/2016/03/17/the-fix-euref-can-there-be-a-left-wing-brexit/
-Aaron Bastani, Communisme de luxe. Un monde d'abondance grâce aux nouvelles technologies,
"Finally, I am indebted to the many people who fought for a political settlement which gave me free healthcare and cheap Without you I would not be alive, let alone writing a book. There is no greater source of inspiration for the struggles that lie ahead than your accomplishments, which, although in the past, abide in the present."
"We have faced changes as momentous as those which now confront us twice before. The first was around twelve thousand years ago as Homo sapiens, our ancestors, began to engage in agriculture for the first time. This consisted in the domestication of animals and crops, practically grasping how biological features can be bred both in and out of species. It wasn’t long before we had farming, animals performing labour and a relative abundance of food. This in turn created the social surplus necessary for the transition to sedentary society and with it cities, writing and culture. In short, life would never be the same again. This was both the end of something – hundreds of millennia of human ‘prehistory’ – and the start of something else. It was the First Disruption.
After that not much would change for thousands of years. Yes, there was progress, as civilisations emerged and empires conquered, but fundamentally, the same sources of light, energy and warmth were available five thousand years ago as five hundred years ago. Life expectancy depended more on geography, social status and war than on technology and, until the last few centuries, most people ’s ‘work’ involved subsistence agriculture.
Then, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a new transformation began. The steam engine – along with coal – became the backbone of the Industrial Revolution and the first machine age. While it had taken all of recorded history for the world’s human population to reach 1 billion, it would take little more than a century to double once more. Now, new vistas of abundance opened up, with extended life expectancy, near-universal literacy, and increased production of just about everything. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was once again clear that something so seismic had taken place that, for better or worse, there was no going back. This was the Second Disruption.
The present conjuncture offers a rupture just as significant as these two earlier moments. As with the Second Disruption it will offer relative liberation from scarcity in vital areas energy, cognitive labour and information rather than simply the mechanical power of the Industrial Revolution. As with the First it will signal a departure from all history before it, heralding a beginning more than a final destination. But this Third Disruption – now in its opening decades – is still to be contested, and its consequences remain uncertain. While the forces underpinning it are already present – as will be highlighted over the following chapters – an appropriate politics remains unclear. Importantly, its possibilities are such that they call into question some of the basic assumptions of our social and economic system. Thus, far from being confronted with a choice between change and inertia, a world dramatically different from our own is both inevitable and near at hand. The key question is this one: In whose interests will it be created ?" (pp.10-11)
"We examine seemingly disparate technologies – in automation, energy, resources, health and food – before concluding that the foundations are cohering for a society beyond both scarcity and work. Nothing is certain about where these technologies will end, nor whose benefit they will serve. What is discernible, however, is that a disposition can be drawn from them – if only they are allied to a political project of collective solidarity and individual happiness.
This is why Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) is a politics rather than some inevitable future. To that end, it requires a strategy for our times while carving new figureheads for utopia, outlining the world as it could be and where to begin." (p.12)
"‘Brexit’ was the most important political moment in Europe for a generation." (p.21)
"The Trussell Trust, which operates the largest food bank network in the country, claims to have delivered around 41,000 food packs in 2010. By 2017 that had risen to 1.2 million after nine consecutive years of rising demand for their services. While the increased use of food banks in the UK is partially the result of disastrous welfare reforms, it also reflects something observable on both sides of the Atlantic: being in work no longer guarantees escaping poverty – quite the opposite." (p.24)
"Since 2008, real pay in Britain, which takes inflation into account, has dropped by more than 10 per cent. It should come as little surprise, then, that nearly 17 million Brits of working age have less than £100 in personal savings. In the United States it’s a similar story, with 63 per cent of Americans saying they have $500 or less put aside.
The other pillar of consent for twentieth-century capitalism, of property-ownership as the complement to democracy, is in similar retreat. In Britain, where the Conservative Noel Skelton coined the term ‘property-owning democracy’ in 1923, home-ownership is at its lowest level since 1985 and continues to fall. It’s even worse in the US, though, where a combination of high prices, low wages and little credit means the average American is less likely to own their own home than at any time since 1965." (p.25)
-Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism : A Manifesto, Verso, Londres / New York, 2019, 278 pages.
https://www.marathi.tv/political-analyst/aaron-bastani-novara-media/#:~:text=%20%20%201%20Aaron%20Bastani%20was%20born,dad%20was%20born%20in%20Iran%20and...%20More%20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novara_Media
https://www.anti-k.org/2019/11/29/aaron-bastani-nous-sommes-en-train-de-vivre-les-dernieres-decennies-du-capitalisme/
https://novaramedia.com/2016/03/17/the-fix-euref-can-there-be-a-left-wing-brexit/
-Aaron Bastani, Communisme de luxe. Un monde d'abondance grâce aux nouvelles technologies,
