this video is part of a collaboration with youtuber Second Thought be sure to check out their video as soon as you're done watching this video i highly recommend their content imagining new sociopolitical systems can be quite hard one could even argue that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism one thing is for sure though capitalism as we know it will end maybe not soon but definitely at some point no social system lasts forever and after all capitalism is a far more chaotic and unstable order than most of those that preceded it it collapses almost every 10 years and that's without foreign intervention and internal sabotage this begs the question then what system will come next will it be something better or something much worse here we'll be speculating what life after capitalism could look like for better or for worse and we'll be going over four potential futures that could develop over the course of the next 50 years in particular we will be taking inspiration from the book: Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase the author considers possible features that could either be marked by scarcity or abundance the four possible futures that Peter Frase considers in his book go as follows Communism: egalitarianism and abundance Socialism: egalitarianism and scarcity Rentism: hierarchy and abundance Exterminism: hierarchy and scarcity before getting into these four possible futures there are a couple of key realities and assumptions about our changing world that we have to take into consideration one being climate change and the second being automation climate change is not only a threat but it is already happening we have been seeing higher temperatures and increased cases of floods droughts and forest fires ever since we opened up the economy towards the end of the coba 19 pandemic the scientific consensus about climate change is clear human carbon emissions are warming the atmosphere leading to hotter temperatures extreme weather and an increasing frequency of storms and droughts this could potentially lead to shortages of water and other resources the melting of sea ice and the acidification of oceans also risk releasing many viruses around the world the question is not so much whether the world will end or whether humans will be able to survive the question is who will survive rich people are already buying properties in gated communities within areas that are most safe from floods such as new zealand furthermore it's also worth understanding that it is highly unlikely that we will be able to combat climate change within a capitalist framework to substantially cut carbon emissions and toxic waste we need to drastically reduce mass consumption and production two things that capitalism requires to exist as it depends on perpetual upward economic growth now we must consider the second main existential issue that will define our future automation while there are varying estimates it is clear that over time more and more jobs can or will be replaced by automation and labor saving technologies robotics and 3d printing can replace repetitive tasks in industrial production while ai and machine learning threaten to computerize jobs in the service sector that we would normally think require human intelligence in a widely cited study using a detailed analysis of different occupations produced by the us department of labor oxford university researchers estimated that about 47 of current u.s jobs are susceptible to automation or computerization thanks to current technological developments the organization for economic cooperation and development uses the same source data but a different approach over a longer time frame and suggested that the figure could be as high as 80 percent regardless it should be clear at this point that the possibility of widespread automation in the near future is very real but why does automation occur in the first place to compete with other capitalists corporations will try to lower the cost of production as much as possible which is why capitalism has a tendency towards ever increasing automation this makes production ever more efficient but it also hinders the system's ability to create new jobs companies have an even greater incentive to automate labor the higher the labor costs are this puts workers in a dilemma asking for higher wages is good and necessary but it puts more industries at risks of automating their production but instead of settling for lower wages out of fear of losing jobs to automation we should be embracing automation demanding higher wages and also be demanding a universal basic income which will obviously be necessary for workers but it may even be necessary for the capitalist system to function as people will need money to consume commodities and with not enough jobs to go around demand will decline rapidly leading to declining growth which is something that capitalism obviously can't handle the generosity of the basic income provided will probably depend on the level of union activism and what we demand politically as mentioned earlier many industries are being automated and most of the jobs that we actually need in society are either starting to be replaced by automation or have the capability of being replaced automation has been rapidly overtaking many of the areas that until recently served as the capitalist economy's biggest motors of job creation from fully automatic car factories to computers that can diagnose medical conditions robotization is taking over not only just manufacturing but much of the service sector as well in fact many of the service sector jobs that are not being automated are arguably superfluous and unnecessary books such as [ __ ] jobs by anthropologist david graber do a good job of highlighting this jobs such as receptionists administrative assistants door attendants middle managers advertising jobs and many other office jobs are either capable of being automated or are completely just unnecessary for society taken to its logical end point automation could bring us to the point where the economy does not require human labor nearly as much this does not automatically bring about the end of wage labor but we'll increasingly face the possibility of freeing people from having to work merely just to exist and get life's basic necessities whether we take that opportunity and how we do so will depend on two key factors one being the question of resource scarcity the ability to find cheap sources of energy to extract or recycle raw materials and to generally depend on the earth's capacity to provide a high material standard of living to all and the second factor being socio-political will we be able to overcome capitalist ideology which holds the current system intact unless you are brainwashed into capitalist ideology or are lucky enough to find yourself within the top one percent of the economic hierarchy it should be obvious that automation is a nightmare under capitalism but it could be a dream come true for socialism the society in which a tiny elite owns all of the robots would be very dangerous indeed this is where we'll get into the four possible futures but before getting into it if you enjoy this type of content and want to keep it going please consider supporting the channel on patreon a lot of work and time is put into these videos and you won't find this level of quality on very many channels that don't have some sort of corporate funding or fan funding now let's start with the worst case scenario first and then talk about the best possible futures towards the end so while it may seem dark and gloomy at first it will get better i promise exterminism hierarchy and scarcity the revolutionary theorist rosa luxemburg famously said socialism or barbarism but the phrase should be more like socialism or extinction a society with both hierarchy and scarcity would be the most barbarous of our possible futures a deeply unequal society in which the environmental crisis is too late to ameliorate and in which resources are scarce what if we arrive in a future that no longer requires the labor of the mass working class but still possesses the same uneven class hierarchies of capitalism the combination of resource scarcity automation and hierarchy could lead to something very terrifying the greatest danger posed by the automation of production in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources is that the ruling elite are no longer reliant on the labor of the working class this consequently makes the masses of people useless from the standpoint of the ruling elite this would be highly different from the typical class conflict in capitalism as we know it where class conflict is defined by a simultaneous clash of interests and mutual dependence on one hand workers depend on capitalists for wages as long as the workers don't control the means of production themselves while on the other hand the capitalists need the workers to do the work for them or else nothing gets done and no profit is made this class conflict of mutual dependence is partly why many capitalist countries in the past and many today still have a form of a welfare state the existence of an impoverished unemployed working class that is organized politically poses a great danger to the ruling class which is partly why the capitalist state often tries to buy off the masses with wage increases government services and some degree of wealth redistribution when buying off the angry masses is no longer a sustainable strategy the capitalist state often resorts to totalitarianism but for the rich another option is to simply escape the poor through gated communities and private islands protected by private military contractors or they could possibly move to an entirely new planet a scenario depicted in the movie elysium with matt damon in a system with extreme hierarchy and scarcity and very little jobs to go around workers would be pit against each other and meant to compete for jobs as law enforcers or protectors for the wealthy but having a mass of angry poor people at bay is always a risk to the ruling class they could theoretically unite together and overthrow the capitalist class and take control of the means of production themselves and establish a entirely new society that actually benefits them to avoid this risk it is a possibility that the wealthy elite may resort to a dangerous path that peter freys calls exterminism this could take shape in multiple forms either in the form of biological population control or even flat out genocidal extermination if need be paying and arming one faction of the working class to wipe out the rest while such a level of extreme barbarism seems to morally outlandish to even be conceivable it is worth noting that the united states is the country that incarcerates the most amount of people in the world and forces them into forced prison labor and also casually kills thousands of people all the time with drones so while this would be a worst case scenario we cannot entirely rule out the possibility but such an extreme worst case scenario of barbarism might not even be necessary if resources turn out to be abundant the ruling class may be able to buy off the working class for longer while still maintaining their dominance and various forms of profit extraction this then begs the question what would a society with abundant resources vast advanced automation and a declining need for human labor look like while still having capitalist hierarchies this brings us to the next possible future rentism hierarchy and abundance with the prospect of widespread automation and abundant energy a communist society becomes a possibility but not necessarily an inevitability who owns the robots will own the world if both natural resources and labor-saving technologies are not commonly owned by some sort of socialist society then they could be easily monopolized by a small elite even if there is enough abundance for a communist society to occur and automation makes human labor less and less necessary the wealthy elite could still maintain their political hegemony over the masses and find tedious ways of extracting profit from them such as by collecting rents on property and monetizing access to software services which could be easily provided universally if they were commonly owned intellectual property for example could be one of the main tedious ways in which the wealthy extract rents from the masses intellectual property rights don't just allow companies to trademark certain ideas and restrict access to them but they can also give intellectual property rights holders the ability to tell others how to use the copies of their idea that they now legally own take for example a special 3d printer exists or a certain type of robot which can produce commodities or agricultural products if such means of production are not commonly owned but are instead owned by private capitalists those private capitalists could restrict access to those 3d printers and robots through intellectual property which would not only force people to pay for a license to use them but it would also allow the original owners to control how anyone else uses them not only would this reinforce the hegemony of the ruling elite but it could also potentially stifle innovation and productivity because if such labor-saving technologies were commonly owned and not just used for profit then we could do a lot more with them and more people could benefit from them while rantism and intellectual property already exists in capitalist societies today a system that is no longer based so much on wage labor and continuous reinvestment to achieve higher economic growth would look something a little bit different to capitalism economists like Yanis Varoufakis for example argue that capitalism is transforming into what he calls neo-feudalism as inequality is reaching past feudalism levels and the ruling class are getting wealth not just from direct profits but more and more from rents for example companies like microsoft google and facebook don't make money just by selling commodities made by wage labor they simply charge money for access to services which could be easily maintained at a zero marginal cost facebook and google essentially collect rents from companies looking to advertise on their platform by selling users data to companies who will pay for it you could say the same about internet companies like verizon and atnt so even in a society with widespread automation and abundant resources that could allow a post-scarcity society to flourish capitalists could easily reintroduce scarcity through intellectual property law and other means to an extent this problem has already been impeding the world's ability to deal with the global covid pandemic it is no surprise that billionaires like bill gates strongly oppose weaving vaccine patents because companies like microsoft already make a great deal of their fortune from intellectual property with widespread automation and less jobs to go around capitalist societies would essentially have to introduce some form of universal basic income that would allow us to consume stuff and let's assume that this universal basic income was somewhat generous and we had more free time from work than we normally do which would be a good thing however the rentus elite could still colonize our leisure time in order to extract free labor facebook and google essentially already do this economists like janice varufarkis argue that we should be texting google and facebook to fund a modest universal basic income as after all these companies make money from our data that being said maintaining a semi-capitalist rent is society that is based on artificial scarcity and significantly high unemployment would probably not be very sustainable for long some theorists out there think that capitalism's tendency towards automation might bring about its own demise for instance books like jeremy rifkin's zero marginal cost society and paul mason's post-capitalism hypothesized that eventually due to automation and labor-saving technologies like 3d printing many goods and services will be able to be produced at such low costs that capitalism will experience a declining rate of profit to the point where capitalism just won't make sense of course this viewpoint is a little bit determinist and even utopian and it overlooks the problem of artificial scarcity and the fact that to truly utilize the full potential of labor-saving technologies we need a fundamental change in our political order from a capitalist one to a socialist one a rentest semi-capitalist society can only persist as long as people accept the legitimacy of its governing hierarchy it depends on whether the power of ideology would be strong enough to get people to accept the status quo or perhaps people would start to ask why the wealth of resources technologies knowledge and culture is being limited by restrictive laws artificial scarcity and arbitrary hierarchies without the blindfold of neoliberal ideology it would become evident that a post-scarcity communist world is possible before imagining what a post-scarcity communist world could look like we should consider what a socialist society with scarcity could look like socialism egalitarianism and scarcity what if labor-saving technologies are able to drastically reduce the amount of necessary labor time while on the other hand energy and resources were to become scarce it's possible that natural resources like iron lithium cobalt water and many more will become increasingly scarce and it is not a guarantee that space exploration will be able to find more plus climate change threatens to wreak havoc on the world's food system causing droughts and floods that could seriously threaten agriculture unlike the highly dystopian society of exterminism discussed earlier things could look very different in a socialist society in this society the need to oppress the working class disappears but the need to manage scarcity still remains this would inevitably require some form of economic planning preferably one that is democratic if you want to understand how economic planning works and why it does work i highly recommend checking out the book called the people's republic of walmart but with the technological advancements we have today particularly in the field of cybernetics and quantum computing economic planning is more possible than ever while planning the entire economy probably won't be necessary desirable or even possible planning certain aspects of the economy that are scarce and in high demand will be vital a climate catastrophe would probably require global coordination as well a completely localist approach to socialism would be very difficult and arguably unrealistic theorists like slavoy zizek have advocated for global economic planning which he argues will also be necessary for combating potential virus pandemics in this third future of socialism with scarcity then people no longer have to work nearly as much just to survive yet people are also not free to consume as much as they like and even though capitalistic economic classes will be presumably abolished some kind of government will probably be required to distribute resources making pure communism a stateless society an unlikely option given the need to determine and maintain stable levels of consumption and thus set prices the state can't entirely weather away just yet as it does in that communist scenario and where there is scarcity there will surely be some sort of political conflict even though if it is no longer the same class conflict however this form of socialism does not have to adopt the exact same systems as previously existing socialist countries did we can learn from the drawbacks and the benefits in addition to being sabotaged by catastrophic wars and economic sanctions experiments like the ussr yugoslavia cuba vietnam and china started off with significantly lower levels of development and did not have the access to the technology that exists today facing this underdevelopment these countries resorted to modes of production that could be described as capitalistic while having some form of socialist redistribution despite this however these systems were nevertheless able to drastically improve their societies just look at the development from before versus after their transition to socialism if you even want to call it socialism which is more a matter of semantic debate the point is that different socio-economic conditions lead to different outcomes after all marx himself thought that communism would be impossible without first passing through the stage of capitalism which he saw as a necessary evil that would exploit workers to death but would develop the forces of production and create a lot of wealth which could then be distributed and utilized for the common good during the transition to communism with the exception of the exploited global south most of the global north countries like america canada and western europe are already highly developed and we are starting to have access to labor civic technologies which can accelerate production while giving people more free time from work which could potentially one day allow us to transition to the fourth and most promising future communism an egalitarian society with abundance but as mentioned before if a worsening climate crisis and disappointing results of space exploration make this possibility too late then we can settle for a socialism where we are given life's basic necessities and more freedom from work but still have a limitation as to how much we can consume maybe it won't be fully automated luxury communism but maybe we can get a partially automated socialism but assuming resources are not scarce and climate change is slightly ameliorated or we happen to find an abundance of natural resources in outer space then let's envision what a full communism with abundance could look like communism egalitarianism and abundance it is already hard to escape the capitalist mind prison but it is even harder to imagine what full communism could look like the term fully automated luxury communism has been popularized by theorist aaron bastiani in his book of the same title this book deserves a video of its own and it has quite a lot of compelling insights and evidence despite what the goofy title might suggest this might all sound like an impossible utopian yet the trend of widespread automation could very well make this a possibility or at the very least allow us to start liberating people from work we can try to envision a classless society of abundance that was envisioned by theorists like karl marx a partially automated communism perhaps a communist post-scarcity society would require a combination of labor-saving technologies with an alternative to the current unsustainable energy system that still exists today which is limited by the physical scarcity and ecological destructiveness of fossil fuels once again this is not a guarantee but there are hopeful signs of progress for instance the cost of producing and operating solar panels has been falling dramatically over the past decade and based on their current trajectory they will soon be cheaper than our current electricity sources now the notion of post work tends to confuse a lot of people people often think about this issue in a very binary way in which either we live in a society where we don't work at all or we work in a society where we have to work just to survive and be entitled to life's basic necessities and this really misses the point in a post-scarcity society it's not like all work would be abolished in the sense that we would all just sit around like sloths as karl marx put it labor would become not only a means of life but life's prime want people could just continue doing whatever activities hobbies and projects that they did out of their own will because they found them inherently fulfilling not because of a needed wage the profit motive is unnecessary especially considering the degree to which many decisions about work are already driven by non-material incentives among those who are privileged enough to have the option millions choose to go to graduate school study degrees with little job prospects become social workers make music make art or start small organic farms even when there are far more lucrative careers open to them it is also worth noting that even this post-scarcity communist future would most likely still require some sort of human labor for certain occupations that can't be automated we would most likely have to have a certain level of labor hours to complete in exchange for labor vouchers which could then be used to purchase leisure products and services provided by small worker cooperatives perhaps those who put in more labor time could get access to more labor vouchers which they could then use to purchase more goods and services thus while arbitrary economic classes would be abolished there would not be an equality of outcome which is essentially impossible rather society would be formulated according to need and ability from each according to his ability to each according to his needs although there are many possible ways to allocate the necessary labor that a communist society would still need to do i would recommend looking into the various theories of michael albert and paul cockshot who hold different compelling ideas anyhow outlining the specific workings of a full communist post-scarcity future is beyond the scope of this video and it will be a project that we will talk about in a future video series on post-capitalism which won't be for a while due to the rigorous amount of research that will be needed the demise of wage labor may seem like a far away dream today but at one point american and european labor movements used to demand shorter working hours as opposed to just higher wages and employment workerism and the protestant work ethic is an ideology that must be overcome to get past wage labor economically we must get past it socially the idea of post-scarcity communism has been loosely represented in one of the most popular works of science fiction star trek now keep in mind even a post-scarcity communist world would still have its own conflicts and contradictions rather than one in which we all live in perfect harmony and politics comes to a halt there would probably be some sort of social hierarchies probably based on reputation and clout but if it's not a vision of a perfect society this version of communism is at least a world in which conflict is no longer based on arbitrary classes and control over scarce resources and the means of production it is a world in which not everything is decided by money to conclude these four different futures are useful to speculate about but we might not necessarily only get one of them we could get them all and the author of the book for futures notes that there are paths that lead from one future to all the others and in many ways aspects of all four of the futures are already partially here but it's ultimately up to us the masses to build up the collective power and organization to fight for the futures that we desire if you enjoyed this video and want to see more unique content like this please consider supporting us on patreon thanks very much to the patrons who have supported me thus far also i would highly recommend checking out the for futures book by peter freys which this video was essentially based on links in the description it's an excellent read highly recommend buying it see you in the next video you
2021-10-16