Mathijs van de Sande 🟥🔻

Preparing tomorrow's seminar, in which students and I will be reading Aaron Benanav's "Automation and the Future of Work" (2020).

What I personally find particularly appealing about this book, is that it shows why a more realist take on automation and its impact on work may at the same time be a lot more radical than the overly techno-optimistic "Fully Automated Luxury Communism"-takes that appear to be in vogue today. As Benanav argues:

"If full automation can appear as both a dream and a nightmare, that is because it has no innate association with human dignity, and because it will not generate a post-scarcity world by itself. Nor will universal basic income."

Cool stuff, check it out: https://www.versobooks.com/books/4029-automation-and-the-future-of-work

Verso

Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

Nov 10, 2022 at 4:45pmWeb
Show threadAlex PrichardDec 3, 2022
@MathijsvdSande Bought this on this recommendation. It’s great when you find a book that articulates what you couldn’t. He’s nailed it. I have always though the statism needed to realise mainstream #UBI was utopian. Nice to see Kropotkin pitched as a realist for our age, but time for a general return to #Proudhon too, methinks. A third of War and Peace speaks to the question of ‘necessity vs freedom’, and Proudhon argues peace only possible through what #Benanav calls ‘conquest of production’