This does helpfully get at the reason I think “fully automated luxury gay space communism,” as fun as it is to say, is such a red herring.

There is no arbitrary point of abundance at which we can automatically throw off the shackles of capitalism, because there’s just so much stuff that we can all live in comfort and aren’t held hostage by capitalists’ control over production and access to material amenities.

Because we already produce so much fucking stuff! It’s everywhere! There’s so much of it that we end up throwing a lot of it away and now there’s a gigantic garbage patch in the Pacific bigger than whole countries! And still these freaks are excited about being able to compel workers to expand their productivity a hundred times over.

*It will never be enough for them.* Their appetite is infinitely insatiable. There will never be some natural point at which we can say “that’s enough, we can ignore them now.”

Surpluses and scarcity and abundance are all social artifacts. We create and define them together. There is no natural cut-off. We’re going to have to do the hard work of throwing off these parasites ourselves.