⋆｡ ﾟ☁︎｡ ⋆｡ ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡ ⋆

Contemporary utopians only consider the efficiency and the abundance of goods and services without sufficiently taking into account the qualitative and material side of production, that is, the autonomy and independence of workers and the sustainability of the natural environment. Their vision of an economy of abundance based on market-driven innovations ends up reinforcing the real subsumption under capital and easily turns into the means of further expropriation from nature and surveillance over workers. Since alienation of work cannot be overcome in this way, fully automated post-capitalism propagates an alternative hope that everyone keeps driving electronic SUVs, changing smartphones every two years and eating cultured meat hamburgers. Such a vision of the luxury future obviously sounds attractive to many people in the Global North because ecological modernization assures them that they do not need to change anything about their extravagant lifestyle. This kind of abundant future appeals to the satisfaction of people's immediate desires without challenging the current imperial mode of living in the Global North. The problem is, however, that such a vision accepts too uncritically existing value-standards and consumerist ideals. It ends up reproducing the social relations marked by oppression, inequality and exploitation that are inherent to capitalism.

Paradoxically, hidden under the optimistic tone of this technocratic vision is actually a pessimistic 'capitalist realism' that holds that there is no strong class struggle to challenge the existing social relations and to fundamentally detach from the capitalist mode of living. People are deprived of the power to transform the system, and this is why technology must play a central role to fill the void left by agency. In fact, this transformation can be implemented without strong social movements, and its promise of a comfortable life appear attractive. Such a productivist vision of post-capitalism ends up endorsing capitalist value- standards under the guise of a grandiose emancipatory project for infinite production and consumption. It gives up the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class and accepts the reified agency of machines as the subject of history.

“…she bloomed in his hands.”