The conflict between full automation on the one hand...

Reforms stave off revolution, they don't encourage it.

I think Nick Srnicek has gone on record stating his preferred solution to delema of economic calculation is basically something along the lines of Chile's Project Cybersyn, which would be pretty dope I think.

*dilemma

I don't think this is actually true, all worse conditions lead to is a further and further dejected working class that continues to lose hope in class struggle, reforms are important in order to build up a healthy working class and to raise class consciousness. Remember, even the Bolsheviks participated in parliamentary politics, it's a tactic, not an end goal.

There are better methods now that require minimal human interaction, but he has the right idea. That's also what I envision.

Exchange value in the economy is produced by human labor, (for competitively produced goods that is, something like yu-gi-oh cards are an exception not the rule) as scarcity under competition is essentially how much human labor is required to acquire something.
As the content of human labor embodies in goods goes down over time, the amount of value produced goes down as well (you can see it reflected in the price of goods, unless you have massive state expenditure purchasing and destroying goods, AKA the war economy, which keeps prices from falling by sustaining heightened demand.)
The decrease in value produced over time compared to the increasing relative cost of capital necessary to produce that value causes falling profits over the whole of capitalism. There is evidence this trend has been behind most economic crisis and is why there are always pushes for neoliberalism.

Capitalism only works when the worker goes out to produce value for the capitalist, and is then paid a wage which he uses to buy back the products of his labor. If the worker doesn't work, he doesn't produce value and he doesn't get a wage. You can give him some money regardless through UBI and have him buy the stuff with that, but if he's not producing any value for you, you're essentially just circulating your own money around. Automation would break the basic mechanism through which capitalism works by making wage labor an impossibility. It would also make the solution very obvious to the dispossessed proles: make the robots work for the benefit of all rather than a small elite - in order words, abolish private property over the means of production.

cost of living keeps increasing though

Well I don't think he meant it in the literal sense, with the Star Trek chairs and everything, I think he was just saying it was a more democratic way to create a planned economy using contemporary computing technology then something like Paul Cockshott's vision.

The numerous contradictions of capitalism are beginning to compound on one another to the point that it increasingly unable to function. In short, because of how finance capitalism functions, trillions are being funneled into the hands of financiers who do nothing with it, and because of declining wages the pool of available capital in the advanced economies are drying up as they become monopolized by the bourgeoisie also.

Ideally this pool of available capital would be replenished by the loans the banking sector is supposed to create in order to get things to work. You want to build a restaurant, so you take out a loan and build it, and the workers that profited from that construction patronise it, and everyone's happy. In this ideal scenario, the bank profits on the loan, the restaurant gets built, and then there are people that can afford to eat there because presumably there are other industries taking out other loans, etc.

Finance capital's innovation is skipping all of that and just creating tremendous loans and then giving it all to financiers to invest, which instead of building restaurants, they buy paper that promises that the restaurant will be profitable, probably. Or they bet directly on whether or not the restaurant will be successful or not in the form of futures.

The problem is that not only does I produce nothing of value, but that all the industries that rely on production to survive, auto manufacturers for example, have no one to sell to, because no money is making it to the consumers in the form of wages. They've been getting around this too by also giving these people loans, credit cards, etc. So no problem right? Well, buying stuff on credit only works if you're able to some day pay them off, which no one is able to do, because corps keep cutting wages to maintain profits, which gets tougher because people have no money, so they stop buying, which means more cut wages…

But now that's grinding to a halt because the economy is basically saturated with credit. People can't borrow any more. It's just impossible. Total car loans is something like 1.2T, and student loans is similar, and both are full of portfolios that are increasingly becoming delinquent.

So why isn't the economy reflecting this? Corporations are more profitable than ever, so what gives? Well you know all those trillions that the Federal Reserve has been printing every year? That's basically been pumping up stock value, which in turn makes the company appear profitable, because in capitalism the real doesn't matter, because everything is worth as much as you can get people to believe it's worth. Unfortunately, you can't totally divorce economics from reality, so these compounding fantasies are about to crash into cold, hard reality.

This isn't guaranteed to end capitalism, but it's a serious problem that currently no one has a plan for what to do when it happens or what comes after.

In part because of 'natural' inflation, but I would imagine the declining production is playing a role in costs rising.

MMT and large debt relief, some kind of basic income. There's still quite a few technical band-aids for capitalism, though none of them are politically feasible. But maybe that in itself ties in to the contradictions.

I think it definitely plays into the existing contradictive. As you said, they're not really politically feasible. "What, just GIVE people free money?"

Part of the logic that dooms capitalism is that any solutions it can offer will be within the bounds of capitalist ideology, the Affordable Care Act, for example. Even if they were able to pass such a thing over the kicking and screaming of the bourgeoisie, it would undoubtedly be defective.

My money would be on some kind of bailout, but I have no idea how they would finance such a thing. The Fed can't just keep printing money forever can it?

It actually can. The US borrows in its own currency, so any debt can be inflated away. Of course, at some point, a very big part of national income will be directed towards rentiers, but that's neither here nor there ;)

Entropy is on our side

How do reforms raise class consciousness? Is the German proletariat chomping at the bit to destroy capitalism in your view? Do you feel Sweden is at the vanguard of the world revolutionary movement? If anything, it deludes class consciousness since it creates the illusion that capitalism can work for the benefit of all and creates a whole group of people in the form of socdem parties and unions who basically serve to mediate conflicts between capital and labor and prevent any real struggle from arising. The Russian revolution only came about after the Russian people found themselves starving to death after an entire generation of men had been slaughtered for Porky's profit.

I can't help but be skeptical of that assertion, but I'm not an expert. I just find it hard to believe that currency can just be endlessly created and the economy on which it's based continue to function. Maybe theoretically, but I would think after a certain point the sheer amount of debt on which it's based would overwhelm whatever potential value it has and lead to collapse.

Although I suppose that is what leads to the US's vitriolic response to any hint of alternative reserve currencies. If the dollar is the only game in town on which all trade is based, then it can weather even the most catastrophic of market failures. If there's an alternative, the yuan for instance, then I would see all remaining industries of value jumping to the more 'rational' alternative.

Great strategy. By the time this race ends capitalism, humanity will be also dead.

Sounds like win win tbh