Is it actually possible to even envision a post capitalist society...

Are open source projects Soviet propaganda?

I mean, it's either that or an already implemented post-capitalist activity that clearly happens IRL and is actually relevant to the significant part of the world economy. No need to envision anything.

They effectively have Communism already.

But - yeah. When we outlive our usefulness, it's soylent green time.

Master the art of meditation…or eat a reasonable amount of psychedelic drugs.
No, I'm serious.

Althusser would tell us that even full communism would have its own ideology, while plenty of other schools (Situationists come to mind) contend that the death of ideology is inevitably involved with genuine social revolution. I still don't know where I lie. The latter option supposes something like a mass awakening, which sounds enticing but nothing empirical seems to justify it.

Once the machines needed to make stuff can themselves self-replicate, both they and the stuff they make should drop down in price to not much more than the cost of raw materials and energy, as long as there's still any kind of market system. Marx could tell you as much (to make a profit capitalists rely on paying workers less than the value of what they produce even after you subtract cost of materials and tools), but here's another way of seeing it–say I have can buy a 3D printer that can print out an exact copy of itself, and the cost of materials and energy it needs to do it is just $50. Then if I want I can sell the copy for anything over $50 and still make a small profit, so if multiple people have the same idea, the price of these machines is going to get driven down to not much more than $50, even if the slightly less advanced model that couldn't self-replicate had been selling for thousands of dollars before that. Likewise, anything this type of machine can make will get driven down to not much more than materials and energy costs. And the range of things 3D printers will be able to make in the near future is probably pretty large, see for example this example of an electric shuttlebus whose parts were mostly 3D printed: theverge.com/2016/6/16/11952072/local-motors-3d-printed-self-driving-bus-washington-dc-launch

So, I think automated production by self-replicating machines would make the liveable-basic-income-for-everyone scenario more likely than the capitalists-genocide-the-99% scenario for two basic reasons. One, the actual taxes on capitalists and people who still have jobs that would be needed to fund a liveable basic income might not be particulary high due to the cheapness of goods, so there needn't be a huge amount of resistance to putting up with such taxes. Two, the government could always use some taxpayer money to buy self-replicating production machines along with the raw materials and energy needed for them to self-replicate until there were a huge number of government-owned machines assigned for public use–and if the mining of materials and the production of large numbers of solar panels could also be done by cheap machines, the government could start doing more of those things itself, and just give everyone an allowance of materials, energy and access to production machines, outside of the market system (you could make a comparison to a country like Norway where most businesses are privately owned but the oil industry is nationalized).

Also note that with full automation of production capitalists would have difficulty making any profit on physical production anyway for the reasons I mentioned earlier, decreasing the likelihood that they'd resist the robotic means of production becoming mostly publicly owned–profit would probably come largely from enforcement of intellectual property laws like patents. The companies that were still in the business of designing physical products (as opposed to software or other purely informational products) could just sell the designs to consumers who would then have the right to print off a copy on the publicly owned production machines. I don't see any obvious reason why the capitalists would make any less profit in this scenario than in a scenario where the capitalists owned the robot production machines themselves, so again that would be a reason for them to not really resist such a change.

And although a market system for intellectual property (and human services) would still exist in this scenario, I think that in the long term, if everyone had a comfortable basic income then the dominance of big corporations in the market would naturally diminish. For example, the reason most computer programmers are willing to do work for hire rather than form teams to just create and sell software products themselves is because they need a year-to-year salary, whereas the capitalists that pay them can afford to sink a bunch of money into a project that won't make a profit for years (note that in this case, the issue is usually *not* that the workers don't own the means of production–it may in fact be true that the programmers do all their work on computers they own themselves). If all programmers had a comfortable basic income I think you'd see a lot more software products where all the money made would go to the programmers who actually created it, and likewise the same could be true for a lot of other types of products, especially if it was cheaper to turn new designs into physical prototypes using 3D printing and such. So after enough time this system would probably evolve into something pretty close to something resembling market socialism, where the people who make money on products are the same people who did the actual work of designing them.

The internet changed capitalism forever, not many people realize it yet, and its effects haven't been fully felt.
The internet is more important than the printing press.
Free music, free books, free tv, free information.
There are so many things i would not know or be into because of the internet.
The media would not be losing control if it werent for the internet.
One day, everyone will have access to the internet, and the internet will be in everything.
And then shit will get really interesting.
It will create a modified capitalism where information is free, where people can create stuff and ask for donations.
There are people who make money off of posting youtube videos.
Something is changing.

Now think about that, and then think oh, here come self driving cars, here comes 3d printers, print out your self driving car.
The american military is developing human exoskeletons to make soldiers stronger and able to lift more things, soldiers will be wearing iron man suits for ww3.

Boston dynamics developing robot dogs and insects to carry shit.

drones are already here.

Corporations are more influential the governments, maybe in the future they will be bigger than countries, all headed by their steve jobs ceo cargo cult like leaders worshiped by the workers and plebes.

The world is going to change a lot before we die.

So robots will maintain themselves, mine the resources and gather/process/smelt/forge/finish those resources without any human input to create more robots, as well as create other robots for other purposes? All of you "automation = communism" folks really don't yet get just how big a supply chain needs to be in order to achieve what you're talking about. You still don't seem to fully grasp just how much labor goes into a simple iPhone for example. Human labor will be needed for a LONG time, and full automation doesn't just mean robots making our shirts, shoes and food (if they could whip up glazed pork belly I would be astonished).

To add to all that, none of you still have grasped the idea that even if that shit comes about we will NEVER reap the full benefits of it in our lifetime. Full, automated communism will not be witnessed by anyone posting in this thread.

So what Marx talked about is actually still very poignant. We will have to work during the day. I don't know about you, but if socialism took hold the world over I'd be fine with doing some sort of menial labor (I already clean my house with two other roommates, thanks Army) for a couple hours a day a few days a week. Because that is all that would be required thanks to no surplus value being extracted, as well as the possibility that under socialism I could definitely do that for my work and then fuck off and go be a poet or play Starcraft. What Marx envisioned is still the Communism that I envision, albeit a modern version of it where you would work and be able to fully manifest your humanity in any way you like.

Right now people talk about automation like its God. If you want those means of production you're still going to have to go get it from people who would rather see you starve than they lose their way of life. We also still have pic related to worry about, because bigger problems are on the horizon for humanity if socialism doesn't take hold in the next few decades. We just cannot wait for your automation Jesus to arrive and destroy capitalism; we are putting faith in something other than the proletariat which to state again…is the revolutionary agent of history.

Communism is an economic system.
Software isn't scarce. It isn't even an economy.

I'm sure the robots would still receive high-level directives from humans about how many copies of any given good (including more robots) to make, what areas to mine, and probably some human judgment would also be needed in troubleshooting when things go wrong and deciding what parts of a system needed to be repaired or replaced (though maybe only if automated troubleshooting had first been tried and failed). But if all the actual physical labor was done by the robots themselves, I'd bet that fraction of the population that would have to be employed on this stuff (and the number of work-hours they'd have to devote to it) would be very small.

A huge number of steps in producing all the components no doubt, but aside from the initial design and engineering phase, can you point to any single step that you're confident couldn't be automated in a decade or two? If not, it seems like automating the whole process should basically be a matter of each company that makes each component hiring engineers to work in parallel on automating each of the individual steps, so however long it would take a team to automate any single step, it shouldn't take that much longer for all the steps to be automated, even if there are thousands or millions of them.

Article on automated clothing manufacturing: economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21651925-robotic-sewing-machine-could-throw-garment-workers-low-cost-countries-out

automated shoe manufacturing: theguardian.com/world/2016/may/25/adidas-to-sell-robot-made-shoes-from-2017

automated kitchen with a robot "chef": gizmag.com/robot-chef-automated-kitchen/36990/\

Quote from that last article:

communism is post-scarcity, tho…

I don't think you understood my point here. I said that full automation doesn't just mean clothing, shoe and food production. I'm quite aware of the advancements we've made in those areas. Those are literally the least of our problems when it comes to automation. What we will always have to worry about is the supply chain to feed the automatons who will be the end producer. Human work will still be required, and a lot of it.

Take for example the ball bearings that might make up the arm or shoulder of a robot chef, or what have you. You need special alloys to make that ball bearing, the ball bearing still has to be manufactured, the resources for the ball bearing would still have to be mined, you'd still have to oversee mining operations, among an endless list of other things that would go along with finding the energy to run mining operations…my point is this, that human labor is still very, very necessary for a long time.

The larger point is that you guys are really forgetting what communism means, from Marx himself.

First of all, what is communism? Communism isn't just post-scarcity, everyone provided for by replicators therefore there is no need for the capitalist mode of production. Communism doesn't just mean sharing a whole bunch of shit. Communism as we need to remember first off is something very tangible and real. It means that the people who use the means of production to produce the wealth society rests on seizes the means of production uses them democratically, not to mention use them more efficiently. The revolutionary element here is not robots, its not some future entity that we can just pawn our problems off to and throw our hands up and say "we can't do it unless the robots and AI come!".

The revolutionary element is the working class, and waiting on AI and automation (not to mention capitalists just somehow sharing the things "their" robots make) to save us is going to be the end of Earth and humanity. How can you not imagine a world in which capitalists hold people hostage by withholding goods, food, energy? All the while at the current day and age we are in the midst of watching humanity wipe itself out by ruining the environment we all live in, in the name of capitalism and profit. We need to get this train moving, and go back to the roots: mobilize the proletariat, seize the means of production, and save this world so future generations can live in it. We will never sit in the shade of the trees we plant, but that is our fate.

"God is dead". Think about what that means, why its supposed to be scary. Religion has been a universal source of mental comfort for people to endure all types of things, and usually those religions rely on some power greater than themselves to bail them out and set the world right be it during life or after death. "God is dead" means that there is no higher power to adjudicate morality, tell us how to live, and direct our will into something that is supposed to be good beyond doubt. We have to decide the fate of ourselves, and that is scary. That responsibility is scary. We have to rely on the working class.

I have no idea where this "communism is post scarcity" came from. We can have post scarcity now, it involves rearranging the way we administer our societal means of production. Socialism is that rearrangement.

What specific step in that chain do you think would be especially difficult to automate? As I said the mass-production of any complex machine–including the robots that work on making other machines, or copies of themselves–is really nothing more than a long series of steps, many of which are presently done by humans but in a very routine, assembly-line-style way that seems like it would be conducive to automating in the future. If you can't point to any *individual* steps you think would be especially hard to automate in the near future, then I don't understand why you think the whole chain would be hard.

Which step in the production of a ball bearing, or the alloys that make it up, would be hard to automate?

Mining might be a bit more difficult than manufacturing that takes place in a well-organized factory setting, because with mining you have to deal with unpredictable aspects of the natural environment. Though robots are getting much better at navigating complicated environments and picking out particular visual patterns of interest (like veins of ore in a mine), so maybe you'd just need people for the initial planning stages of where to mine and the layout of the mining facility. But even if you're right that automating mining proves too hard, the cost of raw materials like ores should remain in the same range that it is today when we do use plenty of human labor, and if all the later steps of refining and manufacturing that happen inside factories can be automated, it'll still be true that the cost of the goods will drop down to not too much more than the cost of the raw materials (whose price would reflect the human labor that went into them) and energy.

And again, as long as the "endless list" can be broken down into individual steps, automating some huge list need not take much longer than automating any of the steps individually since you can just higher a lot of engineers to work on different aspects in parallel. That should be especially true if we develop multipurpose robots with dextrous humanlike hands that be programmed to do most any job a human factory worker could do, as opposed to having to develop separate types of special-purpose machines for nearly every step in production.

I don't know that I would call myself a communist, although I think Marx had a lot of good insights into the dynamics of capitalism including the insight that profit depends largely on variable capital (labor) so that increasing the role of constant capital through automation may give firms temporary relative advantages but in the long term causes the profit rate of industries to decrease. But on the other hand I'm doubtful about the idea that you could make a significantly more "efficient" economy by reducing profits and giving the workers close to the full value of what they produce, actual historical experiments with planned economies have always showed them as inefficient compared to capitalist ones (and there are reasons to think this is fairly inevitable, see jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/ and crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ ). And although some of the profits in the capitalist system do go to just increasing the personal possessions of the capitalists (which I agree is an inefficiency), a lot of it (most? I don't know if economists have really broken this down) also goes to more socially useful functions like developing new products, improving production techniques on existing ones, and expanding production to meet demand. Even Marx acknowledged in "Critique of the Gotha Program that it wouldn't make sense for workers to receive the full value of the goods they produce because of needs like maintaining and replacing production machinery and insuring against accidents, see the quote in comment 708237 at archive.is/A47NX . But Marx doesn't seem to have considered the use of profit in terms of more innovative uses like the ones I mentioned, so I think the system envisioned by Marx and most who call themselves Marxists or communists would be much more static, and feature less of the continual innovation and "all that is solid melts into air" that I see as one of capitalism's best features (I guess my views would qualify as a kind of accelerationism, see criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/ ).

Marx also didn't anticipate the importance that intellectual property would take in the future, and the whole notion of "seizing the means of production" is one adapted specifically to a world where most workers are involved in industrial production, whereas it doesn't really make sense when it comes to production of intellectual property like software for the reasons I mentioned in the last paragraph at . And as I said in that post, my vision of the future is basically just increasing automation of production combined with basic income, where the market still exists but becomes mainly concerned with the creation and sale of intellectual property (with production itself being nearly impossible to squeeze any profit out of due to automation, so that publicly owned production machinery might be something even the capitalists would come to see as the most natural solution). And like I said in that post, my vision is that although the market does continue the dominance of large corporations with a lot of capital gradually tapers off, and people who create intellectual property increasingly just get the money from the sales themselves, rather than the current system where people typically create for a salary while a capitalist who hired them gets the money from actual sales. Obviously this is fairly different from traditional communism, though I have seen people referring to similar ideas with the maybe half-joking label of "fully automated luxury communism", see theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/18/fully-automated-luxury-communism-robots-employment and youtube.com/watch?v=dmQ-BZ3eWxM

Ok, so you're deviating from my point here. You're saying robots are getting much better at this and that, but you are still putting your faith in things that have not arrived in our time. You're essentially betting that within the time frame in which this technology arrives, the Earth's environment will still be here for us to use this technology in.

We are running on a very tight clock here, and just "waiting for automation to get good enough" has a high possibility of just not cutting it. Look man, I'm not saying the shit is impossible. What I'm saying is that for the time being and immediate foreseeable future, human labor will be a necessity. I'd like to stop this meme that is going around in which people think that when the equivalent of Star Trek replicators come about we'll finally have communism because "muh full automation".

Ring-a-ling, its for you. Its necessity, and its saying that even if these technologies come about you are still going to have to deal with the problem of private property and the people that will defend it. It wanted to add that capitalism is quickly remodeling our environment to the point in which we might not be able to exist. Please don't miss my point: we don't have time to rely on some future entity be it full automation of anything else to save both the planet and the people suffering in it as a result of capitalism. Even if full automation is possible (I DONT DISAGREE WITH YOU), communists need to stop believing in it as our coming savior and the destroyer of capitalism.

For now, you're looking into the specifics of what seizing the means of production actually means. If you want to get into specifics, I would start ourselves off *realistically* by setting up every business enterprise as co-ops and go from there. CoftheG is most likely out of date, as well as the suggestions contained within the Communist Manifesto. As of now, we are dealing with the generality of changing the way in which we administer society's resources. I would bet my bottom dollar that changing it from suits that do no actual labor administering common resources, to the community that labors on it in the first place administering common resources is going to be a better route for global peace, stability, and welfare.

I would be very very surprised if in the next 30 years we didn't have robots sufficiently versatile to do any sort of routine, unskilled manual labor type task today done by humans in a factory (especially with developments in robots that can learn by example in a trial-and-error way rather than every task having to be hand-coded, see news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/21/deep-learning-robot-masters-skills-via-trial-and-error/ ). And I also don't think it's all-or-nothing, the cost of goods should become continually cheaper as the amount of human labor that goes into them decreases, even before the production process is 100% automated.

The thing is, any proposed "solution" to the problems of climate change and other environmental problems requires "betting" on something that doesn't exist at the moment, like betting on the political will for major carbon-cutting programs and investment in renewable energy (which is definitely what I think environmental activists should focus on, not pinning all their hopes on new technology), or betting on a socialist revolution in the U.S. within the next few decades. And I think the likelihood of such a revolution within the next few decades is a lot smaller than either of the first two possibilities.

Solving the climate problem doesn't require abolishing private property–conversion to renewable energy in a capitalist system, along with regulations on the use of private property in production, should suffice. By the same token, there's no special reason to think abolishing private property would help anyway unless the people in charge of the new socialist government were sufficiently ecologically-minded, which "actually existing communist" governments have tended not to be historically. Also, self-replicating machinery would as I said lead to a massive drop in the price of all manufactured goods including solar panels and wind turbines. If building construction is done by robots and putting up skyscrapers becomes a lot cheaper, there could also be a move to vertical farms which have crops in hydroponic gardens on different floors of buildings, requiring much less land area to be taken up by farmland which would also help reduce our ecological footprint.

Also, since you mention "necessity", I think Marx would be the first to agree that the level of technology in the means of production does play a crucial role in determining what economic systems are likely to exist or be possible, even if he was not a complete technological determinist. Marx suggested that in pre-industrial times or even in the early stages of the industrial revolution, people who dreamed of communist-like systems had no real chance of success because appropriate level of industrial organization hadn't been reached yet–see for example chapter III of The Communist Manifesto, the section on "Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism" where he wrote "The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone."

Marx did believe that in his own time the world was ready for communism, but I don't think he ever really provided a detailed argument for why 19th industrial century technology was sufficient but earlier technologies weren't–his focus was always more on the analysis of capitalism. Probably he was imagining that a more planned economy could take industrial technologies and use them even more efficiently, but as I said earlier I think there's both good historical and theoretical reasons to think fully planned economies are inefficient compared to markets. So, maybe Marx was right about capitalism eventually falling apart due to contradictions–especially the contradiction that capitalists are continually motivated to replaced variable capital with constant capital in production to gain relative advantages over competitors, even though in the long term this undermines their ability to make profits–but wrong about the level of technology which would be needed to make a new non-capitalist system feasible.

Also, saying that the needed change requires certain new technologies also doesn't mean I'm a technological determinist who thinks all the societal changes will happen easily and naturally once the appropriate technology arrives, there would still need for plenty of political effort to make the type of future I'm envisioning happen. For example, you'd need political efforts to enact a livable basic income (no doubt some people will have other ideas about how to deal with technological unemployment, like requiring everyone to work on pointless jobs, or like Jaron Lanier's crazy idea at theverge.com/2013/5/23/4358680/who-owns-the-future-jaron-lanier-thinks-google-and-the-government that people should monetize every little bit of their everyday lives that might provide useful data for to big corporations like facebook or google). I think it'd also be important to reform intellectual property laws so they become less monopolistic and don't enforce too much artificial scarcity (patenting a new technology shouldn't give one company or inventor exclusive rights to that technology, it would be better if others could use it but had to pay the patent-holder some royalties). And of course political action would be needed to prevent the expansion of productive potential due to self-replicating machinery from making environmental problems even worse–even if renewables like solar would become cheaper and more naturally attractive as a power source, you'd still probably need regulation to make sure people avoided using fossil fuels which might also become a lot cheaper to extract, for example. And you'd need regulations on where the robots would build new production facilities, how quickly they could use up finite resources like metals in self-replicating, and how their materials would be recycled when they break down or become obsolete.

Do you mean a form of market socialism? But then there are questions about how you get there–do we just start more co-ops competing with capitalists businesses and hope they eventually come to dominate naturally? (That's basically what I suggested might happen once you have a basic income and most businesses are making money by producing information, rather than producing goods themselves which anyone can order up from automated production machines if they have the right plans.) Or, would you hope for a revolution (violent or democratic) in which all firms are required by law to be co-ops?

You and I have both come to know an age of progression technology wise that make these types of statements very believable. However, it is still speculation at the end of the day. There is also the human price tag that waiting for fully automated society will cost: for example, the sheer amount of human life lost to simple lower bowel diseases in the third world due to a lack of clean water *cannot wait* for this automated society to come about.

I don't believe that's true. And even if it is, there are verifiable capitalist machinations at work keeping fossil fuels the dominant form of energy in the world. Paying off scientists to write favorable studies for climate denial and limit the effect the public will see of what exactly we're doing to our environment are one of the huge hurdles the current system of production put into action to combat profit loss. As of now, we could surely stand to invest more in wind and nuclear but that won't happen because people who control societal resources through private property are too selfish to allow to happen.

I mean, socialist revolution and technology are a long shot. I don't argue it. But socialist revolution is the one thing at this moment I can think of that will wrestle the control of our energy supplies away from private interests who could give no shits about selling our future for profits now, and instead giving the public the ability to make a decision to scale back production, progression, and frivolous commodity consumption in order to make changes to save our future world for upcoming generations.

As for solving the climate problem, private property does require defeat in order to effectively solve the climate problem. You again mention self replicating machinery and construction led by robots. That's all fine, but how many years do you really think we have before coral reefs around Australia are gone for good? Or how much of a rise in temperature do you think we can wait out in order to get these system going? I think that's where you and I disagree. We don't have time as a species, in my opinion.

I do appreciate your allusion to Marx, and I agree with your use of the passage. It certainly fits. However, I would interpret our relation to his words as we have already squeezed every ounce of necessary innovation our of capitalism already. I believe the bourgeois epoch to have served its time in doing what it needed to do, and conditions have been produced that make socialism possible.

Thank you for Lanier's article by the way, fascinating stuff.

I do mean a form of market socialism in my example. Realistically you're right, there would be a lot of political work to be done even in my scenario in which popular uprising toppled the current American government. Following this scenario, things would remain running in the way they are now in order to keep food in people's stomachs and other necessary functions to make sure we don't end up like Venezuela.

However, I would advocate switching things slowly from the current form of production we keep into a market socialist economy. Every business registered, from largest to smallest would be restructured into cooperatives in order to begin the democratic control of the means of production that socialism means to settle into. So I go with your latter scenario, in which all firms are required by law to be co-ops.

As for the present, people are much too influenced by the superstructure and the idea of "rising on my own to be a boss" to form cooperatives that would make up any sizable portion of the economy.

By the way, I want to thank you for your detailed and level headed responses. This board needs that kind of discourse if we want to advance socialism in any real way.

Read the Culture novels by Iain Banks.

Also, PERHAPS orion's arm as it takes place in a post scarcity world as we.

Ahh satan I forgot.

Also, "manna" (book about post scarcity by marshall brain) and what utopian science fiction novel by bellamy something in 1800s.

Marx had some notes on that actually.

That would trigger said communist revolution. Even now some bourgorise realize they need to be taxed and that UBI at least is a good idea to stave off being brutally murdered in the streets (in the US)

Whats to say they wont continue the same thing?

Have you read 'rapture of the nerds' by cory doctorow?

Im sure you know this already but the tipping point has already been reached woth climate change you cant stop it anymore only minimize the effects

Unfortunately, this is a truth that really makes me melancholy more than it should. I want to have kids, and I want to see them along with people the world over inherit a world better than we had.

But…people are too goddamn selfish and take no responsibility for anything. I'm not pointing any fingers at the people I discussed things with in this thread, but the reason I harp on not banking on full automation to save us is because each day we waste toppling capitalism is a day where we have really no idea just how much worse the environment has gotten. Whose to say we haven't already crossed a threshold in which we basically have give ourselves a doomsay timer, at the end of which civilization as we know it is not bearable by the Earth any longer?

So, we can imagine evolutions of capitalism.
We can imagine star treck.
We can imagine cyberpunk.

But we cannot imagine communism.

Must be because of 50s US sci-fi.

We need more soviet sci-fi.

Well, we always have problems imagining real future.

Soviet sci-fi would be Yefremov. But his was more of an anthropology work than entertainment. Moreover, I strongly suspect his English translation is hideous.

Not a Communism. Seriously, how can anyone consider it anything but a libertarian propaganda?