A Brave New World in the Making: Fully Automated Luxury Communism as a Political Dystopia

Joonas Martikainen

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Chapter 3 A Brave New World in the Making: Fully Automated Luxury Communism as a Political Dystopia

In: Analysing Darkness and Light: Dystopias and Beyond

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Joonas Martikainen

Joonas Martikainen
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 66–87

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004681385_005

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Abstract

During the last decade a new utopian horizon has emerged from the radical left: that of a future postcapitalist society in which technological progress and renewable energy finally take care of our material needs while robots do most our work for us, making paid employment a thing of the past. Instead, we can focus on fulfilling our desires and dreaming up new ones, leading lives of luxury and ease. This utopia, often half-jokingly called “fully automated luxury communism”, could be reached through opportunistically accelerating features of the existing neoliberal capitalist system. However, behind this vision of a bright, sustainable future lurks a worrying political prospect. Joonas S. Martikainen shows how the post-capitalists’ philosophical prejudice against work comes at a high political cost. By painting productive activity as mere drudgery that machines will emancipate us from, they give up on work as the root of radical democratic agency. The luxury communist proposal ends up resembling an extreme case of the neoliberal hegemony that it claims to be fighting, a centrally ruled world completely focused on private enjoyment of luxury and devoid of any shared understanding of human flourishing on which democratic public life could thrive – a political dystopia.

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Analysing Darkness and Light: Dystopias and Beyond

Series: Social and Critical Theory, Volume: 31

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004681385

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 18 Aug 2023

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - Aesthetics & Cultural Theory
  - Anthropology

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Chapter 3 A Brave New World in the Making: Fully Automated Luxury Communism as a Political Dystopia

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Analysing Darkness and Light: Dystopias and Beyond

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