Summary of Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The end of the Cold War in 1989 marked the supremacy of market capitalism, and with it, the demise of self-governing nation-states.
#2 Capitalist realism is the belief that the world is flat and can only be changed by capitalism. It is a world where nothing really matters except for capitalism, and where ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are not at all incompatible.
#3 The world is a broken place, and I don’t just mean the European migration crisis. The world is a broken place because of a crisis of representation, as citizens come to view their governments as little more than conduits for the interests of corrupt elites.
#4 The most pressing crisis facing humanity is an absence of collective imagination. It is as if all humanity has been afflicted by a psychological complex, capitalist realism making us believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it.

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Communism
• Socialism
• Post-Communism
• Communisme

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669394853
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The end of the Cold War in 1989 marked the supremacy of market capitalism, and with it, the demise of self-governing nation-states.

#2

capitalist realism is the belief that the world is flat and can only be changed by capitalism. It is a world where nothing really matters except for capitalism, and where ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are not at all incompatible.

#3

The world is a broken place, and I don’t just mean the European migration crisis. The world is a broken place because of a crisis of representation, as citizens come to view their governments as little more than conduits for the interests of corrupt elites.

#4

The most pressing crisis facing humanity is an absence of collective imagination. It is as if all humanity has been afflicted by a psychological complex, capitalist realism making us believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it.

#5

The fact that you are reading these words is proof that capitalist realism is already coming apart. The global financial system crashed in 2008, and within weeks the world’s leading economic powers were left with no alternative but to bail out their domestic banks.

#6

The economy, which is defined by growth and productivity, is also beginning to show signs of inertia. Britain, for example, produced less in 2017 than it did a decade earlier.

#7

Neoliberalism, which was Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policy, led to higher unemployment and lower wage growth, but it was mitigated by access to cheaper goods and services and inflated asset prices, particularly housing.

#8

In Greece, Syriza, a coalition of left-wing groups, won the most seats in a general election in January 2015. In Britain, the Conservative Party won its first majority since 1992 as the right-wing UKIP attracted almost 4 million votes. In June 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union.

#9

The events of the last several years are historic and unexpected, but they are a response to an economic crisis that began in 2008. Over the next few decades, we will not only endure the aftershocks of the failure of this economic model to deliver rising living standards, but also the era-defining effects of the five crises.

#10

The First Disruption took place around twelve thousand years ago as our ancestors transitioned from nomadic hunting and gathering to a life of settled agriculture. The Second Disruption was powered by a transformation in energy as well as in production.

#11

The combination of steam power and fossil fuels re-oriented production around the factory system, and allowed the creation of national and global infrastructures through railway networks and ocean-going steamships.

#12

Marx believed that capitalism was a system that inevitably created its own gravediggers, and that it would eventually be replaced by a new society based on social transformation. However, capitalism was able to fix the problems it generated, and thus never experienced a workers’ revolution.

#13

The Third Disruption is driven by a general-purpose technology: the modern transistor and integrated circuit, which are similar to Watt’s steam engine over two centuries ago. It is marked by an abundance of information, and a shift away from hydrocarbons and back to renewable energy.

#14

The implications of extreme supply in information extend beyond automation. We will eventually understand the underlying informational rhythms to overcome nearly all forms of disease, and feed a world of 10 billion people while using less, rather than more, of our planet’s bio-capacity.

#15

Digitization is more than just a process that applies to words, pictures, film, and music. It has allowed progressively more amounts of cognition and memory to be performed in 0s and 1s, with the price–performance ratio of anything that does so falling every year.