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The Forum > Article Comments > 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism': Communism's coming of age > Comments

'Fully Automated Luxury Communism': Communism's coming of age : Comments

By David McMullen, published 1/8/2019

It has to be a game changer when a book espousing communism is the talk of the town. It has done this by putting the discussion on a firm footing.

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Considering that as industry becomes more automated, employment shifts to the service industry where face to face service is more desirable.

Bastani is an optimistic idiot like most left whingers.
Posted by Shadow Minister, Thursday, 1 August 2019 8:23:06 AM
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As American economist Thomas Sowell put it, “One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.”
Posted by ttbn, Thursday, 1 August 2019 9:50:59 AM
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What McMullen fails to explain is why Bastani thinks it's desirable, when we reach the fully automated luxury stage, to have communism rather than the kind of mixed economy we have today.

Bastani's anti-green bias is also very strongly evident, implying greens are anti-technology or believe Gaia is God, when in reality those are very much minority viewpoints among the green movement. Worse still, he's failed to notice that renewables are already a cheaper way of generating electricity than fossil fuels. He obsesses over the current cost of hydrogen storage, and notes that it's not a mature technology (a fact which DESTROYS his argument against it, though he seems to think it strengthens it). He also ignores the potential of demand management.

I don't ever recall seeing, in a non-exemplary context, a view where the bias so overwhelmingly determines the content.
Posted by Aidan, Thursday, 1 August 2019 11:23:20 AM
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Communism came of age when we and other nations dismantled it in favour of far more rational and incentivising, private enterprise.

The best of which and demonstrably so, cooperative capitalism!

Cooperative capitalism is the best form of shared capitalism and makes those that own the store or factory, the ones who work in it and profit from it.

As opposed to communism which like Animal Farm puts entirely unproductive pigs in charge and requires a component of slave labour (reeducation camps) and the quite blatant theft of intellectual property to survive!

Simply put, communism has absolutely nothing going or it except for your lazy bludger or thief, or power junkie, who wouldn't work in an iron lung! NOTHING, NOT A SINGLE THING GOING FOR IT OR THEM!

Only those identified above, espouse or advocate for on behalf of fundamentally flawed, cruel beyond comparison, SOMETHING FOR NOTHING (soulless, Godless) communism!
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Thursday, 1 August 2019 12:07:21 PM
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True that "Communism is not some utopia that could have happened any old time." but not in the way the author hopes.

Communism is a hypocritical hell, ruled by rich Party aristocrats, and only appreciated by those who have lived in Communist countries. The people of the Soviet Union and communist satellites long realised Communism's murderous hypocracy and finally freed themselves on the way to democracy in 1989-1992.

Meanwhile the deluded Communist Enthusiasts (often of the UK Fabian and also Leninist Left) enjoy the freedom of living in Western countries. Yet they still carry a Grass Is Greener in Red Countries delusion.
__________________________________________________

CASE STUDY of a Notable Communist Enthusiast.

How [George Bernard] Shaw defended Stalin's mass killings http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1433323/How-Shaw-defended-Stalins-mass-killings.html

"Stalin's show trials which led to the deaths of millions of people in the Soviet Union during the 1930s were strongly defended by the British author and playwright George Bernard Shaw.

An extraordinary document to be auctioned at Sotheby's in London next month reveals that Shaw continued to defend the Russian leader's excesses [providing] a shocking insight into the naivety of Soviet sympathisers among the British intelligentsia.

Senior communists were arrested after the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party chief, in December 1934 and within two months almost 200 had been shot. Tens of thousands of lesser-known people were sent to Siberia although Kirov is thought to have been been killed on Stalin's orders.

...Asked whether he believed that the revolution had "attracted degenerate types", Shaw replied: "On the contrary it has attracted superior types all the world over to an extraordinary extent wherever it has been understood."

...At least 720,000 people were executed in the terror that followed. Millions more died from hunger and ill-treatment in concentration camps."
Posted by plantagenet, Thursday, 1 August 2019 12:10:40 PM
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Hi Ttbn,

That's worth repeating:

"“One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.”"

My parents were communists, from the 1930s, the only working-class members of a branch in a working-class area. Obviously, most people there had enough sense to stay away. It took me forty-odd years to realise that it was a crock.

There seems to be a half-witted turn towards all of the certainties and 'stabilities' of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, almost a turn back to the 'perfections' of the thought-basis of the Middle Ages - even further back: Bruce Pascoe in 'Dark Emu' has declared that Aboriginal society 120,000 years ago (i.e. about 40,000 years before their ancestors left Africa) was a caring, sharing, united society - in fact, the first society in the world, building - for no apparent reason - the first city in the world. Don't worry about evidence, just feel the yearning.

Democracy is a vital, living, imperfect system, but every other type of society seems to have degenerated into either stagnation (viz. Muslim societies) or various forms of fascism (viz. China). Witnessing the attempts to restore democracy in places like Sudan, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Burma, Turkey, Hong Kong, one despairs that anti-democratic societies are incredibly difficult to change, in order to restore or initiate democratic systems. Strikingly, those societies tend not to have much of the organisation and fostering of civil societies, community groups, voluntary groups, discussion groups, etc.

Democracy thus

[TBC]
Posted by Loudmouth, Thursday, 1 August 2019 12:30:00 PM
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