In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible.
Today things are… different.
It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution:
1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody.
2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment
3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology
I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on.
Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last.
(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)
If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure.
I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags.
