https://unevenearth.org/2019/07/redwashing-capital/

"As Marxism has long observed... tech repeatedly drives itself into a ditch. Innovations score quick profits until the new fixed capital spreads, competition intensifies, and economic crises precipitate... exports, monopoly, and war."

"If, as it appears in his Times piece, Bastani thinks food is only about basic nutrition or good taste (however important these both are), then he has bought exactly into an agribusiness productivism that making lots of (marketable) food is the task at hand."

"Blind worship of “novelty” and contempt for established truths. This comes straight out of the commercial cult of the “novelty” of products and out of a persistent belief that something is being “started” that has already happened many times before..."

"...It simultaneously prevents people from learning from the past, from understanding how structural repetitions work, and from not falling for fake “modernities.”

Lots of interesting points made in this review of Aaron Bastani's facile FALC, in @UnevenEarth

"A Left actually working in the natural sciences is arriving at different conclusions, sketching out the horrific details of emerging capital-led tech."

This for me sums up the gap that's opened between left-wing utopian visions that spring from urban-centred imaginations...

...compared to those of us eco-socialists that live/work in the country who feel a serious disconnect between these techno-determinist utopian visions and the world that we love and inhabit. Alienating us from this eco-modernist 'left' that is really a rehash of green capitalism.

"The moral calculus of the resulting accidents—who will driverless cars choose to kill—is giving even sociopaths such as Henry Kissinger the kind of pause that escapes our future-so-bright Left."

This example highlights some of the disconnect - anyone who lives/works in the...

country knows what a ludicrous idea it is that driverless cars could ever work here and yet transportation of 'goods' in the country is not a luxury - it's a necessity to the rural economy. Goods have to get from A to Z - techno-utopianism does not understand the reality of this.

There's a problem when people prescribe robots to 'save' humanity from the hard work of producing food in that it mis-diagnoses the problem, thus the treatment (robots) is treating the symptoms, not the cause.

The cause of the problem is not hard work - the cause is...

alienation and commodification. The treatment is re-connection, owning the means of production, and decommodification. Farmers in charge of their own farms, producing their own food for communities not capitalists.

Those of us on the agroecological left don't want to be spared/

our calloused hands - we want to be able to dig the soil and pick the fruit ourselves - not program and fix a robot. The exploitation of migrant labourers stems from their fundamental alienation.

The problem is not in the means but of the relations of production.