Marx and the Robots
Author: Florian Butollo
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Published: 2022-02-20
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780745344379
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A wide-ranging, myth-busting and balanced materialist account of an overheated discourse
Lanterna Rally
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Marx Toys
Author: Maxine A. Pinsky
Publisher: Schiffer Pub Limited
Published: 1995-11-01
Total Pages: 175
ISBN-13: 9780887409363
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Wonderful toy robots, space ships, astronauts, and comic characters produced by the Louis Marx Company from the 1950s to the 1970s are described and shown in color and black and white photos. The toys were produced in tin or plastic and include wind-ups, battery powered toys, hoppers, and ramp walkers. Interviews with artists employed by the company add detail to this valuable text.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
Author: Aaron Bastani
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2019-06-11
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 1786632640
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The first decade of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of these disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream remains the same. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics, a new paradigm has emerged. Fully Automated Luxury Communism claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. For everyone. In his first book, radical political commentator Aaron Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history. Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone.
Against Automation Mythologies
Author: J. Jesse Ramirez
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-06-02
Total Pages: 116
ISBN-13: 1000169618
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Inspired by Roland Barthes’s practice of "semioclasm" in Mythologies, this book offers a "technoclasm"; a cultural critique of US narratives, discourses, images, and objects that have transformed the politics of automation into statements of fact about the "rise of the robots". Treating automation as an ensemble of technologies and science fictions, this book foregrounds automation’s ideologies, exaggerations, failures, and mystifications of the social value of human labor in order to question accepted and prolific automation mythologies. Jesse Ramirez offers a study of automation that recognizes automation as a technosocial project, that uses the tools of cultural studies and history to investigate the narratives and ideologies that often implicitly frame the automation debate, and that concretely and soberly assesses the technologies that have made the headlines. The case studies featured include some of the most widely cited and celebrated automatic technologies, such as the Baxter industrial robot, the self-driving car, and the Watson AI system. An ideal resource for anyone interested in or studying emerging technology and society, automation, Marxist cultural theory, cultural studies, science fiction studies, and the cultural history of technology.
Four Futures
Author: Peter Frase
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-11-01
Total Pages: 134
ISBN-13: 1781688141
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An exploration of the utopias and dystopias that could develop from present society Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism and extermininsm might actually entail. Could the current rise of the real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender's Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of wealth—but there's no guarantee that social hierarchies, governed by an economy of "likes," wouldn't rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through science fiction, social theory and the new technologies are already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a balance sheet of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.
Inhuman Power
Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780745338606
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The past several years have brought staggering advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence. And Marxist analysis has to keep up: while machines were always central to Marxist analysis, modern AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Inhuman Power explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through three approaches, each using the lens of a different Marxist theoretical concept. While the idea of widespread AI tends to be celebrated as much as questioned, a deeper analysis of its reach and potential produces a more complex and disturbing picture than has been identified. Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI is likely to render humanity obsolete and that the only way to prevent it is a communist revolution.
Greenberg's Guide to Marx Toys: 1923-1950
Author: Maxine A. Pinsky
Publisher: Greenberg Books
Published: 1988-06-01
Total Pages: 143
ISBN-13: 9780897780278
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Automation and the Future of Work
Author: Aaron Benanav
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2020-11-03
Total Pages: 161
ISBN-13: 1839761318
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A consensus-shattering account of automation technologies and their effect on workplaces and the labor market In this consensus-shattering account of automation technologies, Aaron Benanav investigates the economic trends that will shape our working lives far into the future. Silicon Valley titans, politicians, techno-futurists, and social critics have united in arguing that we are on the cusp of an era of rapid technological automation, heralding the end of work as we know it. But does the muchdiscussed “rise of the robots” really explain the long-term decline in the demand for labor? Automation and the Future of Work uncovers the deep weaknesses of twenty-first-century capitalism and the reasons why the engine of economic growth keeps stalling. Equally important, Benanav goes on to salvage from automation discourse its utopian content: the positive vision of a world without work. What social movements, he asks, are required to propel us into post-scarcity if technological innovation alone can’t deliver it? In response to calls for a permanent universal basic income that would maintain a growing army of redundant workers, he offers a groundbreaking counterproposal.
Breaking Things at Work
Author: Gavin Mueller
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2021-02-09
Total Pages: 191
ISBN-13: 1786636751
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the Nineteenth-century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English countryside, practicing drills and manoeuvres that they would later deploy on unsuspecting machines. The movement has been derided by scholars as a backwards-looking and ultimately ineffectual effort to stem the march of history; for Gavin Mueller, the movement gets at the heart of the antagonistic relationship between all workers, including us today, and the so-called progressive gains secured by new technologies. The luddites weren't primitive and they are still a force, however unconsciously, in the workplaces of the twenty-first century world. Breaking Things at Work is an innovative rethinking of labour and machines, leaping from textile mills to algorithms, from existentially threatened knife cutters of rural Germany to surveillance-evading truckers driving across the continental United States. Mueller argues that the future stability and empowerment of working-class movements will depend on subverting these technologies and preventing their spread wherever possible. The task is intimidating, but the seeds of this resistance are already present in the neo-Luddite efforts of hackers, pirates, and dark web users who are challenging surveillance and control, often through older systems of communication technology.
Marx and Digital Machines
Author: Mike Healy
Publisher: University of Westminster Press
Published: 2020-10-16
Total Pages: 172
ISBN-13: 1912656809
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book explores the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the digital environment: technology offers all manner of promises, yet habitually fails to deliver. This failure often arises from numerous problems: the proficiency of the technology or end-user, policy failure at various levels, or a combination of these. Solutions such as better technology and more effective end-user education are often put into place to solve these failures. Mike Healy argues that such approaches are inherently faulty drawing upon qualitative research informed by Marx’s theory of alienation. Using Marx’s theory, he considers participants in three distinct settings: the workplace of information and communications technology (ICT) professionals; university scholars researching the ethical and societal implications of our digital environment; and a group of pensioners living in South London, UK, undertaking ICT training. By delving beneath the surface of how digital technologies are created, researched and experienced, this study illustrates the contradictory nature of our digital lives, as they directly arise from the needs of capitalism. The book also places Marx’s theory in contrast to the mainstream approaches derived from Seaman and Blauner. In researching and comprehending ICT, this book reaffirms the superior explanatory power of Marx’s theory of alienation.
