[sewercake]

Haven't read the book, but here are two (notably harsh) reviews:

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17006_fully-automat...

- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors

- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.

- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera

https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism-and-a...

- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.

- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily

I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.

[crdoconnor]

>Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input

e.g. by selling mineral rights or valuable beachfront land.

[Svip]

But where does the money for whom that is purchasing those things come from? Eventually, all profit can be traced to human labour input.

[claudiawerner]

Marx begins to deal with this in his theories of rent; a more accurate criticism of Bastiani would be that he believes one can have profit without surplus. It is obvious, and was so when Marx was writing, that not all profit is due to exploitation of labour.

[Applejinx]

But the exchange of labor has nothing to do with profit, since financialization. There have been many smart people for decades now, making this be so. It's very important today to come up with profit scenarios that don't depend on labor in any way.

[sewercake]

'nothing to do with profit' is a pretty strong claim. I think Marxists (and others) would argue that the two are stochastically linked. Decreases in the value of a good (the amount of labour-time used to generate it) roughly tracks with a decrease in the price (and thus amount of profit that the producer gets for each item) over longer time frames. I think that's what the author was implicitly referring to but I may be wrong!

As for financialization and profit: I think contemporary labour-value theorists, and even Marx, talk about fincancialization as 'fictitious capital'. The 'value' of financial instruments comes from the claim on future labour-time, and is thus generally parasitic for a well-functioning economy. Cedric Durad is a recent example of this. I'm stepping into territory I know very little about though, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt / generously.

[bogle]

Here's a more enjoyable review from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/29/fully-automate...

By enjoyable I mean less po-faced.

[stdbrouw]

These seem like rather insular concerns. "He takes some stuff from Marx but he's not quite Marxist enough, ergo he's wrong."

[sewercake]

While there might be some puritanism in there, I think the implication is these theoretical errors lead to erroneous conclusions. I.e: Bastani is using certain conclusions from Marx, while changing certain premises, and not doing the work to then argue the conclusions still hold. I didn't read the piece closey enough (and my Marx isn't strong enough) to really go in-depth there though.