>>24298566
>cheaper commodity allows more people to buy and thus improve their lives
>reduced labour allows people to work producing other things, improving the economy
Yes, and that way of describing capitalist growth has become fully hegemonic. But my point is: where the new productivity goes to, and the kinds of lifestyles it supports, are not even open questions in capitalism.

If you had asked global populations in the 1970s whether they wanted a portable phone that shows them jokes and makes them anxious, or whether they wanted more healthcare, housing and free time, I am willing to bet big money they would've picked the second option. But when these kinds of decisions can't be meaningfully posed, and your only interface with people around you is the job market and the commodity market (plus meaningless parliamentary elections once every four or five years), you let the algorithm settle these questions, you click on the choices on your personal terminal, you take the jobs you can get, and you feel lucky to obtain your cheap iPhone at the end of it.

The questions of historical alternatives naturally don't raise themselves in most peoples' minds. Capitalism becomes an unchangeable machine into which we input our life-force, sometimes getting a tolerable lifestyle back out, sometimes an intolerable. Human nature has made for itself an automatic self-driving civlization machine. And it's tolerable enough for most of us that we're happy to see the machine speed away on its blind career and leave in the dust any other possibilities for human nature.

To me that's as suicidally tragic as everyone posting AI images all of a sudden. 'This is what the culture industry needs to reduce production costs and promise investors continued returns, so let's get used to it, because at least the ChatGPT payment plan is reasonable, and these images are moderately funny.' So they say as they fill their work chats with Ghibli pastiches, like people grinning as they strike themselves in the skulls with hammers, obliterating their capacity to make or even imagine any other kind of culture.

>but why [produce for others in the commune world]?
Because it will be the natural, rational thing to do under certain ways of interfacing with others. 'This world I enjoy around me exists because people in my situation spend a quarter of their day labouring to produce it. That arch under which I walk was made because people wanted a more beautiful urban environment. This porridge I eat was made because people want to live in a network of communes where a bowl of hot porridge can always, within reason, be got. Let me go head to the pleasant, sociable workshop, because I wish to create this world too.'

I acknowledge that the specific forms of that alternative social interface are the huge, unknown, troubling expanse in the middle of all attempts at communism. But I also think that venturing into that expanse is the task of civilization.

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