PanThe Los Angeles Review of BooksWhat this argument exposes is the profound delusion that has been afflicting the left ever since Thatcher and Reagan came to power 40 years ago. Namely, that if only the socialists could wrest economic control from the neoliberals then everything else in life will magically fall into place ... Why does Bastani insist that the slogan of a democratic energy policy should be \'cheap and abundant energy for all\' without so much as reflecting on why it’s so unthinkable to imagine a world in which people might actually be willing to consume less? ... Bastani’s statist politics — municipal protectionism, credit unions, universal basic income and services — sit starkly at odds with his disruptive power of technology argument ... The glaringly absent variable from Bastani’s technological revolution is class struggle ... the fully automated society, whether in Bastani’s luxury version or in the austere version of Khrushchev and Kim Il-Sung, has nothing whatever to do with communism.
