Johannes Fehrle, Marlon Lieber, and J. Jesse Ramirez (eds)
Volume Editors: Johannes Fehrle, Marlon Lieber, and J. Jesse Ramirez
Much has been written about the prospects of automation in recent years. While many have raised concerns over the threat of technological mass unemployment, others have anticipated a fully automated communist utopia which will provide material abundance to everyone. (De)Automating the Future gathers chapters that critically investigate automation’s ambivalences from inter-disciplinary Marxist perspectives. The contributions raise questions about automation’s affordances for postcapitalism, its transformation of manual and mental labour, and its role in the intensification of class antagonisms and exploitation.
Biographical Note
Johannes Fehrle, Ph.D. (2012), Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, is a member of the “Biomaterialities” Research Group at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He has written articles on U.S.-American and Canadian literature, film, and popular culture. He is also one of the editors of the collection Adaptation in the Age of Media Convergence (Amsterdam University Press, 2019).
Marlon Lieber, Ph.D. (2018), Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, is assistant professor of American Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He is the author of Reading Race Relationally: Embodied Dispositions and Social Structures in Colson Whitehead’s Novels (transcript, 2023) and of articles and book chapters on American literature, critical theory, and Marxian value theory.
J. Jesse Ramírez, Ph.D. (2013), Yale, is a lecturer at East Switzerland University of Applied Sciences. He is the author of Un-American Dreams: Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Disimagined Community, and Bad Hope in the American Century (Liverpool, 2022), Rules of the Father in The Last of Us: Masculinity Among the Ruins of Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2022), and Against Automation Mythologies: Business Science Fiction and the Ruse of the Robots (Routledge, 2021).
Readership
Scholars interested in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Economics, Marxism, Sociology, and Science and Technology Studies
Table of Contents
Introduction: Marxism and the Technology Debate 1
Johannes Fehrle, Marlon Lieber and J. Jesse Ramírez
part 1
Histories of the (De)Automation Debate
1 Production and De-humanization: Herbert Marcuse, Günther Anders,
and the Marxian Response to Automation 57
Jason Dawsey
2 Nowhere to Go: Automation, Then and Now 83
Jason E. Smith
3 Time to Automate: The Hidden Labour of Automation 111
Christina Gratorp
part 2
Key Concepts in the Automation Debate
4 Capitalism without Workers: On the Impossibility of Automation and Its
Relation to the Question of Value 135
Benjamin Ferschli
5 Deskilling: Automation and Alienation 158
Amy Wendling
6 De-alienated Labour, Technology, and the Social Heart of
Socialism 178
Jeff Noonan
part 3
Automation, Labour, and Resistance: Production, Distribution,
Representation
7 The Transformation of the Retail Sector: Automation and the
Warehouse 203
Larry Liu
8 Automation along Global Supply Chains: How rfid-Systems Will
Transform Work and Power Relations in the Supply Chain of Fast
Fashion 226
Steffen Reitz
9 End Meeting: A Workers’ Inquiry into the Algorithmic University 256
Robert Ovetz
10 Automation of Artistic Labour and Its Limits 274
Jens Schröter
Afterword: Stagnation, Circulation, and the Automated Abyss 288
James Steinhoff, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and Nick Dyer-Witheford
Works Cited 311
Index 347