(De)Automating the Future: Marxist Perspectives on Capitalism and Technology (Historical Materialism Book Series, 321)

Book info: (De)Automating the Future: Marxist Perspectives on Capitalism and Technology (Historical Materialism Book Series, 321) (Hardcover, 360 pages) – Brill, 2024. Language: English.

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. Editorial Reviews About the Author 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. (20), 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).