[int_19h]

The very concept of ownership is a social artifact, and as such, is not immutable. What does it mean for the 0.1% to own all the means of production? They can't physically possess them all. So what it means in practice is that our society recognizes the abstract notion of property ownership, distinct from physical possession or use - basically, the right to deny other people the use of that property, or allow it conditionally. This recognition is what reifies it - registries to keep track of owners, police and courts to enforce the right to exclude.

But, again, this is a construct. The only reason why it holds up is because most people support it. I very much doubt that's going to remain the case for long if we end up in a situation where the elites own all the (now automated) capital and don't need the workers to extract wealth from it anymore. The government doesn't even need to expropriate anything - just refuse to recognize such property rights, and withdraw its protection.

I hope that there are sufficiently many capitalists who are smart enough to understand this, and to manage a smooth transition. Because if they won't, it'll get to torches and pitchforks eventually, and there's always a lot of collateral damage from that. But, one way or another, things will change. You can't just tell several billion people that they're not needed anymore, and that they're welcome to starve to death.

[klyrs]

The problem I see is that once the pitchforks come out, society will lose decades of progress. If we're somewhat close to the techno-utopia at the start, we won't be at the end. Who's going to rebuild on the promise that the next generation won't need to work?

Revolutions aren't great at building a sense of real community; there's a good reason that "successful" communist uprisings result in totalitarian monarchies.

What it means for the 0.01% to own the means of production is that they can offer access to privilege in a hierarchical manner. The same technology required for a techno-utopia can be used to implement a techno-dystopia which favors the 0.01% and their 0.1% cronies, and treats the rest of humanity as speedbumps.

There are already fully-automated murder drones, but my dishwasher still can't load or unload itself.

[astrange]

I suspect "the 0.01% own and run all production by themselves" isn't possible in the real world. My evidence is that this is the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

If they're not trading with the rest of the world, it doesn't mean they're the only ones with an economy. It means there's two different ones. And the one with the 99.9% is probably better, larger ones usually are.

[int_19h]

Revolutions aren't great, period. But they happen when the system can no longer function, unless somebody carefully guides a transition to another stable state.

That said, wrt "communist" revolutions specifically - they result in totalitarian dictatorships because the Bolshevik/Marxist-Leninist ideology underpinning them is highly conductive to that: concepts like dictatorship of the proletariat (esp. in Lenin's interpretation of it), vanguard party, and democratic centralism all combine to this inevitable end result.

But no other ideological strain of Marxism has ever carried out a successful revolution - perhaps because they simply weren't brutal enough. By means of example: Bolsheviks violently suppressed the Russian Constituent Assembly within one day of its opening, as soon as they realized that they don't have the majority there. In a similar way, despite all the talk of council democracy, they consistently suppressed councils controlled by their opposition (peasant ones were, typically).

Bolsheviks were the first ones who succeeded, and thereafter, their support was crucial to the success of other revolutions - but that support came with ideological strings attached. So China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba etc all hail from the same authoritarian tradition. Furthermore, where opposition leftist factions vied for dominance against Soviet-backed ones, Soviets actively suppressed them - the campaign against "social fascism" in 1930s, for example, or persecution of anarchists in Republican Spain.

Anyway, we don't really know what a revolution that would stick to democratic governance would look like, long term. There were some figures and factions in the revolutionary Marxist communist movement that were much more serious about democracy than Bolsheviks - e.g. Rosa Luxemburg. They just didn't survive for long.