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   Rasmus Fleischer (rasmusfleischer@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 02:47:12 JST Rasmus Fleischer

   (1/3) Reposting five theses recently posted by William Clare Roberts on Bluesky
   https://bsky.app/profile/marxinhell.bsky.social/post/3kmunwj4zxf2k

   1. The mode of production based on wage labor has made it possible to feed, clothe, and house 8 billion people, vastly increasing the carrying capacity of the earth and breaking out of the Malthusian trap of earlier modes of production.

   2. This mode of production has also concentrated heretofore undreamt of wealth and political-military power in the hands of a tiny minority.

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     Rasmus Fleischer (rasmusfleischer@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 02:48:07 JST Rasmus Fleischer

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     3. This same mode of production has driven a process of scientific and technological development that has made at least one fourth and maybe half of the population of the earth superfluous from the standpoint of wealth production, a massive “economically expendable” population concentrated especially in the global south, but found in pockets everywhere. We can feed 8 billion, but we can only employ 4-6 billion in profitable forms of production, a number that will likely continue to decrease sharply.

     4. The process of development has also upset the homeostatic regulation of the earth's climate, unleashing a spiral of climate change that will increasingly drive this economically expendable population into precarious migrations of immense scale, seeking secure access to the means of existence.

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     Rasmus Fleischer (rasmusfleischer@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 02:49:03 JST Rasmus Fleischer

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     5. The goal of radical social change is to avoid the mass slaughter that the current world, as captured in the previous theses, seems to be building towards. The second industrial revolution issued in the industrial-scale murder of scores of millions – in the colonial killing fields, the slaughterhouses of disposable populations, and the famines of catch-up development. There is a real danger that the next century will see exterminations ten to fifty times what the world saw between 1880 and 1980. Confronting that possibility head-on is the task.