Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto

by Aaron Bastani

For Drucker, however, the transformation didn’t stop with Taylor. He observed an increasingly central role for knowledge as capitalism changed over the twentieth century. Thus, while the period after the 1880s saw a productivity revolution, and the decades following 1945 a ‘management revolution’, it was in the ‘information revolution’ that he saw production increasingly based on the ‘application of knowledge to knowledge’. While knowledge had always been important – after all, the essence of the First Disruption resided in mastering the information content of crops and animals through selective breeding – with the rise of digitisation and information technology, Drucker viewed this process as reaching some kind of end point, with labour, land and capital critically sidelined as factors of production.