In response to that admission, an assertion: any successful politics that seeks to submit the possibilities of the Third Disruption to the needs of people rather than profit must be populist. If not, it is certain to fail. Capitalist realism is simply too adaptable for a radical politics of management and technocracy, meaning any rupture must be understandable to most people in an idiom that they readily understand. What is more, the wider social benefits of the shift to Fully Automated Luxury Communism must be seen as running parallel to flourishing on a personal scale, rather than a sacrifice to some greater good. This is the politics of the self-help guru – be precisely who you want to be – embedded within a broader programme for political change. You can only live your best life under FALC and nothing else, so fight for it and refuse the yoke of an economic system which belongs in the past.
Populism is a politics that refuses to recognise the prevailing common sense in managing the economy. Consequently a portion of its critics, those most seduced by capitalist realism, attack it from the incorrect assumption that there is no alternative to neoliberalism. As the status quo is imperilled by the five crises, as well as the long fallout from 2008, such defences will increasingly take place through appeals to anti-utopianism rather than anything positive or propositional. Thus even standard-bearers for the establishment might concede that living standards are getting worse, or that society is going backwards by many measures, but at least, they will respond, we aren’t in 1990s Rwanda and aren’t medieval serfs. Such a position signifies the death of the very idea of the future, with enlightenment and progress – formerly ideological pillars of liberal capitalism – exchanged for a vision of the good society where decline is marginally slower than it might otherwise be.
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paradise found