I am reading "Surviving the Future", a book about alternatives to the capitalist economic system. Some discussion is about "slack" and "tautness" in the economy. In capitalism, tautness is the holy grail, where every resource and every minute is used to make more money. Slack is viewed as anathema, to be avoided at all costs, as being "unproductive". In a triple-bottom-line model it is slack that is "productive" for the social and environmental sectors. Somehow, leisure, one form of slack, is promised as a reward of taut capitalism. It's offered up in much the same way as heaven, or 70 virgins, or your own planet is dangled carrot wise by certain religions as a reward for strict obedience to the cult.

Here is an interesting quote by a writer in the Democratic Review in 1853 regarding the day when the industrial revolution would make labor unnecessary; "Men and women will then have no harassing cares or laborious duties to fulfill. Machinery will perform all work - automata will direct them. The only task of the human race will be to make love, study, and be happy."

Apparently, capitalism is supposed to lead to luxurious socialism. Are we almost there, yet?

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller