ER, you should go back to the Marxist roots of much of your rhetoric and recall that what made Marx exciting was his insight about conceiving of the present as the future of its past which was in the process of becoming the past of its own future. What was now the result (capitalism) of its own preconditions was viewed as the precondition of what would soon become its result and its own negation. Any conditions which arise in historical time are capable of disappearing in historical time. Today we have to fit globalization, demographics, cognition, and applied science and technology into such a scheme.

RE work:
Everything that can be automated will be automated. Non-skilled jobs lacking in ‘human contribution’ will be replaced by automation when the economics are favorable. At the hardware store, the guy who used to cut keys has been replaced by a robot. In the law office, the clerks who used to prepare discovery have been replaced by software. IBM Watson is replacing researchers by reading every report ever written anywhere. This begs the question: What can the human contribute? The short answer is that if the job is one where that question cannot be answered positively, that job is not likely to exist in the future.

Let’s look a bit further into the future. Obviously all the memes emergent from the European labor movement of the mid 19thCentury are not going to be applicable. The human “work force” will consist of specialists with extraordinary skills, who will work as freelance contractors. Nothing “lumpen” will remain, and social welfare systems will be expressed as some kind of distributed mediocrity. Human society will resolve into a form of cognitive caste system. Genetic selection practiced by “smart” parents will accelerate this. Remember that in China-India-Russia there is a positive attitude towards eugenics, unlike the frowns in EU-Anglosphere .

The entire world IS at present a confederation of oligarchies. Since Eurasia favors this form (whether through family-controlled business, or through sovereign wealth), it is the form that will continue to dominate. So, to further policy preferences, interest groups will have to nurture dialogue with this confederation, and place people on the inside and the outside, advancing some form of shame culture. The internal affairs of nations will be a potpourri, but as presently in Finland, positioning in global competition will likely pare down ambitions of those interests which favor a big welfare state.