The Great Inversion: Automation, Thermodynamics, and Political Economy After Labour.

High-income societies are entering an Earth-system-constrained phase of the Anthropocene in which population mass shifts from a strategic asset into a thermodynamic liability. This transition reflects the exhaustion of the Anthropocene’s fossil-energy windfall that underwrote the Anthropocene, declining energy return on investment, and the rapid substitution of biological labour by automated and algorithmic systems. As energy surplus erodes and machine intelligence scales, labour-based political economies face a structural mismatch between demographic reproduction, fiscal capacity, and biophysical limits. This article diagnoses the institutional logic implied by this condition, which it conceptualises as a shift toward a neganthropic political economy. Rather than maximising labour mobilisation and material throughput, such an economy would redirect automated surplus toward entropy-reducing activities, including care, scientific research, ecological restoration, and long-term planetary repair. The argument situates automation as an Anthropocene pharmakon: simultaneously accelerating entropic degradation under existing property regimes while remaining the only mechanism capable of operating at the scale required for neganthropic intervention. The paper does not offer a policy blueprint but reconstructs the boundary conditions for political-economic viability after labour within a finite Earth system. In doing so, it reframes demographic contraction not as a social failure but as an endogenous thermodynamic correction within the Anthropocene.