Review: Fully Automated Luxury

Communism
By
 Colin Wilson
 -
9 June 2019

Colin Wilson reviews Aaron Bastani’s much-anticipated account of the

potential for a future society of equality and abundance.

Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A

Manifesto (London: Verso, 2019). 288 pp.

***

We face serious challenges, among them climate crisis and the worldwide
growth of the far right. But we’re also seeing reasons for hope, such as the
growth of left social democracy internationally – headed in the US by Bernie
Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and in Britain by Jeremy Corbyn.
Extinction Rebellion has developed quickly to lead mobilisations involving
thousands of people. Protests about the climate emergency by school students
are unprecedented and inspiring.

We need to debate what kind of socialism we are fighting for, and what
strategies can take that struggle forwards. Aaron Bastani, a leading figure
in Novara Media, has written a book which seeks to paint that big picture. It’s
been endorsed by other well-known left authors including Owen Jones, Paul
Mason and Bhaskar Sunkara. We are to treat this, then, as a serious
contribution to the development of left-wing strategy. Unfortunately, the plain
fact is that it’s seriously flawed.

Bastani’s general assertion is that human society has passed through two
major transformations in its history: the development of agriculture, and the
development of technologies associated with industrialisation in the
eighteenth century, in particular the steam engine. The next few decades, he
argues, will see a third transformation, equal in significance to the first two in
bringing about a qualitative increase in humans’ ability to control our lives.
Solar technology, mining asteroids, individualised gene therapies and other
developments will mean an end to the scarcity which is a precondition of
capitalism. As evidence for these claims he repeatedly offers little more than
enthusiastic statements from the entrepreneurs involved, which he uncritically
repeats in every case.

Bastani quotes Marx in support of his overall analysis, but his account leaves
out a good deal of what Marx actually had to say about the development of
human society, much of which is relevant to our current situation. It’s true, as
Bastani points out, that in the Communist Manifesto Marx begins by stressing
the productive capacity of capitalism and its ability to dissolve social
structures which have existed for centuries – ‘all that is solid melts into air’, as
the memorable phrase has it. But Marx’s analysis includes other elements
which don’t appear in this book. Capitalism is a class society – as most human
societies have been since the development of agriculture – so that the wealth it
generates disproportionately benefits a few. That technical developments can
increase class divides is a point Bastani repeatedly neglects. He reports with
enthusiasm that to use new Amazon stores you don’t need cash. But this
misses the fact that cashless stores exclude people without bank accounts,
with the most recently opened one, in New York, conceding that it will accept
cash for just this reason.

Domination in capitalist societies isn’t just about class, but about the
subordination of groups on the basis of, for example, race and gender. Marx
points out that the ‘initial accumulation’ with which capitalism began
involved the theft of vast quantities of gold and silver from Latin America –
where Europeans forced local people to mine these metals – and the
enslavement of millions of Africans. It’s because capitalism has always
involved this kind of oppression that visions of the socialist future typically
depict societies which are not only technically advanced, but quite different
from our own in terms of how society is organised. The utopian socialist
Robert Owen expected to see marriage die out in a socialist society. Charles
Fourier, also a utopian socialist, foresaw an end to marriage, the family and
urbanisation – as well as making the bizarre claim that the oceans would come
to taste like lemonade.

The fascination of the accounts of utopias presented in novels like Ursula Le

Guin’s The Dispossessed, Marge Piercey’s Woman on the Edge of Time and
Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels is that they depict societies where the most
basic assumptions of our own are challenged. Banks’ characters change sex at
will, and living your whole life as a woman or man is thought eccentric.
Piercy’s future village initially seems low-tech, but babies develop outside the
body in artificial wombs. In the anarchist society portrayed by Le Guin,
money and prisons are obscenities. In all these societies, same-sex desire is
accepted and unremarkable.

Bastani suggests that we are about to enter a utopia, a society beyond scarcity.
But he has nothing to say about how this will affect oppression on the basis on
sex, race or sexuality. One of the oddest things about his utopia is that much
of society will stay pretty much the same. For example, there’s the issue of
eating meat. Some people argue that doing so uses resources very
inefficiently, so we should move to a plant-based diet. That would involve
some social change, but lots of vegetarian and vegan foods and cuisines are
available. Bastani accepts the argument for plant-based food, but then comes
up with a technological fix – rather than eating meat from animals, we can eat
meat grown more efficiently in tanks. He even considers one problem with
this to be that you can’t get streaky bacon this way. Perhaps, he suggests, 3D
printers could help. The failure to imagine a different kind of society, of this is
only one little example, is really remarkable.

It’s also worth considering another aspect of Marx’s analysis of capitalism.

Not only is it a class society, it’s based on competition. From the beginning it
has been unplanned, and that has meant it takes no account of the effect it has
on the environment. Marx’s collaborator Engels, as early as the 1840s, was
writing about the effects of uncontrolled technology in northern industrial
towns – the polluted rivers, the air full of coal smoke, the lack of clean
drinking water. The absence of coordination, the dominance of competition,
has always meant that new technologies are introduced under capitalism in a
chaotic way. Rather than rational assessment, you see wild swings between
hype and then demoralisation after the resulting bubbles burst, even in the
case of technologies which are genuinely important. In the 1840s, for
example, the success of the first railways led to an outburst of speculation.
Plans were made to build over 9,000 miles of railways, far more than would
have been used. About a third of the total were never built – companies failed
as the bubble burst, and middle-class families, who had invested their entire
savings in the hope of becoming rich, lost everything. The dot-com bubble of
the 1990s worked in a similar way. The website boo.com, for example, spent a
cool $135 million of venture capital – $25 million went on advertising – failed
to make a profit and then collapsed.

So, capitalism’s track record as regards new technology is clear. Remarkable

innovations come along. I can remember watching TV as a child in the 1960s,
when it was impressed on us that we were watching images ‘live from
America via the satellite’ – and now Facebook Live means any of us can
broadcast to people throughout the world using our phone. But if social media
allows millions of us to communicate, it also reflects some of the most
repulsive aspects of contemporary capitalism. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal
wealth exceeds $60 billion. Google and Facebook keep tabs on our online
activities so that our every interest can be converted into targeted adverts.
Abuse – often sexist and racist – is rife. New technologies leave unchanged
the basic nature of capitalist society, because capitalism isn’t centrally about
technology, be it Bastani’s steam engine or anything else. Capitalism is a
system of social relations. As Marx puts it in Wage Labour and Capital, ‘A
cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain
conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as
little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.’ The cotton-
spinning machine only makes profits for the capitalist once it is set in motion
by a worker, who has no choice but to work for wages to avoid utter poverty.
Ending capitalism is a matter of ending this exploitative social relationship, as
well as ending systems of domination like sexism and racism.

We don’t know for certain how capitalism can be ended, since no attempt so
far has been successful for any length of time. But one thing had become clear
by the middle of the nineteenth century. It didn’t work to draw up a blueprint
for the new, better, more rational society and simply expect it to catch on.
Various Owenite and Fourierite communities – in America in the 1840s, in
particular – tried to put the plans of their favoured authors into practice. One
basic problem was that such an approach was fundamentally undemocratic.
Mister Owen or Monsieur Fourier had laid down how things were to be in the
new society – Fourier had designed the furniture for the children’s nurseries,
the ground plans of the community buildings and much else – so all that was
left for the community members to do was to follow the rules. Owen
explained, for example, to a young woman who wanted to wear a pretty dress
on her wedding day that in the New Moral World people would ideally not
marry at all, and if they did, would do so in their everyday clothes. She
complied, but none of these communities lasted long.

The point here is that socialism has to be achieved in a deeply democratic

way, has to involve the mass of the population in active debate about how to
shape society. Such an outburst of debate and involvement is central to every
genuine radical movement. During the English Revolution, despite the lower
literacy levels of the seventeenth century, over 700 cheap newspapers were in
publication and pamphlets were published, as the historian Christopher Hill
notes, ‘on every subject under the sun, at an average rate of three a day for
twenty years.’ Angela Davis has recalled working as part of the 60s black
liberation movement with young African American men who had had little
education but persevered in their efforts to read and understand texts by
Lenin. Such debate is part and parcel of mass activity, as people who have
never felt they can change things come to believe they have a stake in the
future.

This brings us to the most disappointing part of Bastani’s book – its final
section, which explains how Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) is
to be brought about. ‘You can only live your best life under FALC and
nothing else,’ urges Bastani, ‘so fight for it and refuse the yoke of an
economic system which belongs in the past.’ Indeed, in the new society,
‘luxury will pervade everything as society based on waged work becomes as
much a relic of history as the feudal peasant and medieval knight.’ So,
assuming I’m persuaded, that lots of us are persuaded, how do we get
involved? It turns out that, for the most part, we don’t. ‘The majority of
people,’ we’re told, ‘are only able to be politically active for brief periods of
time… Which is all the more reason why FALC… must engage in
mainstream, electoral politics.’

There’s a rather uneasy transition in these pages, as we shift from an end to

scarcity – a classless society, more or less – to local government financial
strategies as carried out in Preston. But this isn’t the biggest problem – you
could argue that you have to start somewhere, so why not Preston? The
problem is that a monumental obstacle stands in the path that leads from
running local government in one city to FALC. In Bastani’s account that path
leads through the creation of local banks and credit unions, combined with the
development of ‘universal basic services‘ which will make transport,
education, housing and so forth free to all. Moving to a global scale, national
energy investment banks, meanwhile, will invest in sustainable buildings,
heating and lighting, so that by 2030 ‘the world’s wealthier countries would
see their CO2 emissions fall to virtually zero’.
All this is perfectly possible. But consider our current position. Oil has been
the key commodity for capitalism for around a hundred years. Capitalism is
based on competition, so the United States, the world’s one superpower, is
keen to control the global oil supply – not because it needs to import oil, but
because countries including China do. And so the American state works hand-
in-glove with the oil companies. The last thing the oil companies want is that
we should move away from fossil fuels. Most governments accept to some
extent that the crisis is happening, but refuse to take adequate action. The
threat to short-term profitability is of more concern to them than the survival
of the planet. The people who run businesses will oppose the massive shift of
resources to the public sector that local investment banks would involve. So
the only way to begin to move towards FALC, towards a social transformation
on such a scale, is to win mass popular support for it. It seems implausible that
anything less than a radical and democratic mass movement can bring it about
– but that would be just the sort of movement which can check out how good
these technologies really are, and make creative decisions about how to use
them. And this, really, is my problem with Fully Automated Luxury
Communism – the classless world beyond scarcity it depicts is a genuine
possibility, but if we’re to take that possibility seriously, as something more
than a provocation, we need better plans about how to move towards it.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani – a

manifesto for the future
Book of the day
Society books
Social justice and limitless abundance – a leftwing provocateur serves up some techno-
optimism
Andy Beckett

Wed 29 May 2019 

 The world of work … the BMW Mini car production plant, Oxford. Photograph: Geoff
Caddick/AFP/Getty Images

“Under Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” writes Aaron Bastani towards

the conclusion of this short, dizzyingly confident book, “we will see more of the
world than ever before, eat varieties of food we have never heard of, and lead
lives equivalent – if we so wish – to those of today’s billionaires. Luxury will
pervade everything as society based on waged work becomes as much a relic as
the feudal peasant ...”

In the doomy world of 2019, to come across this forecast is quite a shock.
Enormous optimism about humanity’s long-term future; faith in technology,
and in our wise use of it; a guilt-free enthusiasm for material goods; and yet also
a belief that an updated form of communism should be 21st-century society’s
organising principle – these are Bastani’s main themes. The immediate
temptation is to see the book as some sort of joke: a satire, or a political prank.

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Bastani is a rising young leftwing provocateur, co-founder of Novara Media, the

slickest of the guerrilla news and opinion operations that have sprung up in
Britain, amid the struggles of mainstream journalism either to properly register
the failures of austerity and modern capitalism or to explain the rise of their
opponents such as Jeremy Corbyn. Bastani is an effective but slippery
broadcaster and online presence: always fluent and flexible, able to switch from
fierce defence of Corbynism to cheekier updates on the busy British left’s latest
preoccupations, from post-work to the universal basic income. Fully Automated
Luxury Communism is a typical Bastani catchphrase – attention-grabbing,
armoured against attack with a sparkly coating of irony – and he has been
deploying it shamelessly for years in the lead-up to this publication.

But is it much more than a catchphrase? In a surprisingly earnest and stiff

opening section, he repeatedly lays out the book’s core argument. The world is
in an unprecedented crisis – environmental, economic, social, demographic. Yet
the left and the green movement’s conventional solution to it – essentially to
tame humanity through regulation and self-restraint – is the opposite of what’s
needed, Bastani says. Technology, guided by activist leftwing governments,
should be used to intensify our “mastery” of the planet, and to extend it to
places beyond. The result will not just be our world’s survival, he promises, but
the creation of a new world of social justice and limitless abundance, with goods
produced at almost no cost, and then freely and equally distributed.

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 Aaron Bastani is a co-founder of Novara Media. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The
Observer

Like many futurologists, he bases his predictions on a broad-brush reading of

history. So far, he claims, human society has been transformed by two epic,
upper-case “Disruptions”: “the domestication of animals and crops”, and the
industrial revolution. Both made possible ways of life that were previously either
fantasies or simply unimaginable. A “Third Disruption” is now imminent. Some
of its supposed driving forces are familiar stuff – artificial intelligence, solar
power – while others sound more far fetched: the mining of asteroids to
replenish Earth’s dwindling supplies of minerals; the replacement of most
edible meat with synthetic flesh. The latter process, Bastani writes, will be
“likely” to include “using a 3D printer to ‘print’ steaks”. It certainly makes a
change from his day job sticking up for British politics’ most famous vegetarian.

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In fact, much of the book is light on politics, focusing instead on recent and
impending technological breakthroughs, in a manner more familiar from upbeat
technology magazines such as Wired than the rigorously pessimistic leftwing
volumes Verso usually publishes. But Bastani writes with pace, economy and
infectious enthusiasm, and he solidifies his most speculative chapters, to an
extent, with some telling facts. “Global solar [power] capacity … increased by a
factor of 100 between 2004 and 2014,” he points out. And later: “Luxembourg
[has] already begun to create the legal frameworks for asteroid mining
companies to base themselves in the Duchy.” The beginnings of the future he
wants are already here.

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There are practical challenges still, he admits, deploying phrases such as “once
the technical barriers are surmounted”. But these cautions are rare and brief.
Bastani doesn’t say so explicitly, but he is really an accelerationist, one of a
small but influential line of thinkers, active in Britain since the 1990s, first
mainly on the right, now increasingly on the left, who believe that the best path
for humanity is to go faster, in all senses. “We must grasp the opportunities of
the new world,” he writes, “rather than dwell on those … social mores which are
quickly moving into the slipstream of history.” It’s easy to snort at, or feel
unsettled by, such moments of Lenin-goes-to-Silicon-Valley rhetoric. Bastani’s
vast proposals sometimes lack the relatively human scale and rootedness in
history of the schemes, similar in optimism and intent, currently being
promoted by other leftists as a Green New Deal.

Yet sometimes the nimbler Bastani persona lightens these pages. A clever
passage uses the London “Horse Manure Crisis” of 1894, when the then huge
number of horses being used in the capital led the Times to wonder whether it
would become uninhabitable, to demonstrate that supposedly lethal threats to
the environment can be overcome by technology with unexpected swiftness.
Within a few years of the panic, motorised transport became common, the
London horse population collapsed, and the threat of manure-buried streets
evaporated. “A few short decades from now,” Bastani concludes, “the seemingly
terminal [environmental] problems of today will appear as absurd.” You don’t
have to share his confidence about that to agree with his suggestion that the
apocalyptic is a mode that the media and many of its consumers slip into too
easily – sometimes for commercial or psychological rather than rational reasons
– and that episodes of mistaken doom-mongering are too easily forgotten.

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 John McDonnell at the start of the People’s March for Climate & Jobs, January 2018.
Photograph: Peter Marshall/Alamy
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But he does concede that there is a bigger obstacle than pessimism, or “technical
barriers”, to the creation of a sustainable and fair world. The problem is
political: the stranglehold of short-termist corporations over most economic life
and governments. It’s a predictable bogeyman for a book of this sort, but a
persuasive one. As long as such capitalists dominate the development and
deployment of technology, he argues, its potential to achieve higher social and
environmental goals will not be realised. Even the most adventurous space
exploration firms, which he at first profiles with great enthusiasm, are
ultimately too unambitious and profit-driven for his liking.

In his final chapters, Bastani sketches how governments and citizens could
make companies act differently, and also expand the space for developing
technology outside capitalism altogether. He suggests that Corbyn’s Labour
party, and in particular the shadow chancellor John McDonnell and his
technologically literate young advisers and proteges, are on the right path. But
it’s a long haul from “growing the worker-owned economy” and establishing
new British “regional investment bodies”, as the book slightly blandly
summarises the McDonnell approach, to establishing the new global society
Bastani envisages, with almost limitless public services and consumer
commodities, all of them either free or affordable to all, and environmentally
sustainable.

Some readers will finish this book exhilarated and energised. Others will be
unconvinced, or utterly baffled. There are more ideas crammed in here than in a
whole shelf of standard politics books. And in today’s fraught world, the time to
read whole shelves of politics books may have passed.
• Fully Automated Luxury Communism is published by Verso (£16.99). To
order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p
over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Further reading[edit]

 Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think  by Peter Diamandis
 Bright Future: Abundance and Progress in the 21st Century by David McMullen
 Books by Martin Ford (author)
 The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End
Oppression by Peter Joseph
 Peoples' Capitalism: The Economics of the Robot Revolution  by James Albus
 Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin
 Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek by Manu Saadia
 The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought by Peter
Joseph and TZM members
 Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin
 Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

Post-scarcity economy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be

produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they
become available to all very cheaply or even freely.[1][2] Post-scarcity does not
mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services, but that all
people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some
significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. [3] Writers on the
topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-
scarcity society.[4][5][6][7]
In the paper "The Post-Scarcity World of 2050–2075" [8] the authors assert that
we are currently living an age of scarcity resulting from negligent behavior (as
regards the future) of the 19th and 20th centuries. The period between 1975
and 2005 was characterized by relative abundance of resources (oil, water,
energy, food, credit, among others) which boosted industrialization and
development in the Western economies. An increased demand of resources
combined with a rising population led to resource exhaustion. [8] In part, the ideas
developed about post-scarcity are motivated by analyses that posit
that capitalism leverages scarcity.
One of the main traces of the scarcity periods is the increase and fluctuation of
prices. To deal with that situation, advances in technology come into play,
driving an efficient use of resources to a certain extent that costs will be
considerably reduced (almost everything will be free). Consequently, the
authors claim that the period between 2050 and 2075 will be a post-scarcity age
in which scarcity will no longer exist.[8]
An ideological contrast to the post-scarcity economy is formed by the concept of
a steady-state economy.[citation needed]

Speculative technology[edit]
Today, futurists who speak of "post-scarcity" suggest economies based on
advances in automated manufacturing technologies,[4] often including the idea
of self-replicating machines, the adoption of division of labour[9] which in theory
could produce nearly all goods in abundance, given adequate raw materials and
energy.
More speculative forms of nanotechnology (such as molecular
assemblers or nanofactories, which do not currently exist) raise the possibility of
devices that can automatically manufacture any specified goods given the
correct instructions and the necessary raw materials and energy, [10] and so many
nanotechnology enthusiasts have suggested it will usher in a post-scarcity
world.[11][12]
In the more near-term future, the increasing automation of physical labor
using robots is often discussed as means of creating a post-scarcity economy. [13]
[14]

Increasingly versatile forms of rapid prototyping machines, and a hypothetical

self-replicating version of such a machine known as a RepRap, have also been
predicted to help create the abundance of goods needed for a post-scarcity
economy.[15] Advocates of self-replicating machines such as Adrian Bowyer, the
creator of the RepRap project, argue that once a self-replicating machine is
designed, then since anyone who owns one can make more copies to sell (and
would also be free to ask for a lower price than other sellers), market
competition will naturally drive the cost of such machines down to the bare
minimum needed to make a profit,[16][17] in this case just above the cost of the
physical materials and energy that must be fed into the machine as input, and
the same should go for any other goods that the machine can build.
Even with fully automated production, limitations on the number of goods
produced would arise from the availability of raw materials and energy, as well
as ecological damage associated with manufacturing technologies. [4] Advocates
of technological abundance often argue for more extensive use of renewable
energy and greater recycling in order to prevent future drops in availability of
energy and raw materials, and reduce ecological damage. [4] Solar energy in
particular is often emphasized, as the cost of solar panels continues to
drop[4] (and could drop far more with automated production by self-replicating
machines), and advocates point out the total solar power striking the Earth's
surface annually exceeds our civilization's current annual power usage by a
factor of thousands.[18][19]
Advocates also sometimes argue that the energy and raw materials available
could be greatly expanded if we looked to resources beyond the Earth. For
example, asteroid mining is sometimes discussed as a way of greatly reducing
scarcity for many useful metals such as nickel.[20] While early asteroid mining
might involve manned missions, advocates hope that eventually humanity could
have automated mining done by self-replicating machines.[20][21] If this were done,
then the only capital expenditure would be a single self-replicating unit (whether
robotic or nanotechnological), after which the number of units could replicate at
no further cost, limited only by the available raw materials needed to build more.
[21]

Marxism[edit]
Karl Marx, in a section of his Grundrisse that came to be known as the
"Fragment on Machines",[22][23] argued that the transition to a post-capitalist
society combined with advances in automation would allow for significant
reductions in labor needed to produce necessary goods, eventually reaching a
point where all people would have significant amounts of leisure time to pursue
science, the arts, and creative activities; a state some commentators later
labeled as "post-scarcity".[24] Marx argued that capitalism—the dynamic of
economic growth based on capital accumulation—depends on exploiting
the surplus labor of workers, but a post-capitalist society would allow for:
The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of
necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general
reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then
corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the
time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. [25]
Marx's concept of a post-capitalist communist society involves the free
distribution of goods made possible by the abundance provided by automation.
[26]
 The fully developed communist economic system is postulated to develop
from a preceding socialist system. Marx held the view that socialism—a system
based on social ownership of the means of production—would enable progress
toward the development of fully developed communism by further advancing
productive technology. Under socialism, with its increasing levels of automation,
an increasing proportion of goods would be distributed freely. [27]
Marx did not believe in the elimination of most physical labor through
technological advancements alone in a capitalist society, because he believed
capitalism contained within it certain tendencies which countered increasing
automation and prevented it from developing beyond a limited point, so that
manual industrial labor could not be eliminated until the overthrow of capitalism.
[28]
 Some commentators on Marx have argued that at the time he wrote
the Grundrisse, he thought that the collapse of capitalism due to advancing
automation was inevitable despite these counter-tendencies, but that by the
time of his major work Capital: Critique of Political Economy he had abandoned
this view, and came to believe that capitalism could continually renew itself
unless overthrown.[29][30][31]
Post-Scarcity Anarchism[edit]
Main article: Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Murray Bookchin, in his 1971 essay collection Post-Scarcity Anarchism, outlines
an economy based on social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and an
abundance of fundamental resources, arguing that post-industrial
societies have the potential to be developed into post-scarcity societies. For
Bookchin, such development would enable "the fulfillment of the social and
cultural potentialities latent in a technology of abundance". [32]
Bookchin claims that the expanded production made possible by the
technological advances of the twentieth century were in the pursuit of
market profit and at the expense of the needs of humans and of
ecological sustainability. The accumulation of capital can no longer be
considered a prerequisite for liberation, and the notion that obstructions such as
the state, social hierarchy, and vanguard political parties are necessary in the
struggle for freedom of the working classes can be dispelled as a myth.[33]

Fiction[edit]

 A for Anything, originally The People Maker, by Damon Knight, depicts a

dystopian future in which the introduction of a device that can replicate anything,
including people and itself, has led to the return of slavery, since human labor is
now the only scarce commodity.
 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon features post-scarcity civilizations of the
Fifth and Eighteenth Men.
 Moving the Mountain is a feminist, eugenicist utopian novel written by Charlotte
Perkins Gilman. Jobs are distributed and everyone works two hours minimum for
full wages.
 The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Over three novels, Robinson charts
the terraforming of Mars as a human colony and the establishment of a post-
scarcity society.[34]
 The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks are centered on a post-scarcity economy[34]
[35][36]
 where technology is advanced to such a degree that all production is
automated,[37] and there is no use for money or property (aside from personal
possessions with sentimental value).[38] People in the Culture are free to pursue
their own interests in an open and socially-permissive society. The society has
been described by some commentators as "communist-bloc"[39] or "anarcho-
communist".[40] Banks' close friend and fellow science fiction writer Ken
MacLeod has said that The Culture can be seen as a realization of Marx's
communism, but adds that "however friendly he was to the radical left, Iain had little
interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to radical politics in the here
and now. As he saw it, what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by
continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the
meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world
were rational and humane."[41]
 The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey features a form of post-scarcity on
Earth, although this version is closer to post-employment. The majority of Earth's
population lives on "basic", a regular government stipend and governmental
housing, that is the only income they have, as only a few work in jobs. People have
to work for a period at basic service positions to prove they won't get bored and
quit before being allowed to pursue higher education and actual employment.
 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow features a moneyless
society where material goods are no longer scarce, and everyone is granted basic
rights that in our present age are mostly considered luxuries. In this work, the
author write economic society by appraisal of human personality that economic
 value a person have is decided by estimation or esteem from other persons. In this
world, it is established that estimation system of economic value so called Whuffie.
An like elixireal technology is realized by clone technology with low cost backup of
human personality, and fisical property became not scarce. The hero of this story
had been live above more one century, and work in the Walt Disney World.
 The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross takes place in
a post-scarcity society and involves "disruptive" technology.[34] The title is a
derogatory term for the technological singularity coined by SF author Ken
MacLeod.
 Con Blomberg's 1959 short story "Sales Talk" depicts a post-scarcity society in
which society incentivizes consumption to reduce the burden of overproduction. To
further reduce production, virtual reality is used to fulfill peoples' needs to create.[42]
 The science fiction novella Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip José
Farmer paints a vision of a highly regulated, state-dominated post-scarcity society,
in which a renaissance in arts coincides with mass illiteracy.
 The 24th-century human society of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine has been labeled a post-scarcity society due to the ability
of the fictional "replicator" technology to synthesize a wide variety of goods nearly
instantaneously,[43] along with dialogue such as Captain Picard's statement in the
film Star Trek: First Contact that "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving
force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."[44] By the
22nd century, money had been rendered obsolete on Earth.
 Voyage from Yesteryear by James P. Hogan. The human-habitable planet is
found by interstella investigation space-ship, Embryo synthesized by genetic
information in the computer of investigation ship grow, and human born in the
found planet with that the planet is their home planet. They build society of their
own, in no relation with the human civilization of the Earth.
 Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age takes place in a post-scarcity
world, though not everyone benefits equally.[45]
 Cory Doctorow's novel Walkaway presents a modern take on the idea of post-
scarcity. With the advent of 3D printing – and especially the ability to use these to
fabricate even better fabricators – and with machines that can search for and
reprocess waste or discarded materials, the protagonists no longer have need of
regular society for the basic essentials of life, such as food, clothing and shelter.[46][47]

June 25, 2019  Aaron Bastani Bill Jefferies book review Ideals

Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A

Manifesto (Review by Bill Jefferies)
✑ BILL JEFFERIES` ╱ ± 9 minutes
 Bastani’s future is not one to be fought for.

Aaron Bastani describes how various key technological

trends will lead to ‘fully automated luxury communism’
(FALC). Bill Jefferies points to some flaws in his theory
and political programme.

From: Marx & Philosophy, June 11, 2019. ╱ About the author 

A aron Bastani is the founder of Novara Media, his Fully Automated

Luxury Communism is an attempt to diagnose various key technological trends of

contemporary society, which together he considers will lead to the end of
capitalism and its replacement by a new society he calls ‘fully automated luxury
communism’ (FALC). It closely follows the work of Jeremy Rifkin who
originally developed this thesis (if not the name) in the mid-1990s, or more
precisely that of Paul Mason, who advocated a Marxist version of Rifkin’s ideas.

Bastani claims that through the course of human history there have been ‘three
disruptions’ (10). The first disruption was the agricultural revolution circa 12,000
years ago, the second disruption was the industrial revolution circa 200 years ago
and now the information revolution – the third disruption. This disruption will
‘offer relative liberation from scarcity’ in ‘energy, cognitive labour and
information’ (11). Following Mark Fisher, Bastani considers this disruption
means the end of ‘capitalist realism’, the idea that ‘it is easier to imagine the end
of the world than the end of capitalism’, which was Fisher’s description of the
dominance of capitalist ideology after the collapse of the USSR. According to
Bastani our world is ‘increasingly defined by low growth, low productivity and
low wages’ (26). Not only in the West, rapid growth is over in India and China
too. This finite world of stagnant economies and living standards produces five
crises: ‘climate change, resource scarcity, ever-larger surplus populations, ageing
and technological unemployment as a result of automation – are set to undermine
capitalism’s ability to reproduce itself’ (48). This crisis of stagnation is so grave
that it poses an imminent threat to the future of capitalist production. Yet at the
same time it is so dynamic that it will abolish scarcity and introduce a regime of
luxury communism, to paradoxically save capitalist production from itself.
Bastani considers that

"For Marx the realm of necessity was where we ‘wrestle with nature to satisfy
our wants and to maintain and reproduce life –  in other words it was a world
defined by scarcity… In Marx’s day it formed the central question of classical
political economy: how do you efficiently and equitably allocate resources in a
world where they are limited?" (54)

But this was not the question of classical political economy. It was the question
of neo-classical economics. The principle problem of classical political economy
was to determine the laws that regulate the distribution of production among
‘three classes of the community’. Output was not scarce but produced, as Ricardo
put it, ‘almost without any assignable limit’. Bastani’s question, and his theory of
communism, comes not from classical political economy but Lionel Robbins.
Bastani’s assertion that the working class revolution will ‘eliminate work and
thereby end all class distinctions’(55) derives from a definition of work provided
by William Stanley Jevons where ‘labour is any painful exertion of mind or body
undergone partly or wholly with a view to future good’ and so something to be
avoided at all costs. Bastani considers that in his FALC ‘work becomes more
akin to play’, aimless activity the produces nothing but fun. This communist
work is a ‘route to self-development rather than a means of survival’. Bastani
quotes Marx who considers that in a communist society ‘labour has become not
only a means of life but life’s prime want’ (55). Labour is not then akin to play, it
continues to provide the means of life, but is no longer alienated, it is not
something to be avoided, but life’s prime want. Communism does not abolish
labour, but alienated labour, the alienation of humanity from its own essence, the
human need to consciously transform the world to provide for its own needs.
Bastani’s lethargic utopia is something quite different. There is no labour in it,
but life is luxuriant lassitude, perhaps like the do-nothing existence of the royals
or the Trumps?
 Bastani summarized the core arguments of his book in the New York Times.

Bastani supports this vision of the new society by quoting J.M. Keynes, the
liberal economist who considered that scarcity, the premise of marginalist
economics, would eventually disappear with rises in productivity, Peter Drucker,
the management theorist, who considered in 1993 that ‘knowledge has become
the resource rather than a resource’ (59) and Paul Romer, the neo-conservative
Chief Economist of the World Bank, who asserted in 1990 that technological
change was ‘endogenous’ to growth (63). According to Bastani this was
something new to economics. Maybe to economics, but not to political economy,
premised on the assumption that capitalism exists through constantly
revolutionizing the technical basis of production. Bastani quotes Brad Delong
and Larry Summers who complained that with the rise of the internet, production
no longer fulfils the basic condition for economic efficiency, that price equals
marginal cost, as information could be produced at no cost. Bastani asserts that
this means the ‘price mechanism had broken down’ (65). This is at a basic level
untrue. Delong and Summers were wrong, technological advance means that the
owner of the latest technology is able to extract monopoly rents. Hence the
determination of the Chinese and Huawei for example, to catch up with the USA
and Apple. But let’s say it did, what if technological advance meant that
manufacturing output was produced for nothing, would this mean the end of
capitalism? It would not. There are many factors of production that are given to
producers for nothing, such as air, water, and surplus labour. Why should the
addition of another cause the price mechanism to break down? More
fundamentally, in any real economy price cannot equal marginal cost. Price or
average revenue only equals marginal cost in a society based on perfect
competition an internally incoherent abstraction which never has and could never
exist. Firstly, as there is no such thing as marginal cost, production is continuous
so there never is a final unit. Secondly, even if there were, and prices equalled
marginal costs, then prices could not change. Thirdly, all producers have some
market power, however miniscule, which means marginal costs do not equal
prices, which is why prices can change at all. Fourthly, there is no profit if
marginal cost equals price, as profit is the difference between average cost and
price at the given quantity. The equilibrium condition of the neo-classical
economics, where marginal cost = marginal price = average cost = average price
is one that excludes profit and so curiously capitalist production itself.
 What if technological advance meant that
manufacturing output was produced for
nothing, would this mean the end of
capitalism? It would not.
Bastani’s understanding of the labour theory of value is similarly sketchy.
Bastani says that ‘if capital can become labour – if tools produced by humans can
subsequently perform any task they themselves complete – then, within a market
system, the price a worker can demand for their time collapses’ (70). The realm
of output produced by tools, machines and technology has expanded
exponentially under capitalism and will continue to do so. So what? There
remains a fundamental distinction between machines and humans within
capitalist production that no amount of expansion will change – property
relations. Humans can own machines but, machines cannot own humans and, in
capitalism, humans cannot own humans either. As surplus value is a transfer of
property, that is a redistribution of value from one set, or class, of humans to
another, only humans can produce profits – not machines. If humans are
eventually excluded from the capitalist production process, not only will the
demand for labour collapse, capitalist production will do too, as there will be no
profit to transfer.

Bastani claims that ‘faced with the limitless, virtually free supply of anything,
[capitalism’s] internal logic starts to break down. This is because its central
presumption is that scarcity will always exist’ (137), but this is not the central
presumption of capitalism, but of neo-classical economics. The premise for
capitalism, and of classical political economy, is that commodity production
takes place without almost any assignable limit. As technology reduces the cost
of manufacturing production, so commodity production will expand into new
previously unthought of realms of production, just as it has done over the last
three centuries. Bastani claims that the absence of ‘scarcity’ in certain domains of
production is at ‘odds with the essence of capitalist social relations, a system
where ‘the basic condition for economic efficiency … [is] that price equal
marginal cost’ – that is where things must be made for profit if they are to be
made at all’ (115). This is not the basis of capitalist production, but of marginal
economics, a condition which never occurs, and if it did, bizarrely excludes
profit. If the domain of manufacturing extended across all production, to the
point where all human labour was excluded, not only would the price of labour
fall to nil, so would capitalist profit, as profit is a transfer of human property
between humans. As the source of profit will have disappeared, if these capitalist
property relations persist, and Bastani never suggests they will not, far from the
future being a luxury automated communism, it will be an automated hell of
universal collapse.
 The working class has scarcely any social
agency in Bastani’s schema, at their most
active they appear as voters.
Bastani points to the growth of robots, the spread of solar and wind power, the
potential mining of asteroids, the genetic manipulation of humans and possibility
of growing steak in petri-dishes. He finds that technological advance can be
amazing. But what about the political programme for this FALC movement?
How does society advance to it? Bastani says that ‘the return of ‘the people’ as
the main political actor is inevitable’ (191), but there will be no return to the
‘anti-liberal coup’ of 1917 (193). FALC is different as it recognizes ‘the right of
personal happiness’ (193). The FALC is not ‘so simple to achieve as to merely
require replacing one group of rulers with another’ (55). Merely? The ‘revolution
[FALC] portends is not simply one that substitutes one ruling class for another’
(194). That’s a relief, as the substitution of one ruling class by another (i.e. the
emancipation of the working class by its own self-activity) is in any respect
unachievable as ‘the majority of people will only be politically active for brief
periods of time’ (195) hence, FALC must engage with ‘electoral politics’ (195)
which ‘shapes the parameters of what is possible’ (195). Bastani advocates a set
of reforms more or less limited to the Labour Party’s 2017 manifesto, plus a few
minor additions such as worker owned businesses, an improved central bank,
some renationalization and municipalisation, and a reworked definition of GDP
(233). The working class has scarcely any social agency in Bastani’s schema, at
their most active they appear as voters. The rest of the time they are victims; of
the five crises and of technological advance. Bastani’s future is not one to be
fought for, as there is no way of fighting for it, it is merely a case of waiting for
technology to deliver what the class struggle could not.

Top image: Aaron Bastani, 2017. From: Wikimedia.

February 29, 2020  Aaron Bastani book review Ideals Sam Nicholls

Fully Automated Luxury Communism (a
counter-review by Sam Nicholls)
✑ SAM NICHOLLS` ╱ ± 8 minutes

 In a work of popular non-fiction, simplified

language is often necessary.

At its core, Aaron Bastani's book Fully Automated

Luxury Communism shows both how bad things could
get if the people of the world do not unite, and how good it
could get if we do.

From: Socialist Economist, Feb. 29, 2020. ╱ About the author 

I n Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Bastani achieves what all Marxists

dream of. His book about communism is fully readable. As such, it is a badly
needed contribution to a living, breathing Marxism, one that seeks knowledge of
the world in order to change it. To Bastani the world is heading into a future
already foreseen by Dr. Karl. Capitalist competition has always incentivised
innovations that reduce the need for labour. This process is leading, according to
Bastani, to a near complete loss of jobs. As a system dependent on wage labour,
capitalism will no longer be viable. Or at least, it will no longer be the dominant
mode of production. To Bastani, this is only one of five present crises of
capitalism. The solution to all of them is Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
If only a populist movement could create it, people could have all their basic and
luxury needs met. A system of innovation and production driven by AI and
asteroid mining would allow all to benefit from a world of post scarcity in both
labour and resources. In this possible future, history would stop ending and start
beginning.

What Bastani does best is highlight how catastrophically bad things could get,
while also showing how easily the very opposite could happen. If on the one
hand the world could descend into the horrors of climate change induced mass
displacement and famine, and a political economy operated by and for
monopolies, it is equally true that there is a solution to every problem. This
should not be taken for granted. It is just as likely that we humans would find
ourselves in a situation as messy as the present, but without solutions. Indeed,
there are likely thousands of universes in which humans never even had the
opportunity to die from climate change. Even more optimistically, the solutions
to each of the world’s problems help address all the others. As Bastani notes,
solving climate change also helps solve poverty, and solving poverty also helps
solve climate change.
 What Bastani does best is highlight how
catastrophically bad things could get, while
also showing how easily the very opposite
could happen.
This fork in the road, with climate change induced genocide on the one hand, and
fully automated luxury communism on the other, is most evident when Bastani
discusses the situation faced by the world’s poorest people. Mainstream
economists have long justified inaction on global poverty because capitalism’s
rising tide would eventually lift all boats. Just look at China, capitalist
propagandists would and still do say.  For them China is obvious proof of the
folly of humans who think they can do better than the market. Don’t worry
underdeveloped states, eventually you will get the luxury of being the world’s
sweat shop. The problem is, and as Bastani shows, China’s rise is not a future
foreseeable for any other developing country hoping to industrialise. Why?
Because with the massive reductions in the need for labour that AI-driven
automation will bring, there will be no need to offshore. If there are no labour
costs, it’s better for companies to keep their Intellectual Property safe at home. If
true, then an economic rise like China’s will not necessarily be possible for
poorer states.

Nevertheless, Bastani’s FALC offers a solution to global poverty, climate change,

and automation. To solve climate change, developed states must fund a new
wave of green industrialisation in the Global South. This won’t just mean catch
up, but leap frogging. Just like the widespread adoption of mobile phones in
Africa, the relatively cheap virtual power networks offered by solar panels and
batteries are already spreading, as seen in Bangladesh. If the emissions of
wealthy states are taxed in order to further expand such provisions, the economic
development of the Global South would be accelerated just as climate change is
drastically reduced.

Curiously, however, Bastani’s FALC has not been welcomed by socialists with

open arms. In the pages of this very website, Bastani’s book has been
attacked. Bill Jefferies wrote that ‘Bastani’s future is not to be fought for’. In
Jeffries’ reading, FALC presents a future in which workers will only be able to
spend their time ‘waiting for technology to deliver what the class struggle could
not.’ This reading of Bastani is ungenerous and unforgiving. I feel Bastani’s goal
of presenting a readable book has been a success, even if this means he does not
get as bogged down in structure-agency dilemmas, and the true complexity of the
history of economic thought, as Jefferies might hope. As evidence for this, I
picked up FALC in a real-life bookshop in Australia last week. But Jeffries’
reading can’t be explained only by an inability to tolerate readable books.
Instead, Jeffries’ core claims are not true. Bastani certainly has not written a
history in which workers have no agency. Nor is it one in which workers should
just sit around and wait for the crises of capitalism to unravel. For Bastani,
workers do not only have the world to win, but they have far more to lose than
their chains. Indeed, things could get much much worse.
 Bastani certainly has not written a history in
which workers have no agency. Nor is it one
in which workers should just sit around and
wait for the crises of capitalism to unravel.
Thus, while Bastani does write of the great historical importance of technological
innovation, he does not assume it to have occurred in a vacuum. Rather, it is
conditioned by the politics of the day. Just as the labour saving innovations that
are leading to a world without jobs have been shaped by past class struggle, so it
will in the future also. For Bastani such struggles will mean the difference
between a world destroyed and a world won. Bastani’s calls for people to take
voting seriously should not be read as his only proposal for worker agency. His
proposals are presented as necessary first steps. If worker power is not built up
early, then workers will not be able to capitalise on any of the gains made
possible, but not inevitable, by the crises of automation. Indeed, beating at the
heart of Bastani’s book is an urgency for action. Not drawing up a precise
blueprint for exactly how the politics of FALC will unravel is as much a result of
Bastani being aware that the future can’t be predicted, and that collective agency
might need to go in many directions, as it is something to justify dismissing his
entire approach to history and the future.
Of course, there are problems with Bastani’s writing. Talk of ‘capitalism’ doing
things, or capitalism as a subject, ignores that capitalism is just a sound used to
describe, along with other equally artificial words, a certain mode of production
which is driven forth by the actions of people who exist in many different
relations to both the ideas and material forces that they themselves help create.
Nevertheless, in a work of popular non-fiction, simplified language is often
necessary. Attempting to write about change in history without slipping into
language that evokes a sense of inevitability, or without treating constructs like
‘nation states’ and ‘capitalism’ as subjects, is highly tedious.

Writing a digestible work on such issues is made even more difficult by the fact
that it will inevitably rub shoulders with core debates not only of Marxism, but of
social science more generally. Here, it must be noted that Jeffries is not entirely
wrong. Bastani’s language does sometimes imply inevitability, particularly about
an impending automation that takes away all jobs. This is not inevitable. Quite
possibly, a great crisis from any direction will engulf the world capitalist system
before automation does. It is also possible, although grossly unlikely, that
humans will create the power and consensus to restrict the application of
innovation. Maybe, just maybe, the whole world will become Amish.

This point about inevitability touches on another aspect of Bastani’s argument.

He claims that communism has never been possible before, because previously
luxury could not have been granted to all people. But this ignores the prospect of
people creating a culture that did not want limitless luxury. Maybe people could
not have had iPhones in the past, but it is possible that they could have been
content and free without them, and it is possible that they would have found work
satisfying if they had received from it the full value of their labour, such that they
could enjoy far more free time. Of course, Bastani’s argument is more complex
than I am making out. At issue is not just what people could get, but how quickly
and expensively goods are to produce at various points in history. Here Bastani’s
book relates to an interesting debate within Marxism. How necessary is the
capitalist mode of production for a future socialism? Was it ever necessary? Is it
still necessary?

While Bastani has not written a work that footnotes the endlessly intricate, and
no-doubt important, debates about the nature of capitalism and historical
materialism, he has given all present and future social forces a big-picture view
that is useful for making sense of many complex developments. It is deceptively
simple, and for this it is powerful. At its core, FALC shows both how bad things
could get if the people of the world do not unite, and how good it could get if we
do. This vision need not scare away the cold-war conservativism of anyone’s
parents (though it no doubt will), because it is a historical materialism of and for
the present. While not inevitable, Bastani’s vision just might prove useful to a
populist movement seeking to grapple, in many different ways, with the many
different crises currently facing, and soon to be facing, the world capitalist
system.

Top image: From cover of Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto.