Champagne Communism?

“Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” by Aaron Bastani, 2019

This is a surprising title and intended to be so.  It is based on Marx’s few observations about the nature of communism – a society based on abundance, unalienated labor and the full exercise of talent, absent a state and coercion.  Of course, the author knows everything cannot be fully automated and should know the definition of ‘luxury’ is historically and class determined, but still…

Break Out the Beer?  Actually the Champagne!

Bastani might be considered a techno-utopian socialist, unlike those capitalist techno-utopians from Silicon Valley whose whole framework is within a profit-based, market economy.  He focuses on the great reduction in labor time for so many products if technology no longer just served profits.  Yet his writing is full of hosannas to U.S. and U.K. tech firms working on various parts of his vision of FALC – thus oddly jiving with their projects.  Bastani discusses artificial intelligence, gene modifications and testing, asteroid mining, cheap space missions, lab-grown and barrel-brewed food, zero-energy heat and AC housing, a continuing ‘Green Revolution,’ electric and driverless vehicles, ubiquitous cell phones and solar and wind power.  For a neo-liberal reader this gives credibility to these projects in the present ‘capitalist reality” alone.  After all, the slant of the techno-capitalists is to promote the idea that profitable technology can solve all problems, including global warming.

The experience of the USSR and the present ambivalent role of China, which Bastani doesn’t go into, show that actually a planned or partially planned socialized economy can be a larger motor to progressive technological development than the reverse.  We do not always need capital to ‘show us the way.’  As he points out, the activities of every capitalist firm doing this high-tech work is heavily planned as well.

Bastani identifies what I call ‘zombie technologies’ – gasoline & ethanol engines, gas and wood heat, ground telephone lines, carbon power, non-preventive medical care and meat and dairy diets of animals and fish - and shows how technological developments can make them largely obsolete in regard to energy, health and climate change.   He does not address the issue of agriculture except regarding the issue of diet.

Bastani sees these technological developments in the context of a “3^rd Disruption” – following the 1^st of mass agriculture and the 2^nd of industrialization – based on information and computing power.  Bastani seems to see technology as the driver of history, not class struggle, though at the end he denies that technology predetermines history.  He is a big proponent of “Moore’s Law” – which brings down costs in exponential ways or increases capacity in exponential ways. The hip term ‘disruption’ is borrowed from current neo-liberal phraseology, not Marx or Engels, but his understanding of the uses of technology is grounded in Marx. 

I.E. the common misunderstanding of Luddism as being simply 'anti-technology' is not actual history.  Machine-breaking was a tactic, not the end in itself.  Ludd wanted a minimum wage; the right to trade unions; against the super-exploitation of women and children and most pointedly jobs for those put out of work by machines.

Bastani makes the valid point that capital needs scarcity to keep prices up.  If scarcity ended and prices fell to zero or near zero in energy, in health, in food, in housing, in education, in transport, in entertainment (as he claims has already happened - on the surface - in downloaded music, news, YouTube and Wikipedia) – then the system would loose its raison d’etre.  This he puts as “energy and information want to be free.” On the topic of automation, he clearly sees that artificial intelligence could shorten the working day instead of putting people in the unemployment line.  As Kim Moody noted in his labor book, “On New Terrain,” (reviewed below) in the past 30-year period of neo-liberalist capital, automation took significantly more jobs in the U.S. than off-shoring.

ACTION

In his ‘action’ section Bastani advocates a ‘red and green’ mass approach.  He likes a form of ‘market socialism,’ which is not the same thing as using some market mechanisms in a transition to socialism.  In the present capitalist regime he supports somewhat wonky and reasonable social-democratic plans to localize production, which he terms “municipal protectionism.”  He wants to create state and municipal banks that focus on benefiting the working classes and fund the new energy paradigm of solar and wind.  He seeks to keep procurement locally based and build and finance worker cooperatives while freezing housing prices. He wants to take the strategy regional, then national, then international for a global ‘worker-run economy.’  He thinks defensive unions, so-called Leninist formations and other nostalgic methods of organizing have to be superseded by new kinds of organizing that incorporates the future.  He says workers can run in elections and administer governments if elected. But other than that, his vagueness on organization and the state is deafening.

Coming to a Flag Near You

PROBLEMS IN PARADISE?

Another large problem I see here is time-scale.  Unless all of this starts TODAY there will be no rosier future, especially regarding climate change.  As to the tech advances, asteroid mining is still literally pie-in-the-sky, so mineral scarcity will be a reality.  Retrofitting housing will not be done at the snap of a finger nor will implementation of these other technologies. The assumption that solar and wind can replace oil, gas & ethanol 100% and more has not been born out by studies, though it is theoretically possible given the mass of sunlight falling on the earth. Nor might we want it to.  Marx did not believe you could go from capitalism to communism in one fell swoop, unlike what Bastani seems to believe.  The Russian revolution, along with others, certainly proved that in practice.  This approach appears to be reminiscent of utopian socialists like William Morris or ultra-left communists and anarchists.  

The other problem is the resistance that will be put up by the capitalists.  Finance capital, carbon capital, Big plastic, Big Ag, Big retail, the real estate complex, the building industry, the military and its industrial suppliers – i.e. nearly every dominant aspect of the present capitalist economy will have to be done away with or oriented towards a communist future.  This will not happen after a large academic symposium where Bastani convinces the assembled CEOs that they are dinosaurs living out the archaic ‘2^nd disruption.’  Nor through a ‘counter-culture’ co-op economy that somehow grows to dominate capital.   

Essentially the proletariat needs to crush the capitalist opposition quickly, and that will not be done through an academic discussion or marginal efforts.  A workers government exercising overwhelming force over capital will be the only thing that can stave off the worst effects of global warming and bring us to the basics of plenty and the gates of communism – sustainability, food, housing, transport, education, health, democracy, culture and unalienated labor.   Bastani calls some of these Universal Basic Services (UBS) – far superior to Universal Basic Income.  He wants UBS to be instituted in the post-capitalist period prior to FALC. 

As to the concept of FALC, work is what made humans human - it is not a dirty word in itself, so full-automation might also be alienating, not just impossible. Then there is the word 'luxury.'  At the present time the word ‘luxury’ is usually associated with a Maserati in every mansion.  This is not a socialist term - it is meant to appeal to the hedonics of present capitalism – and also meant to portray communism as something better than living in a military barracks.  Which it definitely is - minus the mansion and Maserati. Though almost free lab-based champagne might be technically possible according to Bastani, so that is something else to look forward to.

Other reviews on this subject below, use blog search box, upper left:  “New Dark Age,” “Shrinking the Technosphere” (Orlov); “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “The New, New Thing” and “Flash Boys” (Lewis); “Zombie Capitalism,” “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” “In Letters of Fire & Blood” (Caffentzis); “Hippie Modernism,” “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Time Wars” (Rifkin), “Cypherpunks” (Assange) “The Hedonism Handbook.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 26, 2019