Despite the claim that Marx favoured violent revolution, the truth is he never believed the transition beyond capitalism would be an exclusively political process – something so simple to achieve as to merely require replacing one group of rulers with another. It certainly entailed class struggle and the working class gaining political power, but it also needed new ideas, technologies and social relations. Marx considered the working class to be the key to a future society, but only because its revolution was uniquely able to eliminate work and thereby end all class distinctions.
Thus despite repeated calls for the working class to liberate itself, Marx did not believe that work makes us free – nor that the society of work expands the scope of human possibility. To the contrary, his view was that communism was only possible when our labour – how we mix our cognitive and physical eforts with the world – becomes a route to self-development rather than a means of survival. Marx viewed this as contingent on technological change: the more developed the forces of production, the greater their capacity to ofer a new kind of society where labour and leisure would blend into one:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life ’s prime want … and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
With the arrival of communism any distinction between mental and physical labour would vanish, with work becoming more akin to play. This also meant a society with greater collective wealth, where all essential wants as well as creative desires are satisfied. Which is where luxury comes in. The concept, under conditions of scarcity, expresses that which is beyond utility, its essence an excess beyond the necessary. So as information, labour, energy and resources become permanently cheaper – and work and the limits of the old world are left behind – it turns out we don’t just satisfy all of our needs, but dissolve any boundary between the useful and the beautiful. Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism.
What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism?
55