--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781786632623" library_document_id: "6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea" source_sha256: "1abf214ba80dbc1c2c27dfbaa4c324d483354085cfb676f2df827d68fa33ed6f" pdf_physical_page_count: 288 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 190 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea?start=190&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=190&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=180&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=200&limit=10" --- # Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=190 | PRINTED_PAGE=181 For now the wines are easily distinguishable from the real thing, with the brand’s Moscato described by one reviewer as exhibiting a ‘plastic aroma and taste ’ and reeking ‘with artificiality’. Their whiskey is a diferent story, however, with the Washington Post describing how it had touches of liquorice and apple and tasted better than Pappy Van Winkle ’s Twenty-Year-Old Family Reserve, one of the world’s most-prized bourbons. Besides the huge savings in labour, time, energy, land and water, synthetic biology will underpin a historic relocation of food production. Synthetic meat, which needs no sunlight, would appear to be a perfect candidate for vertical, urban farming, while the obvious savings with land come to fundamentally alter our relationship with nature. This could have a number of benefits including the rewilding of vast wildernesses lost to deforestation and the Industrial Revolution – certainly of major use as carbon sinks in trying to mitigate climate change. Meanwhile, the end of global food distribution, at least in its present form, would avert colossal amounts of waste. At present the average ingredient in an American meal travels 1,550 miles before consumption, while 70 per cent of a food’s final retail price comes from transportation, storage and handling. In a society emphasising energy abundance through eficiency as much as extreme supply, the idea that 127 calories of fuel would be used to fly a calorie of iceberg lettuce from the US to the UK, as is presently the case, will be rightly viewed as absurd. Indeed, just like gene editing it’s possible that DIY cultures will accompany the rise of hyper-local production with our ever-expanding leisure time given over to home-brewing ribeye steaks and Gruyère cheese as much as beer or cider. Food Without Animals 181 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=191 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=192 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED III. Paradise Found Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos. Mary Shelley With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Oscar Wilde ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=193 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=194 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 9 Popular Support: Luxury Populism We want everything. Nanni Balestrini Against Elite Technocracy The technologies of the Third Disruption are already creating a new set of dispositions towards the world. As a result, every aspect of social life, from ownership to work and even scarcity is being transformed. From that observation emerges several questions: How can these dispositions be turned into political power? How can the distance between the future we thought was on ofer, and the disappointment of the present, be breached? How do we translate seemingly individual, personal problems into a bold and emphatic ‘we ’? The answer to all three enquiries begins with an admission. While the tendency to extreme supply means everything will become permanently cheaper – from food to transport and clothing – all as a result of each factor of production falling in price thanks to the central role of information, in the absence of an appropriate politics this will only lead to novel forms of profiteering. Marx expressed this perfectly when he wrote, ‘The most developed machinery thus  forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=195 | PRINTED_PAGE=186 In response to that admission, an assertion: any successful politics that seeks to submit the possibilities of the Third Disruption to the needs of people rather than profit must be populist. If not, it is certain to fail. Capitalist realism is simply too adaptable for a radical politics of management and technocracy, meaning any rupture must be understandable to most people in an idiom that they readily understand. What is more, the wider social benefits of the shift to Fully Automated Luxury Communism must be seen as running parallel to flourishing on a personal scale, rather than a sacrifice to some greater good. This is the politics of the self-help guru – be precisely who you want to be – embedded within a broader programme for political change. You can only live your best life under FALC and nothing else, so fight for it and refuse the yoke of an economic system which belongs in the past. Populism is a politics that refuses to recognise the prevailing common sense in managing the economy. Consequently a portion of its critics, those most seduced by capitalist realism, attack it from the incorrect assumption that there is no alternative to neoliberalism. As the status quo is imperilled by the five crises, as well as the long fallout from 2008, such defences will increasingly take place through appeals to anti-utopianism rather than anything positive or propositional. Thus even standard-bearers for the establishment might concede that living standards are getting worse, or that society is going backwards by many measures, but at least, they will respond, we aren’t in 1990s Rwanda and aren’t medieval serfs. Such a position signifies the death of the very idea of the future, with enlightenment and progress – formerly ideological pillars of liberal capitalism – exchanged for a vision of the good society where decline is marginally slower than it might otherwise be. 186 paradise found ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=196 | PRINTED_PAGE=187 Others, who may agree about the scale and even urgent necessity of change, will contend that such a radical path should only be pursued by a narrow technocratic elite. Such an impulse is understandable if not excusable; or the suspicion that democracy unleashes ‘the mob’ is as old as the idea itself. What is more, a superficial changing of the guard exclusively at the level of policy-making is easier to envisage than building a mass political movement – and far simpler to execute as a strategy. Yet the truth is any social settlement imposed without mass consent, particularly given the turbulent energies unleashed by the Third Disruption, simply won’t endure. Which is why for the kind of change required, and for it to last in a world increasingly at odds with the received wisdom of the past, a populist politics is necessary. One that blends culture and government with ideas of personal and social renewal. One that, to borrow a term, invents the future. Anything less will fall short. A populist politics is one that calls upon, and claims to represent, ‘the people ’. While this category does not exist as a permanent and immutable entity, what does prevail are parameters that elevate certain kinds of assembly, social trait or capacity. That is why the ‘ethnic people ’ is defined by the community of blood and land; the ‘democratic people ’ by the shared act of forging legitimate authority through elections; and the ‘ignorant people ’ by a benevolent elite who generously keeps them at bay or defends them from themselves. The very essence of populism is to determine who ‘the people really are, rendering visible – and powerful – those elements otherwise framed as too incompetent, dangerous or docile to transform society. Popular Support 187 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=197 | PRINTED_PAGE=188 Just as was the case with the Second Disruption in early nineteenth-century Europe, populism is the only way to manage the kind of transformation we are set to confront. Then, making sense of a changing world was enacted through new forms of togetherness: nationalism both liberal and authoritarian, imperialism, racism and socialism. The present juncture demands something similar, asking us to create a collective politics that goes beyond scarcity, work and the narrow forms of selfhood and identity ofered by neoliberalism. The notion that a ruling class can manage such transition – for better or worse – within such civilisational rift isn’t just wrong, it’s absurd. What is more if new, appropriate forms of togetherness are not created, those authoritarianisms concocted by previous generations will return. The Red and the Green This ‘luxury’ populism must be both red and green. Red because it places the energies of the Third Disruption at the service of humanity – in the process enhancing personal freedom like never before. Green because it knows climate change is inevitable and that going beyond fossil fuels is a matter of critical urgency. What is more, rather than reducing our quality of life, it grasps how the transition to renewable energy ofers a bridge to energy abundance – permitting more prosperous societies than previously possible under the petty limits of fossil fuels. A green politics of ecology without a red politics of shared wealth will fail to command popular support. Conversely, the promise of red plenty based on fossil fuels and resource scarcity will fall victim to climate breakdown, leaving the world’s poor exposed to devastation like never before. Which is why the only politics fit to fight climate change is the demand for FALC – driven by the impulse to lead fuller, expanded lives, not diminished ones. 188 paradise found ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=198 | PRINTED_PAGE=189 To the green movement of the twentieth century this is heretical. Yet it is they who, for too long, unwisely echoed the claim that ‘small is beautiful’ and that the only way to save our planet was to retreat from modernity itself. FALC rallies against that command, distinguishing consumption under fossil capitalism – with its commuting, ubiquitous advertising, bullshit jobs and built-in obsolescence – from pursuing the good life under conditions of extreme supply. Under FALC 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 of history as the feudal peasant and medieval knight. More than the vacuous nihilism of today’s ultra-rich, whose ascent beyond scarcity finds its pathetic expression in conspicuous consumption, the process of building FALC will not only bequeath us the resources needed to make us happy, but also a sense of common purpose. What is more, luxury populism rejects the folk politics of ethical consumption and the sphere of ‘the local’ as inherently virtuous. The extent of the solutions needed to address the five crises are planetary, and while action will often be close to home – as the following chapters make clear – acknowledging the historic and global scale of any response is critical. Our ambitions must be Promethean because our technology is already making us gods – so we might as well get good at it. Popular Support 189 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=199 | PRINTED_PAGE=190 Nevertheless, space must remain for ‘grassroots’ campaigns which advance the post-scarcity alternative while attacking a broken status quo. Campaigns around divestment from fossil fuels ofer one example of how that will work. Rather than calling for climate justice through appeals to turn down the volume on modernity here, criticism of fossil fuels is situated within the broader frame that they are an obstacle to yet higher standards of living. In comparison to solar and wind, hydrocarbons are as unsuitable to the needs of our century as burning whale fat for light was for the last. Digging up and burning mineral deposits for energy is so last century. The same approach is needed in resisting extraction of shale gas, the most glaring example of the myopia of ‘scarcism’ amid the final embers of the Second Disruption. While one part of that is to continue pursuing outright bans, like those already in place in France, Germany and New York, this must be done alongside the demand for something better. Here advocates must clamour for the alternative with and alongside communities targeted for fracking, demanding indigenous rights, local democracy and radical land reform along with calls for an end to drilling. In this respect movements in Alaska, Canada and Australia already serve as stunning examples, not to mention the case of Balcombe, a tiny village in Sussex, where a coalition of campaigners and local residents opposed plans for fracking while demanding the alternative of communityowned solar power. The call for clean energy must become synonymous not only with the expectation of permanently falling costs but also common ownership. Prosperity, democracy and the commons as not only connected, but mutually constitutive. As well as advancing a red–green politics which revives ideals of progress and common plenty, this new populism will also be one of luxury. FALC, unlike the world of actually existing neoliberalism, will not demand constant sacrifices on the altar of profit and growth. Whether it’s ‘paying down the debt for future generations’, as our politicians are so keen to repeat, or growth and rising wages always coming ‘next year’, it’s becoming ever clearer that the good times aren’t coming back. What remains absent, however, is a language able to articulate that which is both accessible and emotionally resonant. 190 paradise found 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=200&limit=10)