--- 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: 20 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea?start=20&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=20&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=10&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=30&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=20 | PRINTED_PAGE=11 This was the Second Disruption. The present conjuncture ofers a rupture just as significant as these two earlier moments. As with the Second Disruption it will ofer relative liberation from scarcity in vital areas – energy, cognitive labour and information rather than simply the mechanical power of the Industrial Revolution. As with the First it will signal a departure from all history before it, heralding a beginning more than a final destination. But this Third Disruption – now in its opening decades – is still to be contested, and its consequences remain uncertain. While the forces underpinning it are already present – as will be highlighted over the following chapters – an appropriate politics remains unclear. Importantly, its possibilities are such that they call into question some of the basic assumptions of our social and economic system. Thus, far from being confronted with a choice between change and inertia, a world dramatically diferent from our own is both inevitable and near at hand. The key question is this one: In whose interests will it be created? What follows is a summary of the world in which this has begun to unfold, presenting the spectre of crisis – ecological, economic and social – alongside the potential abundance of an emerging alternative. From there it is proposed that a political map can be gleaned from both the challenges we face and the potential tools at our disposal. This map is Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Introduction 11 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=21 | PRINTED_PAGE=12 After the realm of speculation, we draw upon the world as it is, or rather as it is becoming. Here we examine seemingly disparate technologies – in automation, energy, resources, health and food – before concluding that the foundations are cohering for a society beyond both scarcity and work. Nothing is certain about where these technologies will end, nor whose benefit they will serve. What is discernible, however, is that a disposition can be drawn from them – if only they are allied to a political project of collective solidarity and individual happiness. This is why Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) is a politics rather than some inevitable future. To that end, it requires a strategy for our times while carving new figureheads for utopia, outlining the world as it could be and where to begin. So let us start at the end – or so we thought – with the strange death of the future. 12 fully automated luxury communism ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=22 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED I. Chaos under Heaven ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=23 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=24 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED 1 The Great Disorder ‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises In the summer of 1989, as it became clear the United States and its allies had won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay titled ‘The End of History?’ for the National Interest. Its core proposition was provocative yet simple, with the little-known academic asserting that the collapse of the Soviet Union was of greater importance than simply marking the end of a military rivalry: ‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. Fukuyama’s contention was that, while clocks would still tick and years continue to roll by, no new ideas would emerge, at least none capable of challenging the status quo. In making this extraordinary claim, he referenced the unlikely authorities of Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In their diferent ways both had claimed that history had a final destination. Now, with the end of the Cold War, they were proven right – only rather than the Prussian state or the downfall of capitalism, the twilight of ideology was Big Macs and Coca-Cola. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=25 | PRINTED_PAGE=16 Fukuyama swiftly became an intellectual superstar, turning the essay into his first book The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. There he ofered an extended explanation of his core hypothesis from three years earlier, outlining how history is primarily driven by ideas constantly competing with one another. As a result, by the 1990s liberal democracy, and by extension market capitalism, reigned supreme because no viable alternative remained. While in a sense that was true – the USSR had just disintegrated – it failed to grasp how the gravest challenges are more likely to emerge from internal contradiction or external, unanticipated, shock than an absence of consent. For Fukuyama the end of history signalled a world defined by economic calculation and ‘the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands’. And yet the present moment, defined by challenges such as rising temperatures, technological unemployment, income inequality and societal ageing – to name just a few – poses questions which extend beyond mere technical competence. If Fukuyama’s words were naive in 1992, then in the decade that followed the financial crisis of 2008 they became positively ridiculous. Indeed, he admitted as much in a book he published on identity in 2018. But the stakes are greater than simply being right or wrong on an issue of academic detail. Because worse than naive credulity or mistaking a brief moment for historic permanence, many in power still view Fukuyama’s hypothesis as sacrosanct. Three decades after the end of the Cold War the legacy of his work is a political ‘common sense ’ that actively obstructs us from addressing the great challenges we face. After all, why would decisive action – particularly if it undermined the interests of business and profit – be necessary if nothing really changes? 16 chaos under heaven ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=26 | PRINTED_PAGE=17 Fukuyama’s triumphalist thinking a generation ago, even if he himself has now renounced it somewhat, still matters. That is because it has since gone on to infuse a broader folk politics that understood the end of the Cold War to not only signify the supremacy of market capitalism, but also the inevitable demise of self-governing nation-states. In this flat, crowded and connected world everything would be subject to ever-accelerating change. Everything, that is, except the rules of the game. Indeed, many no longer even considered them to be rules but rather reality itself, with alternative political systems viewed as either futile or incomprehensible. Here, liberal capitalism went from a contingent project to a reality principle. Welcome to the world of capitalist realism – where the map is the territory and nothing really matters. Capitalist Realism Capitalist realism is best summed up with a single sentence: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’\* For Mark Fisher – the British theorist who coined the term – that catchphrase captures the very essence of our era, with capitalism not only viewed as the exclusively ‘viable political and economic system’ but also one where it is ‘impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative ’. After all, how can you contrive an alternative to reality itself? The Great Disorder 17 \* This phrase is attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, although Jameson himself is unclear as to its original source. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=27 | PRINTED_PAGE=18 Turning to the 2006 film Children of Men, Fisher investigates its surreal normality as a dystopia fit for our age with the world it projects ‘more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours (rather) than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise cofee bars co-exist.’ This tallies with the thinking of Alain Badiou, who writes, We live in a contradiction … where all existence … is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible … our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it ’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. Because capitalist realism has no ofer of a better future – especially so over the course of the last decade – its default logic is one of anti-utopianism. Flat wages, falling home ownership and a warming planet might be bad, granted, but at least we have iPhones. And, yes, you may not be able to access the things your parents took for granted, like afordable homes or free higher education, but you should still be grateful – at least it’s not the sixteenth century. Over time this argument, seductive for the opening years of the twenty-first century, is being revealed as patently absurd. Capitalist realism, a world where nothing really changes, is giving way to a historic moment defined by crisis. One where, unless we transform our understanding of the future once more, the very worst demons of centuries past will prevail. 18 chaos under heaven ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=28 | PRINTED_PAGE=19 Crisis Unleashed To say the present era is one of crisis borders on cliché. Habitual and familiar, this crisis difers from the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, or hell in the paintings of Bosch or the last days of Earth as told in the Book of Revelations. It is unlike Europe during the Black Death or Central Asia as it faced the galloping Golden Horde. Here, instead, we inhabit a world in free-fall and yet we are all along for the ride. Some aspects of this, like the European migration crisis, are highly mediatised and public. Here, people displaced by war and social breakdown migrate, often meeting with hostility in response. While for previous generations the Berlin Wall was totemic of division, only 235 people died trying to cross it. Compare that to the 3,770 souls who died or went missing in the Mediterranean trying to reach the shores of Europe just in 2015. And if, as an undocumented migrant, you are fortunate enough to safely cross the Mediterranean, or the US–Mexico border, or the fences and forests between Hungary and Bulgaria, your problems are only just beginning. There are of course other expressions of our broken world that are equally profound, if less immediately obvious. One is a crisis of mental health, with suicide the leading killer of British men under the age of fifty and depression expected to be the leading cause of the global burden of disease by 2030. Others still are less easy to personalise, remaining incomprehensible on a human scale. One is a crisis of the state, as agency ebbs to the market and an increasingly globalised economy undermines the ability of nations to act decisively. This process of market and capital integration – where commodities move more seamlessly than ever – is entirely at odds with the experience of displaced peoples and undocumented migrants as they face walls, surveillance and ever more securitised borders. The Great Disorder 19 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=29 | PRINTED_PAGE=20 As the state gives way to the market this is accompanied by a nebulous sense of loss, as a crisis of representation empties democratic institutions of authority and citizens come to view them as little more than conduits for the interests of corrupt elites. This entrenches the tendencies of globalisation as previous, if imperfect, repositories of accountability – national governments – lose the consent of those they represent. In the supposedly good times something had gone badly wrong – but it remained an undercurrent. 2008: Return of History Almost two decades after Fukuyama’s false prophecy, that decisively changed: a banking crisis, a debt crisis, a deficit crisis – all culminating in the imposition of austerity, from Greece to California. Alongside that was war in Georgia, the flowering of the Arab Spring, uprising in the Ukraine, insurrection – and then the most bloody of civil wars – in Syria. Elsewhere previously low-intensity conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan deteriorated further, soon joined by similarly hazy struggles in Libya and Yemen. In early 2014 the Russian Federation added new territory for the first time as it annexed Crimea following a local referendum. A few months later, straddling Syria and Iraq in an area the size of the United Kingdom, insurgents declared a caliphate, the Islamic State. But even amid all this it was events in Western Europe, a heartland of capitalist realism, which proved most surprising: 20 chaos under heaven 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/6dfd053e-a721-41da-a147-63bee43ea5ea.md?start=30&limit=10)