Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto

Because behind such entreaties – whether from Erdoğan, Trump, Theresa May or the European Central Bank – is an esoteric caste of administrators that nobody else can quite understand. Their language of mathematical economics resembles the high Latin of Europe ’s priests as they explained the nature of things to illiterate peasants who could never hope to understand. To the Ten Commandments all they add is that economic growth – of any kind – is good, while the pious many must uphold the faith by working harder and spending more than ever.

This demand for constant oferings from taxpayers, hardworking families or ‘strivers’, all while living standards stagnate, means we are now experiencing what Eastern Bloc socialism endured after the 1970s. Two conspicuous hallmarks of that era similarly characterise our present: falling economic growth and crumbling ideological hegemony. The words of the priests increasingly fall on deaf ears, meaning many now turn to other – often older – faiths to make sense of the seemingly absurd.

Thus the return of ‘the people ’ as the main political actor is inevitable, whether as the rabble who patrician elites defend from their own desires, the Volk grounded in land, blood and soil, as witnessed in the revival of the far right, or the masses as a potentially transformative subject which makes history. Many increasingly grasp that the problems we face are large and unprecedented, and they intuitively understand the necessary solutions must be of a similar scale. So given the possibilities of the Third Disruption, promise them what they deserve – promise everything.

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Everything against the emptiness of a system in breakdown, with its call to toil for even less than you already have. Everything against the farce of identities which no longer make sense or were myths of little initial purpose. Everything, that is, except the demand of luxury for all. The ofer to be who you want, rather than your life being shaped by forces beyond your control.

When we have scaled that summit and surpassed scarcity, having turned the dividend of the Third Disruption to the needs of us all, even the least compassionate will reflect on today’s world with regret and pity. Regret at so much lost potential, all the stories never written and lives which might have been so much more. And pity, particularly for those who believed a regime of enforced scarcity made them better than anyone else.

This Is Not 1917

FALC is not the communism of the early twentieth century, nor will it be delivered by storming the Winter Palace. The reason why is that, until the opening decades of the Third Disruption, communism was as impossible as surplus before the First Disruption or electricity before the Second. Instead it was socialism, still defined by scarcity and jobs, which became the North Star for hope across the world.

The technologies needed to deliver a post-scarcity, postwork society – centred around renewable energy, automation and information – were absent in the Russian Empire, or indeed anywhere else until the late 1960s. Indeed, amid eforts to catch up with the more advanced capitalist economies of Europe and America, the Bolsheviks became students of the Taylorist science of productivity, applying themselves to the task of subordinating human time to economic production with ever-greater eficiency. In truth, they had little alternative.

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It turns out that Marx’s early suspicion that the countries set to lead the revolution would be those at the cutting edge of capitalist modernity was right. Only now we know that means technology as much as politics, the Third Disruption as necessary a precursor as class consciousness and collective struggle. Creating communism before the Third Disruption is like creating a flying machine before the Second. You could conceive of it – and indeed no less a genius than Leonardo Da Vinci did precisely that – but you could not create it. This was not a failure of will or of intellect, but simply an inevitability of history.

What is more, the means by which the revolution of 1917 was won and defended, through an anti-liberal coup then subject to military invasion by every major power, further limited the possibility for social transformation. Inevitably, this shaped a regime which became supremely hierarchical. Given the odds it faced, both within and beyond its borders, its seven-decade survival remains one of the great political achievements of the last century.

Regardless of history’s ‘what ifs’, FALC is diferent. Instead it recognises the centrality of human rights, most importantly the right of personal happiness, and seeks to build a society where everyone can access the necessary resources to further that end. This is a politics centred around the recognition, as Franklin Roosevelt once put it, that necessitous people are not free people. In the absence of access to such resources – housing, education, transport, healthcare, information – freedom as self-authorship cannot be said to meaningfully exist. Liberal ends, specifically the individual being uniquely placed to determine their path in life, are impossible without communist means. The possibility of most people finding happiness and meaning is impossible as long as these things are commodities – subject to profit rather than need.

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We must understand that appropriate forms of political organisation, just like the utopias we construct, are contingent on the times in which we live. Just as FALC is appropriate for a world where technology leaves us on the cusp of previously unthinkable abundance, the party-form which emerged in response to closed, under-developed societies makes increasingly little sense. The same is true for forms of worker organising, radical or reformist, which are erroneously premised on the society of work enduring forever. That society will not endure, nor should that be our political ambition. The role of the labour movement is to liberate the working class, and therefore all of society, not save a broken system which is passing away.

The vehicles for political transformation change, just like the worlds we reach for. Now we must build a workers’ party against work – one whose politics are populist, democratic and open, all while fighting the establishment which, through its power over civil society and the state, won’t rest in ensuring FALC never comes to pass.

Electoralism and Society

FALC is only possible now because of the developments of the Third Disruption. The revolution it portends is not simply one that substitutes one ruling class for another, but carries with it a broader shift in ideas, social relations and technologies – what Marx memorably called a mode of production.

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What that requires from us, in turn, is to transform this new understanding into a collective subject with specific demands.

In this respect, electoral politics serves a vital purpose. The majority of people are only able to be politically active for brief periods of time. To an extent this is regrettable, the outgrowth of a culture that intentionally cultivates apathy and constrains a wider sense of popular power. Yet it is also a natural response for many who, exhausted by the pace, demands and monotony of work, not to mention family commitments and the sensory overload of the modern world, fail to establish a permanent space for political engagement in their lives. The problem is not, therefore, that most people do not care about politics but rather they cannot aford to care in the face of so many competing demands. While in the last decade, as the status quo has oscillated between inertia and collapse, that has changed slightly, it should not be overstated. At least not yet.

Which is all the more reason why FALC, embedded within a luxury populism, must engage in mainstream, electoral politics. After all, it is often only around elections when large sections of society – particularly the most exploited – are open to new possibilities regarding how society works and able to perceive how previously distinct issues share both common cause and prospective solutions. What is more, the act of voting – even if viewed as devoid of much power in itself – can catalyse a shift to deeper forms of participation and activism. In isolation electoral politics will not give us the world we want, but allied with a constant movement to make the potential of the Third Disruption apparent to everyone – along with the necessity for a collective political response – it shapes the parameters of what is possible.

In addition it must be recognised that the flow of history goes beyond politics, electoral or otherwise. In the shift to FALC we will need new ideas, social relations, forms of daily life and relationships to nature. The political ideologies of the past have often, to their detriment, focused on only one of these at the expense of others: many contemporary anarchists tend to hold social relations as pre-eminent – as if they were distinct from ideas, daily life and work. Leninism, meanwhile, views production, and by extension working-class subjectivity, as critical while ignoring a world whose ideas and technologies are hugely changed from those of the early twentieth century. Elsewhere technological utopians, such as the Californian ideologues of Silicon Valley, view technology as the principal means by which to carve a better future, almost detached from politics, society and history. Finally, certain environmentalists have favoured relations to nature and how we view ourselves in the cosmos, particularly regarding other forms of life, as the primary force that guides their politics. Too often this has come at the expense of a class analysis in understanding exploitation and production under capitalism, and how that system inherently opposes what they want.

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Given the stark diference between the world waiting to be built in the shadow of the Third Disruption and the present, the choice is more complex than either choosing to embrace electoralism or renounce state power. Rather we must adopt the disposition of FALC, fitting it to each part of the ensemble that makes history. In each case the driving impetus must always be the same: reaching ahead to the realm of freedom and a world beyond scarcity and jobs; a place where there is the universal freedom to be who we want, and an abundance so plentiful as to seem almost spontaneous. This requires participating in electoral politics and even government, but not being constrained by it.

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Against Globalism, towards Internationalism

FALC is internationalist, grasping the integrated nature of the world economy and flows of goods, people, capital and climate systems. It builds on universal values struggled over from Haiti to China for more than two centuries. It accepts that the nation-state, as a tool for the powerful, has concentrated wealth in certain places to the disadvantage of others. To say one country is less developed than another is not to diminish it, but to recognise the global system has intentionally sought to bring such a situation about. The point is not to change the words we use, but the reality they describe.

One of the greatest barriers to such change is the cult of globalism, whose default rhetoric is that the challenges we face are so profound that they can only be resolved through international coordination. On climate change, migration and resource scarcity we repeatedly hear the same refrain: no single nation can solve these problems in isolation. That may well be true but, so far, such talk has served political inertia more than decisive action. Perhaps that was the intention.

The starkest example of this is with climate change: the 1992 Rio Earth Summit was the moment the world began to grasp the devastating consequences of global warming. The resulting conclusion was immediate and would shape globalist presumptions for decades to come: because this challenge was truly planetary in scale only cooperation between states was adequate. Anything less was destined to fall short.

And yet, since then, carbon emissions have significantly increased, with the years immediately following the global financial crisis the worst for emissions in recorded history. The current approach to climate change isn’t about ‘working together’, it’s about passivity presented as partnership. The reflex of pointing to the necessity of global solutions – always conjoined to a form of economic globalisation interchangeable with market capitalism – has allowed elites to evade responsibility. Here ‘global coordination’ is merely the international adjunct to capitalist realism, allowing the biggest polluters – who are also the most powerful nations – to avoid changing their path.

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Which is why we must re-imagine and replicate the prototype politics of the nineteenth century, itself a response to the Second Disruption as it recast society on a global scale the first time round. Rather than integration we need imitation, with the power of the demonstrable example far more compelling than elite interests framed as multilateral compromise. In response to prototypes the cult of globalism insists they are inefective at best and at worst a return to the 1930s – when nation-states last turned their back on a failing global order. Such rhetoric is analogous to the anti-utopianism through which capitalist realism prevails at the domestic level. Nothing ever changes – and that’s the point.

Prototype politics could not be more diferent, emphasising action and decision, no matter how minor or limited, over rhetorical cooperation. When we wanted to connect the world through trains, cable and roads, it was through example and imitation. When we desired universal literacy and sanitation, the same applied. When we sought democracy and forms of government that served the needs of ordinary people, it was through looking elsewhere and saying, ‘Why isn’t that us?’ Now the same impulse must apply in creating the institutions, cultures and technologies to address the problems of our age – from climate change to ageing and technological unemployment. This requires a basic admission that has been heretical for much of the left since Fukuyama declared history was over: quick, efective action can only happen through nationstates. Complete decarbonisation, in certain respects, is no greater a challenge than road-building, universal literacy or electrification. It’s time for us all to stop waiting and make history once more.

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In describing capitalism and what comes after it, Marx wrote incisively about how history contains multiple moving parts:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society.

He added how these new material relations concurrently created new mental ones too,

on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

Marx proceeded to say something of supreme importance, especially given what is happening to the price mechanism for information goods, even according to the likes of Paul Romer and Larry Summers:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

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This superstructure, comprising shared popular culture, how we comprehend nature and even how we author our own personalities, is in the process of being re-made. A politics appropriate to FALC understands that and inserts itself into each terrain, guided always by a simple motto: liberty, luxury and the pursuit of post-scarcity.

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