Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto

People’s Businesses, People’s Banks

Much of this won’t be possible without access to credit, with dificulty in accessing finance widely accepted as the single biggest hurdle for cooperatives and worker-owned businesses.

These firms tend to sufer from limited access to long-term finance in capitalist economies, with conventional institutions sceptical of lending to businesses over which they have no control. This lack of support leads to under-investment and a tendency to buckle during moments of financial stress, making cooperative businesses susceptible to acquisition by larger non-worker-owned ones who can access credit more easily. This explains why, despite their ‘static’ productivity advantages over conventional organisations, over longer periods worker-owned businesses are structurally handicapped – which explains why they presently comprise such a small part of the economy.

Any of the larger national banks – who hold around 80 per cent of deposits in the UK – would prefer to lend £10 million to a single large business than £50,000 to two hundred smaller ones. So if we want to move away from economies based on oligopoly and capital flight, creating a network of local banks and credit unions will be of paramount importance.

Here too a greater focus on the public sector provides part of the solution, with the large pension funds of these same anchor institutions ofering more than suficient capital to start. While Britain’s unions rightly resist austerity at the national level, they have around £200 billion of their members’ money invested in pensions. By putting this in local development banks, they could not only create more jobs but also ensure better returns for their members. Of course, profit wouldn’t be the bottom line, but as John Clancy has written, their returns from investments in overseas equities often prove distinctly underwhelming, which means funds are actively looking for more sustainable and, if necessary, local investments.

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In keeping with the new ethos of municipal protectionism, these banks would be similarly restricted in their lending both by amount and geographical area. What is more, their remit would be to maximise social value as well as returns, focusing on energy transition and accelerating specific sectors as well as financing a new wave of worker-owned business.

The positive benefits of growing the cooperative and worker-owned economy are well documented, from helping deal with low productivity to under-investment in small and medium-sized enterprises – not to mention reducing economic and regional inequality. Most importantly, however, within the context of the Third Disruption they ofer a practical means by which society can navigate the forward march of automation and, ultimately, artificial intelligence. Despite the immense challenges of both, there is a political solution to a world where labour may well become capital: giving the means of production to workers themselves.

In addition to this network of local banks, central government would create national and regional investment bodies to fund not only businesses but also key infrastructure that delivers social returns – be it reducing emissions or purchasing fixed capital that allows worker-owned enterprises to make more with less. As we ’ll see in the next chapter this, alongside dramatic changes to the remit of national central banks, will mean a transformed role for finance in the economy.

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Return of the State: UBS

As exciting as it is, municipal protectionism and widespread adoption of the ‘Preston Model’ is not enough in isolation. It may prove the handbrake helping reverse privatisation while providing fertile ground to expand worker-owned business, but it barely scratches the surface when it comes to placing the potential of the Third Disruption in the hands of the people. Which is why Universal Basic Services (UBS) must be ofered alongside it.

The classic way of expressing this idea is nationalisation, with government owning and controlling a range of industries and services. Such a model is familiar to many. After the Second World War the modern welfare state, across Europe in particular, was a central player in much of the economy – from energy and education to the commanding heights of manufacture and mining. Elsewhere other countries experimenting with forms of state socialism, often under the political influence of the USSR, dispensed with market production altogether, privileging what they called economic rights – particularly for work – over civil and political ones. Even in the mixed-market economies, however, there were aspects of this second approach, with perhaps the most obvious being Britain’s National Health Service. Created in 1948, and still free at the point of use, it remains the largest publicly funded healthcare system anywhere in the world.

While its critics like to paint the NHS as outdated and oldfashioned, unable to keep pace with the demands of a rapidly changing world, it’s the opposite which is true. Despite underfunding, it is consistently rated among the best healthcare systems of the wealthy nations, proving particularly outstanding when it comes to eficiency. Whereas the United States spends around 17 per cent of its GDP on healthcare – approximately \$9,892 per person – Britain spends just \$4,192. And yet it is Britain which provides universal coverage and enjoys better outcomes on a range of key measures, from infant mortality to deaths in childbirth and life expectancy.

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As the five crises unfold – from societal ageing to climate change and technological unemployment – it won’t be a case of no longer being able to aford systems like the NHS, as many of today’s politicians are all-too-eager to say. Rather it will necessitate a rejection of less-eficient models which aren’t universal or free at the point of use. As well as being the most ethical way of distributing the abundance made possible by the Third Disruption, the five crises also require universalism from the perspective of eficiency.

Far from an idea of marginal interest, UBS has become increasingly central in contemporary conversations about the provision of public services. This is most apparent in a 2016 report titled ‘Social Prosperity for the Future ’, published by the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. While the report did not explicitly establish its proposals within the context of the Third Disruption, it did situate them within a set of challenges comparable to those of the five crises, identifying six public goods – besides healthcare – which should be reconstituted to more closely resemble the NHS and Britain’s healthcare model. These are education, democracy and legal services, shelter, food, transport and information.

The IGP report was eager to emphasise that UBS isn’t solely a response to crises whose emergence is relatively recent, but also the means by which citizens can enjoy fuller lives, accessing the resources necessary to be who they want. Thus the broader hope is to mitigate ‘unfreedom’ – the dependence on economic forces beyond our control which, for nearly all of us, determine how life turns out.

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Not all seven services outlined in the UCL report are necessary in the transition to FALC – at least not initially. Indeed, alongside municipal protectionism and a worker-led economy, it is taken here that only five need be established: housing, transport, education, healthcare and information. As UBS, the intention for each is to become free public goods accessible to everyone – not as commodities for exchange and profit, but as the foundational resources on which to build their lives. That is not to say private ownership of housing, for instance, would be prohibited – it would not, but there would be a guarantee that the state would meet an individual’s housing needs if required. Market production and the price mechanism would endure, but this would become progressively rarer in those areas classified as universal basic services. With energy, labour, and resources wanting, like information, to be free, history and extreme supply would be on the side of UBS.

As a consequence, UBS will difuse incrementally. In transport it might resemble the UK’s ‘Freedom Pass’ – which allows free travel on local bus services for those over sixty – being extended to everyone. This is sensible – as we’ve already seen, transport sits at the intersection of post-scarcity in energy and labour with extreme supply from renewable power (energy) and autonomous driving (labour) meaning the cost of public transport will fall precipitously. This should be to the benefit of users, citizens and workers – not profiteers. The UBS of progressively expanding free public transportation is the best way of ensuring precisely that.

Similarly, in healthcare, the rise of ultra-low-cost technologies in the areas of gene sequencing, therapies and editing will mean that a few decades from now public healthcare will be cheaper to administer with each passing year. But this will only be of collective benefit if we reject the notion that edited genes are the same as pharmaceutical drugs and must be subject to patent and the profit motive. Instead, the gains of healthcare becoming a true information technology should be socialised as we eliminate genetically inherited conditions like Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and sickle cell disease – much like we did with smallpox in the twentieth century.

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Even such breakthroughs, tremendous and unprecedented as they would be, would represent just the first step, as the arrival of virtually free gene sequencing – which would allow us to all but eliminate early-years mortality and locate cancers at ‘Stage $0 ^ { \circ }$ – moves medicine from responsive to preventative. Again, rather than propping up the profits of private business while putting millions of healthcare workers out of a job, that should mean free, universal healthcare for everyone. The alternative of allowing market rationing amid conditions of such abundance, and for matters of literal life and death, is barbaric.

The same trends are evident in housing, education and information – understood here as media production and internet connectivity. Just a few decades from now paying for a bus, or an internet connection, or a university degree or renting a home, need not be an issue. In each instance payment might feel as counter-intuitive as it would today if you were invoiced for starting an email account or checking the accuracy of a date on Wikipedia. And why shouldn’t it? After all, resources, energy, health, labour and food – just like information – want to be free. It is this fundamental tendency which underwrites why a constantly expanding provision of UBS, in line with extreme supply, should be a central demand for twenty-firstcentury politics.

Alongside a shift to municipal protectionism, the implementation of UBS would create a much larger role for the state – although given extreme supply, perhaps not as much as one might think. The state will be crucial in procurement with local worker cooperatives building homes, hospitals and schools as well as performing catering, maintenance, cleaning and support services. Under the neoliberal model these are the ground zero of the outsourcing economy, with workers subject to constant attacks over wages and working standards while users endure ever-poorer outcomes. In the transition to FALC, however, and with UBS adopting a central position in the economy, the leverage of anchor institutions will only expand. While automation will eliminate as much work as possible, those jobs which remain – most likely because of Moravec’s Paradox – will increasingly be performed by worker-owned businesses, completely transforming how we relate to society, work and one another.

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Importantly, UBS should be presented as an expanded set of rights, an upgrade on the constitutions that emerged alongside the Second Disruption in places such as Corsica, the United States, France and Haiti. Legal and political rights will remain of critical importance, but it will be increasingly acknowledged that these mean little without access to economic and social resources. Finally, we will have realised that liberal ends of personal fulfilment and self-authorship mean little without socialist means. The technology of the Third Disruption, combined with the politics of FALC, bring them finally within reach.

Decarbonisation

While societal ageing may be the larger problem over the next half a century, climate change is without doubt the greatest challenge confronting humanity. Although its scale is so significant precisely because it will unfold in a multigenerational – and therefore unpredictable – manner, it must be present generations that take decisive action.

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Yet more than simply an intervention determining the future capacity of our planet to maintain life, the politics of energy transition must also articulate its ambition of bringing limitless energy to the world’s rich and poor alike. That is the prize on ofer with solar and wind, almost as much as saving the planet, and should be stated as such when demanding energy transition alongside UBS. Switching to renewable energy won’t just mitigate increasingly chaotic climate systems, it will also deliver greater prosperity for all of us.

But while the opportunities are huge, and the political scope for integrating ecology and economic development increasingly clear, there is little time to act. The reality is we have to decarbonise the world economy by the middle of this century to stand any chance of halting warming beyond two degrees centigrade.

The demand, therefore, is as audacious as it is simple. The Global North must reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by an annual rate of 8 per cent each year for the decade following 2020. Then, starting in 2030, the Global South will embark on the same journey at precisely the same rate. If successful that will mean a full, global transition to renewable energy by 2040. Of course, that is easier said than done, and a complete transition to renewable energy in little more than two decades would be the greatest feat of collective action in human history. But the truth is we have no alternative. Fortunately, the technology we already possess means it is entirely possible. What has been missing, until now, is political will.

Indeed, we don’t need to invent new means of generating and storing renewable energy. Rather we must accelerate the progress of already-available technologies. Even on present trends, as detailed in Chapter Five, fossil fuels will become increasingly obsolete over the coming decades. The challenge, then, is to hasten this shift while ensuring the Global South isn’t left behind in a manner reminiscent of industrialisation in the early nineteenth century. A heightened emphasis on developing nations will serve to speed decarbonisation, especially given all new demand between now and 2035 will come from the Global South. Furthermore, the transition to renewables isn’t just about advancing green technologies, which are on their way regardless (though not quickly enough), but making sure they are in the hands of the people. Because of its modular and distributed nature, this revolution should be about the democratisation of energy as much as its sustainability.

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As with scaling up worker-owned business and cooperatives at the municipal level, the mechanism by which this will be advanced is socially controlled finance. In the Global North, where mass decarbonisation will start, this will be far simpler to administer as many countries have already hit a ceiling in terms of population and per capita energy use. What is more, they tend to enjoy robust state institutions and a significant base of renewable energy capacity.

The worker-led economy will be financed by locally based and geographically restricted institutions. But because of the shortened timeframe, financing energy transition will be the responsibility for much larger National Energy Investment Banks (NEIBs) operating through regional hubs and capitalised – depending on the country – to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds.

Alongside financing renewable energy generation and storage for public buildings, homes and workplaces, with this new infrastructure being democratically owned at the local level, these banks will also ofer credit for local energy cooperatives. Such measures will be accompanied by the financing of energy eficiency programmes whose intention will be to make conventional heating systems unnecessary and smart systems and LED lighting ubiquitous. We have known how to minimise energy consumption for heating – the primary issue in the colder countries of Europe, Russia and North America – for decades, the problem being market-based solutions have failed to materialise. With that in mind, the rate of change could easily exceed the 8 per cent annual target for colder countries – especially when one considers they could likely halve energy consumption simply through intelligent heat conservation.

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By 2030 the world’s wealthier countries would see their $\mathrm { C O } _ { 2 }$ emissions fall to virtually $\mathbf { z e r o } ,$ their poorer citizens no longer subject to the scourge of energy poverty and ‘excess deaths’ in winter. What is more, that would just be the start, because the technologies that make all of this possible will – unlike fossil fuels – keep on getting cheaper.

For the Global South the solution will be more complex. Whereas the task in the wealthier countries is to accelerate a set of already-observable tendencies for lower GDP countries substantial changes to actually existing globalisation will be pivotal. That means the task is somewhat harder here, as it necessitates a coordinated multilateral response. But as already outlined, the rewards of energy abundance are greatest of all for the Global South. More than simply ‘catching $\mathrm { u p ^ { \prime } }$ , many of these countries – by virtue of geographical good fortune – enjoy the highest solar potential on Earth. While the transition from fossil fuels will ultimately mean energy gets permanently cheaper for everyone irrespective of where they live, of almost equal importance is how historically underdeveloped countries will enjoy a comparative advantage.

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