Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto

Marx to Market ofered an extended revision of an argument ofered by Brus in 1961 in The General Problems of the Functioning of the Socialist Economy. There, heavily influenced by the thinking of Kalecki, he argued that both democracy and market mechanisms were necessary in the transition to socialism.

This was expanded further in 1989 with Brus and Łaski claiming that under market socialism, publicly owned firms would have to be autonomous – much as they are in market capitalist systems – and that this would necessitate a socialised capital market. In the countries of actually existing socialism, even in 1989, this was as heretical as it had been in the early 1960s, with such thinking at odds with the top–down, nationally controlled industries that came to dominate the economic landscape not only of the USSR but other countries such as Cuba and North Korea.

Rather than industrial national monoliths being lauded as the archetype of economic eficiency, the authors argued for a completely diferent kind of socialism declaring, ‘The role of the owner-state should be separated from the state as an authority in charge of administration … (enterprises) have to become separated not only from the state in its wider role but also from one another.’ For their critics this was worryingly reminiscent of capitalism and production for profit.

Yet this is efectively what the cooperatives and worker-owned businesses, bootstrapped under the municipal protectionism outlined in the previous chapter, would look like. With the introduction of UBS and a historic intervention in decarbonising the economy, these kinds of enterprise could rapidly become the backbone of economies across the Global North and South. But worker ownership will need socialised finance, with credit explicitly favouring businesses and cooperatives whose objectives extend beyond just profit. As a result, national investment banks – alongside municipal banks and NEIBs – will need to be founded, their role being to specifically amplify extreme supply, underpin UBS and ameliorate the five crises.

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The End of GDP

Peter Drucker may have been the leading theorist of information in the modern economy, but he did so as a management theorist rather than economist or historian. It was this obsession with management which inspired his most memorable quote ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ – a favourite dictum of executives for decades and now the calling card of data-driven performance.

It is true in public policy as much as anywhere else. While it is critical to outline the policies necessary to break with neoliberalism and begin the shift to FALC, this means little if new metrics of success aren’t also created. If we continue to measure things which mean little in dealing with the five crises – while failing to capture the essence of value as information becomes progressively more important – then whatever merits central bank reform or UBS might have, the pursuit of FALC will fall short. Simply put, we need new ways of measuring success appropriate for the Third Disruption, rather than the Second. Ultimately that means leaving the world of GDP, or gross domestic product, behind us.

Today GDP is the principal measure of economic activity. When GDP is rising, the economy can be said to be growing; when it is in reverse, this marks a recession. The information it expresses is the value of all economic transactions within a fixed period of time, usually a year. That is, all the goods and services that are produced, sold and purchased.

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Given its centrality in any discussion of what kind of economic model is preferable, it’s easy to presume that the idea of GDP is as old as capitalism itself – that it was perhaps contrived by the likes of Adam Smith or David Ricardo. Yet to the contrary, it is a relatively recent development, devised by the economist Simon Kuznets in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. It turns out that the central imperative of modern societies – that economic growth should be pursued as an end in itself – only started to reign supreme a century and a half after the Second Disruption began.

Perhaps even more surprising is that scepticism of it is almost as old as the measure itself. In 1968 Robert Kennedy spoke of how GDP ‘measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile ’. While Kuznets himself cautioned that ‘the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income ’. Even for its inventor, GDP was always limited in understanding the broader determinants of a truly successful society.

But besides those older judgements regarding the often zealous manner in which GDP was used, by the late 1980s another criticism began to emerge. Now, some said, it was no longer capable of even measuring economic growth properly. This was most famously expressed by the economist Robert Solow when he claimed in 1987 that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere but the productivity statistics.’ That conclusion was a response to the ‘productivity paradox’ which so troubled economists at the time – namely, how investment in information technology over the 1980s had a seemingly negligible impact on productivity measures, which actually slowed over the decade.

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But what if, rather than digital technologies failing to increase productivity, the changes they wrought were so significant as to require a new way of measuring success altogether? What if we are only at the beginning of an economic shift so profound that, as the Third Disruption continues to unfold, GDP will prove increasingly incapable of capturing all the value being created?

I would submit that this is now happening. Extreme supply is causing deflation across many sectors, and the Third Disruption is evaporating whole swathes of GDP. As the marginal cost of producing goods and services moves closer to zero in more and more sectors, the result is more free, nonmarket transactions will take place. Even where the market can respond and keep certain goods within the price mechanism – as proven with Spotify’s rental model as a response to digital file-sharing – extreme supply still means reduced net circulation. Today few would pay £15 for a music album, something that two decades ago everyone in the Global North took for granted. That explains why twenty years after the digitisation of the music industry began, the value of the market remains substantially smaller, even despite the increasing popularity of streaming services such as Spotify and Tidal. In 1999 the music industry generated revenues worth some \$14.6 billion in the United States, a figure which had fallen to \$7.65 billion by 2016 – and that’s not accounting for inflation.

In terms of how we conventionally understand GDP, those figures should signify disaster – reflecting how fewer people are listening to their favourite musicians than before. Except the opposite is true. Extreme supply in information goods – of which music is a paradigmatic example – means more people are listening to more music than ever, it’s just failing to show up in the numbers we think matter most.

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Another example that goes beyond established assumptions in market economics is Wikipedia. Free at the point of consumption and co-produced almost entirely by a team of volunteers, it is superior to any other encyclopaedia ever created. Indeed, the success of Wikipedia meant that in 2012, after being in print for 244 years, its famed rival, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, went completely online. While its print editions previously sold for \$1,400 the new internet-based service cost just \$17 a month – and yet still it couldn’t hope to compete. While some deride the importance of Wikipedia as a resource, ask yourself how much you’ve used it and, subsequently, how much value you would place on it. I’ll guarantee it’s far more than zero. The fact 99 per cent of its articles rank in the top ten results for any Google search speaks for itself.

These two trends – of deflationary prices in the market economy and production of more free things in its non-market equivalent – will ultimately render GDP irrelevant as a means to measure people ’s quality of life, especially once the postcapitalist state accelerates such tendencies. That, alongside the implementation of UBS, means GDP will only deteriorate as a significant measure of anything, as limited as it already was. What is more it will fail to calculate those things that matter most in the context of the five crises, including atmospheric $\mathrm { C O } _ { 2 } ,$ the health and lifespan of the elderly, environmental degradation, access to clean air and drinking water, mental wellbeing and work that is socially and emotionally satisfying.

Which is why the post-capitalist state would move towards an ‘Abundance index’ accounting for all of this, while integrating the emerging economic model of ever fewer things paid for with money. Initially such an index would integrate $\mathrm { C O } _ { 2 }$ emissions, energy eficiency, the falling cost of energy, resources and labour, the extent to which UBS had been delivered, leisure time (time not in paid employment), health and lifespan, and self-reported happiness. Such a composite measure, no doubt adapted to a variety of regional and cultural diferences, would be how we assess the performance of post-capitalist economies in the passage to FALC. This would be a scorecard for social progress assessing how successful the Third Disruption is in serving the common good.

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Just as it took generations for the Second Disruption to find its measure of progress with GDP, the Third Disruption is facing a similar challenge. What we know for certain is that an already emerging model – with less monetary exchange and a shift to rents – creates too much abundance to be accurately measured by currently available means. This will only intensify further over time.

Universal basic services will be fundamental in the transition to FALC and will be progressively easier to provide. But the measure of success can’t be the volume of transactions through the price system – to do so would be using the definition of progress that belongs to a world already passing away.

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FALC: A New Beginning

Socialism is not evolution’s last and perfect product or the end of history, but in a sense only the beginning.

Isaac Deutscher

The relationship between technology and politics is a complicated one. Melvin Kranzberg put it best in his ‘Six Laws of Technology’ when he outlined the first of those laws: ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ In other words, how technology is created and used, and to whose advantage, depends on the political, ethical and social contexts from which it emerges. To paraphrase Marx, technology makes history – but not under conditions of its own making.

Perhaps that’s what Kranzberg meant with his sixth law, ‘All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.’ Technology may not determine history, but it can disrupt and shape it like nothing else. The technological shift of the First Disruption embodies that law. Cities, culture and writing – themselves the basis for ever more complex forms of social organisation – were shaped by agriculture, the domestication of animals and crops, and a practical understanding of heredity.

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That is not to say technology determines all paths. Indeed, there is a case to be made that the technologies of the Second Disruption – principally Watt’s steam engine – were merely the final element in the broader transition to capitalism. Here industrial innovation came after centralised states, the emergence of a class of ‘landless labourers’ and certain ideas of private and intellectual property. So, while technologies can herald new moments in history, they are just as likely to depend on what went before.

The Third Disruption appears to express both tendencies. Rather than technologies like AI, renewable energy and gene editing being exogenous disruptors of the status quo, they have developed alongside new ideas of nature, selfhood and forms of production.

Take the green movement as just one example. In any successful transition to meat without animals – as outlined in Chapter Eight – its worldview, advanced over decades of activism, will have played a decisive role. While technologically speaking synthetic meat is impossible without digitisation, these products were only created in response to vegan and vegetarian demand, as well as their developers having concerns about the impact of agriculture on climate change and animal welfare.

The same is true for renewable energy. Here too the green movement has been a vital player in making the issue of climate change salient to the wider public. While political failure at the international level is undeniable, with nationstates failing to suficiently reduce $\mathrm { C O } _ { 2 }$ emissions over the last twenty-five years, that does not mean the movement’s legacy is one of defeat. The increased capacity of wind and solar to meet our energy needs again results from technological innovation which would not have materialised without generations of campaigners demanding a shift away from fossil fuels. Fracking bans in a constantly growing number of countries, municipalities and cities, are only the latest testament to that.

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Elsewhere the impulse to automation and the application of the experience curve are an outgrowth of competition, the prevailing logic of capitalism. This has presaged the incessant replacement of labour with fixed capital while seeing declining costs of production for just about everything. While levels of automation have arguably slowed over recent decades, primarily as a result of wages being pushed so low that replacing workers wasn’t profitable, the context within which waves of automation will unfold in coming decades matters. Contradictions internal to capitalism make a crisis of technological unemployment, terminal under-consumption and rising inequality unavoidable.

So technology is of critical importance, but so are the ideas, social relations and politics which accompany it. Thus in making sense of how we arrived at the present, from AI to synthetic meat, we must look at social movements – from Indigenous land rights to protecting animal welfare – as much as the underlying dynamics of extreme supply.

But more than allowing us to comprehend an increasingly complex present, placing the relationship between technology and history within a broader constellation of actors allows us to chart the course for a better future. It helps us understand why some things transpire at certain moments rather than others and why, until now, communism was impossible.

Futures Deferred

Some visionaries have such powers of foresight that their ideas aren’t consonant with the times in which they live. John

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Wyclife, a fourteenth-century priest who oversaw a translation of the Latin Bible into English, was one such person. The heterodox Wyclife opposed core tenets of the church including veneration of saints, monasticism and even the papacy. Yet Wyclife, whose Bible was spread across England a century before Martin Luther was born, remains a peripheral figure in the history of the Reformation.

The reason why is technology. While Wyclife ’s Bible was widely distributed, it was not a printed document in the modern sense – meaning it could never find as large an audience as the vernacular pamphlets and books of a century later. That Martin Luther came to be the seminal figure in the Reformation was, therefore, a consequence of technological innovation rather than personal charisma or new ideas. By the early 1500s, 200 million printed books were in circulation across Europe – a revolution in information even more seismic than the arrival of the internet.

Yet to claim that technology, in particular the printing press, caused the Reformation is absurd – especially when its central ideas had a genealogy which could be traced back for centuries. Where it did prove decisive, however, was in making certain events unfold which had seemed previously impossible – even by the protagonists themselves. When he pinned his ‘95 Theses’ to the church door in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, Luther had no idea what would happen next.

Within six weeks printed editions appeared simultaneously in Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel. Not long after came German translations – the initial document was in Latin – with these capable of being read by a much wider audience. Friedrich Myconius, a friend of Luther, would later write, ‘hardly 14 days had passed when these propositions were known throughout Germany and within four weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar with them.’

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