(Audio) Fully Automated Luxury Communism, by Bastani

Saturday September 21, 2024

Ridiculing The End of History and rejecting Capitalist Realism, Bastani says Marx was ahead of his time: communism is only now becoming technologically possible. While Rushkoff is anti-growth, Bastani was saying (even before ChatGPT) that technology will save us. He says we should demand Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

A lot of the book is detail on how technology is advancing (or may advance) to produce "extreme supply." A surprisingly large amount is about mining asteroids. Predictions on driverless cars and Finless Foods, for example, seem premature. (The book only came out five years ago; is it too early to judge?)

I think Bastani is right that the future he imagines is not inevitable: it depends on political choices. He mostly assumes that technological development is inevitable. I'm less sure about that. They are related, of course.

Bastani has some recommendations. He likes municipal protectionism as in the Cleveland model. He favors Universal Basic Services over Universal Basic Income. (I tend to agree; can we also get Universal Basic Stuff?) He wants a "One Planet Tax" on carbon, to fund renewable energy in the global south via National Energy Investment Banks, and socialized finance for autonomous state-owned companies.

I don't know that Bastani is a great spokesperson, and the book is to some extent just something to put the title on. But still kind of a neat book?

cover

Summarizing the five crises from pages 22-23:

  1. Climate change
  2. Resource scarcity
  3. Societal aging
  4. Global poor / "unnecessariat"
  5. Technological unemployment

(These last two, and maybe even the last three, don't seem that different...)

"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." (pag 194)

"Furthermore, preferring UBS to UBI makes a great deal of sense within the context of the Third Disruption and the turn to extreme supply. As the price for everything shifts ever closer to zero, this will imperil production for exchange and profit, meaning the price mechanism is an increasingly inefficient way of allocating resources. What is more UBS begins the work of communism in the present, articulating resources necessary to a decent life – from housing to health- care – as human rights rather than potential sources of profit. Necessitous people are not free people, and the UBS decisively ends such necessity." (page 226)

This references Roosevelt's quotation of "Necessitous men are not free men" in the 1944 State of the Union (Second Bill of Rights).

"While FALC is situated within a transformation as seismic as that of the arrival of agriculture, its concrete politics consist in specific, readily identifiable demands: a break with neoliberalism, a shift towards worker-owned production, a state-financed transition to renewable energy and universal services – rightly identified as human rights – placed beyond commodity exchange and profit." (page 243)