Fully Automated Luxury Communism:
Could a Utopian Dream Bring an End to Capitalist Realism?
The idea is simple:
[W]hat if everything could change? What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time — from climate change to inequality and aging — we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness. What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun? (Bastani 10)
This concept of a new historical beginning lies at the heart of the political project Aaron Bastani attempts to galvanize in Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto.
“History” is not as simple a concept as it may seem. Indeed, philosophers and historians have been debating for centuries what exactly history is. Is it the past itself or the stories we tell ourselves about that past? Does history more closely resemble an empirical science or some form of literature? How can historical facts be authenticated? Is history above all concerned with the past or the present?
For Bastani, who holds a Ph.D. in political science, history is fundamentally concerned with the present. His suggestion of a new beginning is a direct response to Francis Fukuyama’s Nietzschean assertion that the fall of the Berlin wall marked human history’s end point. Liberal democratic capitalism, so the claim goes, represents the culminating stage of humanity’s social evolution, with war and ideological conflict becoming a thing of the past: “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’” (16). Fukuyama’s vision for the future was one without the great social and cultural upheavals of the past: all that remained, Fukuyama insisted, was the perfection of the society we already have.
This, of course, is an absurd claim, a naïve reading of the historical context in which it was made. Three decades on from the publication of Fukuyama’s essay (and subsequent book), one need only look to the examples of 9/11, seemingly endless war in the Middle-East, and events proceeding from 2008 financial crash to understand that humanity’s history of conflict did not end in 1989. Indeed, Fukuyama himself would later go on to more or less renounce his own hypothesis.
Despite this, the thesis remains disturbingly relevant in 2019, with “many in power still view[ing] Fukuyama’s hypothesis as sacrosanct” (16–17). Ongoing globalization in the decades since the end of the Cold War allowed “liberal capitalism [to go] from a contingent project to a reality principal” (17). Mark Fisher articulates this reality principal in his 2008 book Capitalist Realism. For Fisher, “‘realism’ here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous realism” (Fisher 5). Capitalist realism is defined by the cynical and often unconscious foreclosure of all avenues of thought which might lead to an alternative mode of production. Nancy Pelosi perhaps best summarized capitalist realism in 2017, telling an NYU student “we’re capitalist, that’s just the way it is.”
Pelosi’s follow-up, however, is perhaps even more illuminating: “we do think that capitalism is not necessarily meeting the needs with the income inequality we have in this country.” Even Congress’s senior Democrat admits that our current mode of production does not provide for vast swathes of ordinary people. This is because capitalist realism, at its heart, asserts that while our world isn’t perfect it’s the best one possible: since “capitalist realism has no offer 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” (Bastani 18). The twenty-first century has been defined by a culture of ever more excessive consumerism which obfuscates capitalism’s increasingly obvious structural instability. Political education, imagination, and action are significantly hindered in a population addicted to Candy Crush, Netflix, and Tinder: “why would decisive action… be necessary if nothing really changes?” (17).
Written in the context of a political culture which, even with the increasing ascendancy of progressive politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, remains largely incapable of mounting a structural challenge to capitalism, Fully Automated Luxury Communism offers a new politics capable of expanding the twenty-first century’s political horizons. Bastani does not conceive of this future as an inevitability but, rather, as an exercise in political imagination intended to shift the Overton Window and shatter capitalist realism with relentless optimism and, yes, a utopian vision for the next century.
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Technology is at the heart of Bastani’s communism. The central pillar of his argument is the assertion that twenty-first century information technology has become so advanced as to necessitate a revolution in the mode of production (the manner in which society materially reproduces itself). Since capitalism is predicated on competition for scarce resources, the extreme abundance enabled by humanity’s exponentially increasing ability to technologically manipulate the material world will inevitably undermine the labour relations which underpin capitalism.
In the Grundrisse, a text which was only translated into English for the first time in 1973, Marx discusses this tendency of capitalism to technologically replace human labour in a section known as the “Fragment on Machines.” The competition which drives capitalism, Marx suggests, incentivizes innovative production in order to create goods and services as cheaply as possible. The end result of this is an exponential cycle of automation encompassing both specific tasks and entire jobs which will eventually make human labour largely redundant. One does not have to be a communist, Marxist, or “progressive” to understand this. A 1987 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences echoed Marx’s criticism of technological change under capitalism while in a 2015 study by the Bank of England determined that over the next few decades nearly half of the labour market in the UK will be lost to automation. Mark Carney, the bank’s governor, later reiterated this assessment with the addendum that countless livelihoods could be “mercilessly destroyed” as machines continue to replace human labour, inevitably resulting in ever-rising income inequality.
So what? It’s a big imaginative leap from saying that machines might one day eliminate the need for most human work to positing a world of endless leisure and limitless abundance. Moor’s Law explains how Bastani is able to make this leap. In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors it was possible to fit into a circuit had doubled for each of the past six years. In a decade, Moore calculated, this trend would result in circuits going from having just thirty transistors to having 65,000. In another decade, a previously unimaginable world would be possible, complete with home computing, portable communications technology, and perhaps even automated automobiles.
Despite constant predictions of its terminality, including that made by the CEO of Dell in 2015, the trend illustrated by Moore’s law has continued for six decades, with adaptations such as the introduction of multiple processing cores offering solutions to problems of material limitations. It is because of Moore’s law that the Playstation 4 contains twice the computing power of the ASCI Red — built in 1996 to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer — at 1/100,000th the cost. Moore’s Law accounts for the astounding technological transformations of the late twentieth century, and its principal of exponential growth makes it possible to envision a future beyond the material limits of planet earth: a post-scarcity world.
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Towards the book’s conclusion, Bastani makes an unexpected yet nevertheless insightful comparison between two historical figures: Karl Marx and John Wycliffe, the fourteenth century theologian responsible for producing the first translation of the bible into vernacular English. Though Wycliffe’s heterodox writings predict many of the conflicts which would arise over the following centuries, he remains a peripheral figure to the history of the Reformation. Ask most people and they’re more likely to know of Martin Luther. Technology, Bastani argues, is the reason why.
While it was the fifteenth century’s revolutions in communications technology which enabled Reformation theology to spread like wildfire across Europe, Wycliffe’s bibles was copied by hand and distributed over half a century prior to the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. By the time Martin Luther pinned his Ninety-five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg on the 31 October 1517, it was possible for the theologian’s admirers to copy and distribute the document so widely that within four weeks Luther’s Theses were available almost throughout Europe: thanks to technological progress, “what was impossible in Wycliffe’s time [had become] seemingly inevitable in Luther’s” (241). Crucially, it is not the development of technology itself but the historical circumstances in which it develops which bring about social change: “While the Gutenberg press was profoundly disruptive, it only led to social transformation once it became so mundane that a little-known theologian could have his ideas printed by people he had never met and, in a matter of months, discover an audience of millions” (241).
Bastani makes a similar argument about the information technologies which make communism possible in the twenty-first century, suggesting that Marx, like Wycliffe, imagined technologically-enabled social transformations that were simply not possible in his own time. Just as the mass production of Bibles for ordinary people was impossible before the Gutenberg press, so too was communism before the twenty-first century. And like in 1517, the technologies Bastani identifies as necessary for a revolutionary transformation of society — automated labour, solar power, asteroid mining, gene editing, and cellular agriculture — have been percolating for up to half a decade or more. Luxury Communism is not “about the future but about a present that goes unacknowledged. The outline of a world immeasurably better than our own, more equal, prosperous, and creative, is there to see if only we dare to look” (241).
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It has become almost cliché to reference Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, yet few texts capture the dystopian reality of Neoliberalism so well. Indeed, it was Mark Fisher who first noted how clearly the film bears out the truth about envisioning the end of capitalism:
Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination — the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. In Children of Men, public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals. (2)
Under the straight-jacket of capitalist realism, Bastani suggests, the powerful are the only people imagining worlds beyond neoliberalism. Regardless of the philosophical problems with utopian visions for the future, the fact remains that those dictating the direction of technological progress are imagining worlds that will be even worse for ordinary people than the one created by the political revolutions of Thatcher and Reagan.
Space mining, the technology upon which Bastani predicates the possibility of post-scarcity in material resources, is illustrative here. The possibility of humanity actually becoming a spacefaring civilization matters less than the fact that Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos believe it to be inevitable. The power of Moore’s law suggest that they are not wrong. These men are on track to take capitalist resource extraction into the solar system.
While leftists are right to be wary of utopian thinking, we cannot afford to discount it when those in power continue to imagine new dystopias. Marx himself knew this. Communism has always been socialism’s utopian horizon, and its revitalization of twenty-first century proves that history’s course continues apace. As David Harvey, the world’s pre-eminent Marx scholar, told Bastani in a 2018 interview, “we’re back in Marx’s story.” Much like Marx’s own, Bastani’s Manifesto tells a materialist narrative encompassing all of human history in order to galvanize the imagination and inspire political action. We must choose where that story goes from here.
Bibliography.
Bastani, Aaron. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso, 2019.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
