Fully Automated Luxury Veganism
Desire in a post-labor world
Shibboleths of the anti-work movement have been forced into the political limelight by COVID-19, from universal basic income and increased automation, to a four-day week and a new settlement on the balance between commodified and domestic labor. These attempts to mitigate the way work claims more and more of their lives thrived in popular books, think tanks, and pressure groups in the “left populist” years of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders since 2015. With bitter irony for their supporters, such positions’ true urgency became clear only as the radical left lost control of the Labour Party in the U.K., and failed to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in the U.S.
With the demise of a meaningful electoral left in neoliberalism’s heartlands, it is hard to see how the anti-work potential in this crisis might be realized.
That said, the impact of an unprecedented period of state-decreed and state-supported worklessness, along with a new visibility of state intervention in the productive economy, is yet to be seen.
At the very least, a new recession could spur anti-work thinking and activism, just as the last one did. For this reason, it is useful to probe the ideological implications of anti-work thinking, starting with one of the more memorable post-work slogans of the past few years, “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” (FALC).
In a puckish short essay published in Vice in 2015, a few years before the more developed book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (which Arc Digital reviewed here), Aaron Bastani contrasts the future envisaged by the South African luxury goods magnate, Johann Rupert, with that proposed by the then-British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. Osborne had just seen his extreme spending cuts approved by the electorate in the 2015 election and was seeking to extend these measures into a future of “permanent austerity.” Rupert, meanwhile, was worrying that the mass automation and unemployment predicted by many economists would represent an existential crisis for his own luxury brands sector, as fewer and fewer people could afford to buy its products.
In response, Bastani took Rupert at his word to suggest a utopian way of moving beyond Osborne’s austerity future, combining “full automation” and the right to luxury consumption into “the political adventure of our lifetime”: all work performed by robots, humans left to consume their bounty. “Cartier for everyone, Montblanc for the masses, and Chloe for all.”
The dream of a post-scarcity future has often been invoked from positions of very great scarcity. When John Maynard Keynes made his famous prediction of a future of little work and much abundance in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), he did so in the thick of the Great Depression. From the same period, there is a subgenre of American folk songs about a post-work, post-scarcity world of “cigarette trees,” “a lake of stew and of whiskey, too,” in which “the hens lay soft-boiled eggs,” and “there ain’t no short-handled shovels,” where the song’s speaker himself is an impoverished hobo. The anti-work visions of the Italian Autonomist and “Wages for Housework” movements were devised amid economic crisis and the collapse of the post-war economic consensus.
The present wave of anti-work campaigns have followed this pattern; conceived in the context of the recession following the 2008 global financial crisis and grown over a decade of austerity and increasing job precarity, their ideas are now attracting mainstream attention amid the economic obliteration of the global pandemic.
Even before COVID-19, the habitual disparity between present famine and demanded feast in the tradition of anti-work writing was, if anything, even more pronounced in this latest wave, because it arrived amid impending climate catastrophe. FALC’s enthusiasts are careful to play up the green credentials of “post-scarcity” technologies such as 3-D printing, robot workers, and lab-grown food, and to stress their potential as a remedy to today’s inequitable and environmentally destructive global supply chains.
But this does not quite do away with the sense of disjunction between, on the one hand, Bastani’s demand for “Cartier and Chloe for everyone,” and on the other, an environmentalist discourse demanding “de-growth.”
In such a context, FALC might be seen as a Verfremdungseffekt-like attempt to upend public associations of both left and Green movements with Stakhanovite self-discipline, dour ascetic piety, and mistrust of popular pleasures. Part of its rhetorical effectiveness is that it is difficult to object to without looking a little humorless oneself.
As we describe in our book Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism, radical writing has often been marked by an anxiety about which of our existing desires we should expect to keep hold of in the utopia to come, and which need to be abandoned to the revolutionary fires on the way there. FALC takes a Gordian knot approach to this old problem, meeting us where our desire is in the here and now, and promising to satisfy the lot. But this commitment to luxury also requires a tactical projection into the future of desires that much radical thought has treated as specific to capitalism alone, and indeed has demanded we must overcome as the entry requirement to a better future.
In this respect, the reported increase in consumption of vegan meat may be an ideologically revealing detail of the pandemic. The new hyper-realistic meat-free burgers that have come to prominence over the past couple of years are actually an exemplary proto-FALC product. As anyone who (like the present authors) became vegetarian in the 1990s will attest, traditional meat substitutes are reassuringly unconvincing.
These new burgers, by contrast, seek as far as possible to recreate the texture of meat and in some cases even “bleed” beetroot juice (says one online review, “as a decade-long vegetarian, I was totally unsettled by the texture and could never eat this burger again”). While we are not there yet, the new realist fake meat is also being framed as trial run for the normalization of lab-grown (and so virtually methane and cruelty free) “real” meat.
It is becoming difficult to deny that veganism is an existential imperative: the planet simply cannot sustain animal farming on its current scale; and this, alongside greater visibility of factory farming’s palpable cruelty, has led to an increase in people adopting vegan diets. Yet this trend has also coincided with the rise in the West of meat-centered “paleo” and “keto” diets (taken to baroque extremes by the culture warrior Jordan Peterson, who has claimed to subsist entirely on beef), and even an increase in the meatiness of meat products in popular cuisine: the ubiquitous pulled pork, hipster burgers ludicrously stacked like postmodern sculptures, and fries heaped with bacon.
One traditional response of cultural criticism would be to interrogate why this desire for meat should arise in the present context of ecological crisis. We might consult Roland Barthes on the relation between rare steak and nationalism from Mythologies, the critique of “carno-phallogocentrism’ by Jacques Derrida and within écriture feminine, or Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat: in short a whole canon of criticism on the symbolic violence accrued by our history of handling meat.
The “FALC” burger, by contrast, short-circuits this cultural critique of our desire for delicious but destructive things, using technology to focus instead on the material dimension of actual cruelty and environmental destruction, but leaving the desire itself intact. It is no more interested in the network of behaviors, attitudes, and oppressions that come with wanting to eat meat than Bastani is in our contextually-specific reasons for wanting Cartier, Montblanc, and Chloe.
In the most generous reading, FALC can be seen as standing for a radical withholding of judgement. Recognizing the fact of desire’s cultural-historical plasticity or pointing earnestly to how certain desire is culturally constructed does not help us very much in predicting or predetermining conclusively which parts of desire are to be congenially met by the post-work utopia and which have to fall by the wayside. Questioning how our desires relate to present oppressions must fall under the purview of radical movements.
Yet, as Andrea Long Chu has observed, such movements have often been embarrassed to find that our “bad” unreconstructed desires are stickier and more persistent than their theorists hoped.
A less charitable view would see FALC instead as the extreme endpoint of Slavoj Žižek’s account of neoliberalism’s predilection for “products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol, warfare with no casualties (on our side of course).” Here, we find communism without the need to renounce capitalism’s selfish, violent, and sexist pleasures.
This is a logic which, in the here and now, is the basis of the business agenda of the new vegan meat too. “Meat 2.0” argue Anna and Kelly Pendergrast, “is not just technology — it’s tech … a familiar Silicon Valley story about saving the world” where the “techno-fix” just happens to be the industry’s own product, slotting into existing destructive supply chains and consumer habits, and leaving the system unchallenged. In some cases, radical branding has not prevented vegan start-ups from matching the tech industry’s most notorious union-busting business practices.
Left thinking needs to know how to engage all our resources of desire to help us get out of the shade, even as we know that these desires are easily manipulated to keep us stuck in place.
The grim compromises the fallout of the pandemic is going to demand mean that it is incumbent on the left keep the most utopian horizons open, at worst if only to serve as a counterweight. Part of this thinking must be dedicated to disentangling “what we will want” to eat, to do and to have from its capitalist harness without underestimating the intractable dimensions of human desire.
