The Futuristic Vision of a Fully Automated Luxury Communism
Disclaimer: This is the translation of an article published at TAB UOL.
The so-called “post-scarcity economy” is a hypothetical scenario posed by theoretical economics in which there is an abundance of resources being produced by a minimal human workforce, which means this model enables the commercialization with low prices or, ultimately, that resources are provided for free.
This speculative scenario was first drafted by Karl Marx in his book “Grundrisse” (1858), specifically in a part entitled “Fragment of Machines” in which he argues about the transition to a post-capitalist society in which automation would be so advanced that only a few humans would need to join the workforce, there is an abundance of natural resources and more free time for leisure and study.
Perhaps this doesn’t sound so much like news for those who have been following the work of Peter Diamandis, one of the founders of the Singularity University. Co-author of the book “Abundance,” Diamandis argues that humanity is entering a period of radical transformation, one in which technology holds the potential to elevate standards of welfare to all people on Earth. The authors suggested that this would happen approximately by the year of 2040, when services previously restricted to a wealthy minority will be available for everyone that wants or needs it.
In times of Covid-19, economic and political crisis, it is definitely hard to believe that such a thing could happen to our future interrupted by the pandemic. But for futurists like Diamandis, more than practicing our optimism, it is important to recognize that, despite everything, our current industrialized world was never so safe and we never lived as long as we are now able to. In 2000, our general life expectancy was already 60% longer than the numbers registered in 1900. Besides, we are constantly being surprised by technologies and innovations that hold the promise of a revolution that could encompass all aspects of our lives: from penicillin to exponential technologies, which were named like that due to their exponential capacity of evolving.
Technologies such as virtual reality, blockchain, artificial intelligence, renewable energy sources, internet of things, big data, robotics, bioengineering or even space mining hold the promise to change the world and take us to a Fourth Industrial Revolution or the Third Disruption, as suggested by Aaron Bastani, author of the 2019 book “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”.
Despite the fact that the book title may remind you of some meme or a Facebook page, the term (also shortened to FALC) poses the idea of a future economy that surpasses a state of scarcity, both in the sense of the availability of resources and the creation of an artificial scarcity after the premises of capitalism. Bastani spends almost 300 pages to contextualize and ponder this proposal that indeed raises concerns and skepticism. In spite of being considered an utopian theorist, Bastani tries to keep his propositions the most objective and rational. For this reason, a great amount of his book is dedicated to list examples of technologies and companies that have been working with tools and products that will allow full automation and the conquest of a post-scarcity future.
Before starting a long technology report, Bastani offers first a provocative reflection on how common sense usually leads us to see capitalism as something inevitable and irreplaceable. You probably saw something similar on Olavo de Carvalho’s Twitter, but what Bastani tries to argue is that this is just another symptom of what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism, which could be summarized after Zizek’s quote that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In other words, the general perception is that capitalism is not just the only viable economic system, but that it is “impossible to imagine a coherent alternative.” After all, as stressed by Bastani, “how can one contribute with an alternative to reality itself?” However, according to the French philosopher Alain Badiou, quoted by Bastani,
“We live in a contradiction … where all existence … is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible … our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic.” (Bastani: 2018)
If after reading this quote, you thought about a marketing campaign in which marginalized minority workers thank a company for hiring and including them to their payroll, you didn’t get the idea. In this world of capitalism realism, nothing ever changes; however, as diagnosed by Bastani, we faced a great crisis in 2008 and, today, we glimpse once again another alert sign: in the United Kingdom, suicide is the main cause of death of men aged less than 50 years and depression could be the biggest expenditure of the country’s healthcare system by the year of 2030. Besides, there is an on-going migration crisis in Europe, Brexit, the rise of far right and oppressive leaders, climate change and negationists and, finally, the pandemic that sums a death toll of over 500,000 people (in Brazil) and the perspective of a new economic crisis — which, by the way, will be even more expensive to some sectors of society.
Bastani mentions Francis Fukuyama in his book because the author, by the beginning of the 1990s, declared that the end of the URSS also marked the end of history. However, Bastani stresses not only the absurdity of this statement as well as he argues that this idea only provoked the implementation of the so-called capitalist realism. With the failure of socialism in the URSS, it became more obvious to people that only capitalism could work. But what the FALC author wants to say is that, in fact, it is quite the contrary: it is indeed possible to think about alternatives, and this is one of them.
What we are about to see is the very end of capitalism by its own hands. By the way, this is the scenario envisioned by Slavoj Zizek for the post-Covid future (even though Byung-Chul Han argues quite the opposite). Even if we didn’t face this pandemic, Bastani already diagnosed that the very imperative of capitalism is competition and the constant attempt to find cheaper and more efficient ways to produce commodities (even if that means substituting humans for machines). In other words, the modus operandi of capitalism could hold the very responsibility to give birth to what will make itself obsolete.
Starting with the energetic crisis and the respective scarcity of natural resources, political and economic issues, as well as the collateral effects suffered by the environment. Bastani thus mentions how electrification and the adoption of solar energy are already considered the most relevant and increasingly more disseminated energy source in the world. In the UK, for instance, it is expected that the country will be using only renewable sources of energy until 2040. In China, for the past five years, big cities have been advancing with their plans of electrification of public transportation as a means to reduce both air and sound pollution.
In the case of other natural resources, materials such as iron won’t need to be extracted from the Earth anymore. Considering the perspective of having 9,8 billions of people living on Earth until 2050, it is impossible to sustain the same consumption habits we have today as well as believing that all resources will come from our planet. In fact, a 2015 study has already shown that if everyone on Earth had the same consumer habits of Americans, we would need four planets to support this market in terms of natural resources. But what Bastani brings to the plate is not just related to consumption or even the intensification of recycling processes and the creation of biodegradable products, for instance. The British theorist understands that space mining is the path to acquire virtually infinite mineral resources which, therefore, could become very cheap due to their abundance.
And it seems that many CEOs are already interested in this industry: Jeff Bezos, for instance, has already communicated his interest. Besides him, the futurist Peter Diamandis has also founded the company Planetary Resources, which is focused on asteroid mining. In his case, Diamandis is more interested in the NEAs or near Earth asteroids. Besides the advantage of proximity, there is also the fact that such mineral riches are so vast that is beyond our comprehension. Bastani affirms in his book that one of the estimates for the asteroid belt is something like 825 quintillions tons of iron, with 63kg of nickel to each ton of iron, an estimate that would enable the generation of such a wealth that everyone on Earth would be able to receive US$100 billion in the share. To investigate that, Japanese scientists launched the probe Hayabusa2 in June 2018. It may come back to Earth some time by the end of 2020.
For now, the budget for the exploration, development, and implementation of a robust system of space mining is still too high (to the point that Bastani mentions how even private aerospatial enterprises count on public funding). However, think about the computer and how it grew cheaper and smaller to the size of a mobile phone, thus fulfilling the so-called Moore’s Law. Like any other technology, it is expected that at some point, space mining will be so cheap that the commodities themselves will have almost no value due to such abundance. And this applies to other exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, bioengineering — everything would become cheaper and more accessible, as well as more efficient. Still, it’s important to remember that all these things would happen in a scenario of a majority of senior people and reduced fertility rates, to the point that we may reach our populational peak by the end of this century as envisioned by Bastani.
Sure, it seems odd to think that we will reach a point where population will cease to grow as we achieve new technologies that make our lives easier and when we are faced with an abundance or virtually infinitude of resources. It was already observed during past industrial revolutions fertility rates have increased, while mortality diminished and longevity extends increasingly more. With the exception of a catastrophic event such as a war or an epidemic, it is hard to imagine that we will decelerate population growth. However, for these and other hard-solving challenges, Bastani comes up with the example of the great horse manure crisis in London back in 1894.
Back in the day, the city’s growth provoked the multiplication of horses on the streets and consequently a high amount of manure that wasn’t being efficiently removed, to the point that publications such as The Times suggested that “in 50 years, each Londoner street would be covered by three meters of manure.” This historic event that made horse manure, which used to be a product, become a sanitary crisis became an analogy for times that seem impossible to be surpassed, until a new technology (in this case, the car) changes the scenario completely. This is where exponential technologies are inserted.
But in spite of all the pages in which Bastani argues how electrification will eliminate fossil fuels from the equation, how space mining will bring unlimited resources and how biotechnology may be able to cure diseases and grow meat in the laboratory to the point of making cattle raising an obsolete activity, it is hard to believe that we will reach a point where every person will indeed access all these benefits — after all, isn’t that what communism proposes? The author knows it, and, consequently, Bastani gives as example the science fiction movie “Elysium” in which, despite the achievement of advanced technology, only the elite have access to it. As the British writer explains, in this case, this futuristic society still lives under a capitalist regime, one that even in face of abundance is prone to create artificial scarcity to maintain competition and profit.
This is why, even if technology keeps evolving, it will never be accessed by every person on Earth if there is no political change being applied. In Bastani’s words,
“… the absence of an appropriate politics this will only lead to novel forms of profiteering. According to Marx, even with the most developed machinery the worker could well be forced to ‘work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools’. Technology transformed work, and could improve people’s lives, but only if it was coupled with an appropriate politics. In response to that admission, an assertion: any successful politics that seeks to submit the possibilities of the Third Disruption to the needs of people rather than profit must be populist. If not, it is certain to fail. Capitalist realism is simply too adaptable for a radical politics of management and technocracy, meaning any rupture must be understandable to most people in an idiom that they readily understand.”
In other words, what Bastani argues is that it is not useful to keep those ideas to academia and the elite. When the author talks about populism, he suggests an approach of political rhetoric that can be simple and attractive enough to avoid people’s aversion or confusion. However, in the case of Latin America, it is hard to read this word and avoid the image of populist politicians who didn’t use a more accessible language for the benefit of people, but rather to make themselves elected and thus take decisions for their own benefit.
Apart from that, when Bastani suggests the implementation of communism, he is not talking about the way communism was perceived during the 20th century, after all, we have only experienced socialism and this one was defined by scarcity and the existence of work. In the Third Disruption, we will not only benefit from an abundance of resources and wealth but work will cease to exist as a requirement for survival to become simply a hobby — after all, “productivity is for robots,” as already stated by the futurist Kevin Kelly. This is the point where the researcher comes with the idea of luxury.
Closer to the agenda of green parties in their struggle for animal welfare and environmental protection, FALC is also close to left-wing parties up to the point when these glorify simplicity or even imagine an idyllic escape from the cities and modernity. FALC not only is against this return to nature but it also disagrees with the consumption habits of capitalism which are supported by the use of fossil fuels, its commutation strategies, omnipresent advertisement, nonsensical jobs and programmed obsolescence. In order to live a good life in a scenario of an abundance of resources, it is possible that we may live a life similar to the ones experienced by contemporary billionaires, if that’s what one desires. “Luxury will be in everything as a society based on waged work becomes a relic of history in the same way that of the feudal peasant and the medieval knight,” writes Bastani.
In other words, this isn’t about emulating the nihilist lifestyle of contemporary billionaires, mostly because their actions are based on a logic of scarcity. Launching a Tesla car into space has no meaning except the fact that it shows Elon Musk has enough money to do so. Likewise, that does not mean that FALC defends “ethical consumerism” or even a narrative that what is “local” is more virtuous. In a scenario where everything is accessible, cheap and possible, narratives that are based on such contrasts no longer make sense. And this can only be achieved not through universal basic income, as often is suggested, but rather through a basic system of public services.
In Brazil, we already enjoy a public healthcare system, as well as public schools. What Bastani proposes, however, is to extend these practices to all countries, so that education, housing, transportation, healthcare and access to information are rights granted and free for all. Instead of distributing a basic income, a practice that could ultimately generate inflation in case governments keep understanding that such services are like commodities, thus prone to have their price manipulated by the market, we will need to grant that the access of such services is universal and gratuitous, so citizens can indeed enjoy welfare and independence — after all, as written by Bastani, “people in need are not free people and a system of universal basic services extinguishes this need.”
Now, if you are finding it troubling that Bastani gets inspiration from Marx or even that he proposes communism as a political and economic system to be pursued after the Third Disruption, keep in mind that other economists like Keynes and Drucker also thought something similar: a society in which technological innovation may take us to a scenario of abundance where information becomes the new currency. However, capitalism is not functional in a scenario of automation and abundant resources. Bastani mentions that the levels of automation have decreased for the past years, which means one could grow more pessimistic about the concretization of the Third Disruption. However, the reason is not related to technology, but rather the fact that waged work is increasingly cheaper than the investment necessary to replace workers for machines, which is not a profitable strategy. Besides, the author also mentions an anecdote in which Ford would have said that he couldn’t completely automate his factories or lower salaries too much, because, after all, his own employees were the consumers of his products.
After all, many technologies that are promised to come with the arrival of the Third Disruption are, in fact, not exactly new: they just moved from the “fringes” of society to take the center of it (as explored by the futurist Amy Webb in her book “The Signals are Talking”). If these technologies were already among us and didn’t evolve as fast as they could, it is because we live in a world that is not technological, but political. The same goes for this new world towards which we can walk. For Bastani, in fact, there is no real reason for companies and the wealthiest people to wish for the liberation of people or the maintenance of Earth’s ecosystems — actually, it makes more sense to keep intensifying economic inequality and the universalized collapse so that another predictive algorithm or a new unicorn startup can come with the ultimate solution. On the contrary, change will not come through these enterprises, but rather through collective politics.
Despite the rompant message, Bastani says that “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” is not a book about the future, but rather about a present that is not visible (or which doesn’t want to be seen) by people. This is just a bait that invites us to get out of Plato’s cavern of capitalist realism, or, at least, the book can make us question if there is really any sense to believe that it is easier for the world to end than capitalism ceases to exist. Even if we don’t adopt FALC, even if we don’t even adopt communism, there must be something beyond the specters of capitalism that inhabit our cave.
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