Review: Aaron Bastani, ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto’
Review of Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019), 278 pages.
Abstract
In this review I explore Aaron Bastani’s recent book, Fully Automated Luxury Communism and explain his utopian theory of the passage from late capitalism to a new form of high tech luxurious communism. In the main part of the review I unpack Bastani’s central thesis, which is that advances in technology will enable a move beyond the realm of scarcity to a new world of abundance, and that this will ultimately lead to the emergence of a communist society premised on extreme supply. Following recognition of the potential weakness in Bastani’s work, concerned with his lack of a theory of power, class struggle, and revolution to explain the sociological transition from capitalism to communism, I conclude by highlighting the value of his utopian ambition to look beyond capitalist realism.
Reviewed by Mark Featherstone
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism political commentator and co-founder of Novara Media Aaron Bastani presents a utopian political manifesto for a near future of post-scarcity. The central thesis of Bastani’s book is that capitalism has reached its end point and that over the course of the next twenty years it will be consumed by the effects of a series of contradictions that will make its demise inevitable. According to Bastani a combination of (a) rapid climate change, (b) resource scarcity, (c) the ageing of society, (d) ever expanding poverty, and (e) automation mean the coming end of capitalism and the potential transition to a new social and economic model that he calls Fully Automated Luxury Communism or FALC. While Bastani suggests that these five points of contradictions will see capitalism grind to a halt and start to collapse under pressure of its own need to keep moving forward, it strikes me that the key to understanding the transition from capitalism to communism in his model is a utopian vision of techno-science and a theory of the extreme supply of information. Ultimately, it is innovation and over-supply that he thinks will open up the possibility of a shift from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom where abundance (luxury) means there will be no need for humans to suffer in a world of scarcity.
In Bastani’s view it is ultimately techno-science and an abundance of information that will enable humanity to overcome climate change, scarcity of resource, ageing and disease, poverty, and the redundancy threatened by automation. In order to situate his theory of a leap from late capitalism to FALC, Bastani offers a three stage model of human history. In the first ‘implosive’ stage, which he locates in the Neolithic revolution that took place approximately 12,000 years ago, humans began to keep animals and grow crops (31-32). They shifted from a nomadic life characterised by the endless pursuit of the means of survival to a settled state where they produced their own food, constructed their own shelters, and lifted themselves out of the state of nature through social cooperation. Following this agricultural stage, Bastani leaps forward to the mid-18th century, modern science, industrialism, and the development of capitalism (32-34). At this point society enters an ‘explosive’, progressive, modernising phase. In Bastani’s view, it is this social and economic form that is now coming to an end centrally because the capitalist system founded upon the principle of scarcity will be unable to cope with the coming abundance delivered by the new spatial, technological, and informational fixes. When this happens humanity will be liberated from capitalism, which Bastani appears to understand in terms of the exchange of more or less precious goods under conditions of scarcity, through abundance emerging from advances in science and technology.
In essence Bastani’s utopia of excess, which we might locate in the sociological tradition of Mauss (2000) and Bataille (1991) who similarly imagined a new economic form beyond restriction and limitation, turns on the possibility that new scientific discoveries and particularly the ability to manipulate huge quantities of data will deliver humans from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance where the capitalist relations of production (and subsequently the class system) will no longer hold. This is ultimately where I found Bastani’s story of the transition to a new utopian social and economic form problematic. While the book centres upon an explanation of the ways in which techno-science will resolve the five contradictions that Bastani suggests have pushed capitalism to the brink, his discussion is light on a theory of social change and exactly how revolutionary transformation will come about.
There is a moment towards the end of the book where Bastani seems to become aware that his work does not contain a convincing theory of social revolutionary change to explain the transition away from the existing capitalist relations of production (242-243). At this point he pulls back from the idea that the story of FALC is part of a long Hegelian-Marxist narrative about the inevitable transition of capitalism to communism by saying that the move to Fully Automated Luxury Communism will be contingent on political will and that the communists will need to struggle to make themselves heard. However, the problem is that this vision of contingency tends to fly in the face of his Marxist theory of techno-scientific development towards a new kind of society that leads up to this moment. As a result, one finishes Bastani’s book with a nagging question. If capitalist techno-science will soon overcome the problem of extreme scarcity that currently suggests capitalism’s impending doom, why would those elites who have a vested interest in limiting access to the goods that will emerge from the new abundance make them available to everybody, especially when, as Bastani freely admits, the legal machinery is in place to limit access to the extreme supply of information in the name of generating profits? That is to say that one is left wondering where power sits in Bastani’s theory and what role he thinks class struggle would have to play in shifting from a capitalist to communist society.
I think this is ultimately the problem with Bastani’s book. He has no real theory of power or class struggle. Beyond his utopian vision of techno-science, which I found personally difficult to swallow because he never considers the Marxist / Heideggerian problems of technological alienation and dehumanisation, I think the central weakness of his theory of the leap forward to a Neo-Marxist utopia is that it lacks a fully formed theory of power, catastrophe, struggle, and revolution. This is not immediately clear on first reading of his book because he proceeds as if this is what he is setting up. For example, early in the book he refers to Frances Fukuyama’s (1992) Hegelian theory of the end of history and triumph of American liberal democracy, suggesting that from the very moment of the end of the Cold War, American power was heading for collapse into its (dialectical) other (a kind of dysfunctional authoritarianism) (15-30). Passing over the first signs of the decline of American power (9 / 11, the abortive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), Bastani turns to the financial crash of 2008 and says that this signalled the end of the late capitalist fantasy of endless growth and the turn towards ‘neoliberalism in retreat’ or even worse, a kind of ‘neoliberalism in reverse’. In the context of neoliberalism in reverse the politics of excess and modernity were replaced by austerity and a turn back towards tradition with the result that voters deserted the political centre ground in favour of the left (Syriza) or extreme right (Brexit, Trump). Given that neither the leftists or the rightists have been able to resolve the contradictions inherent in the contemporary capitalist system politically, Bastani turns to techno-science which he thinks will soon provide the technological and spatial fixes to escape the current (late capitalist) impasse.
In this respect Bastani conjures his techno-utopia from a dark vision of the dystopian present and imagines humanity thinking and making itself over to the other side of the apocalyptic end times. Where mainstream politicians and economists have been unable to imagine life beyond the capitalist realism that has limited their thinking since the end of the Cold War, Bastani sees escape from our predicament in new technologies that will solve the problems of (a) climate change (solar, wind power, lithium batteries), (b) exhausted resources (off world mining enabled by Space X and new rocket technology), (c) ageing and disease (digitisation and the manipulation of genetic information), and (d) poverty and hunger (synthetic foods). Given Moore’s law and Stewart Brand’s idea that ‘information wants to be free’ (48-49), Bastani explains that it will be impossible for capitalists to restrict the distribution of these information-based goods for very long and that they will propel humanity towards a world defined by abundance. Of course, the idea that ‘information wants to be free’ rests on the fact of the infinite reproducibility of digital code and the notion that extreme supply eventually reduces costs to zero, thus destroying the price system that relies on some sense of scarcity. Although capitalism has already moved to restrict access to informational goods through intellectual property and copyright law, Bastani does not think this system will hold and that eventually abundance will overcome these attempts to restrict supply.
Connected to these shifts, Bastani turns to Marx’s Grundrisse (1993) and particularly the ‘Fragment on Machines’ to explain how these techno-scientific developments - excessive processing power and the extreme supply of information – will transform the human relation to labour through automation (52-56). While the existing capitalist relations of production mean that moves towards automation have become about forcing those lucky enough to hold onto their jobs to work even harder in the name of increasing productivity and those whose jobs have been taken over by robots to be thrown onto the scrap heap of redundancy, Bastani follows Marx’s vision by interpreting the approach of what he calls ‘peak human’ (74-78) in a different way, where automation becomes about creating a space for the liberation of humanity from labour (where labour refers to repetitive functions carried out in the name of the reproduction of life). In this view ‘peak human’ is not about the kind of story we find in the recent work of Bernard Stiegler (2016) (that is to say, the redundancy of humanity in the face of its own machines), but rather a more hopeful vision of the transformation of humanity from a species that must labour in order to survive to a species that leaves endless toil to machines and lives a life free from scarcity. Thus Bastani imagines humanity escaping from Marx’s kingdom of necessity into a new world of abundance – the kingdom of freedom – where men and women are truly free to pursue humanisation and civilization. As Bastani notes, under these conditions the human, historically caught somewhere between being an animal and a god, starts to look more like a god, because they would no longer find themselves trapped by the limits of their biology and the biosphere (189).
Although Bastani never unpacks the theological / philosophical dimensions of his turn to post-humanism, he clearly wants to explain how this new system would function politically, suggesting a red-green approach founded upon a kind of Neo-Soviet ‘Cleveland-Preston model’ of localism (2008-2011). In this social, economic, and political model public sector anchor institutions (schools, universities, hospitals) become the centre of economic activity and support local business that is itself supported by local investment banks. Finally Bastani suggests state regulation to support localism (and prevent capital flight) and guaranteed universal basic services based upon the extreme supply of energy, healthcare goods, and food that wants to be free. Given that there is no need for humanity to labour in order sustain life in this new system, Bastani makes the final point that it makes no sense to measure value by GDP, but that we should instead move towards thinking in terms of a new abundance index, where the success of societies should be thought about in terms of the extent to which they are able to live in excess, without consuming worker and world in the process (232-236).
Overall, I think that Bastani’s fully automated luxury communist manifesto is probably essential reading for those interested in thinking beyond the contemporary late capitalist impasse. Akin to Paul Mason’s (2015, 2019) recent works on post-capitalism and the future of humanism, Bastani’s book is packed with ideas and reaches out to readers beyond the university in the spirit of trying to imagine how we will overcome the problems of the present that concern everybody. In keeping with the tradition of utopian writing from Plato through More up to Marx, Bastani seeks to bridge the gap between philosophical speculation and concrete social and political modelling through his Hegelian / Bataillean vision of an ideal society founded upon excess and abundance. Although he is not always successful in working out the theoretical detail of how his utopia might emerge from the ruins of the late capitalist dystopia – surely the neoliberals will not simply fade away, particularly if techno-science injects new life into their failing project? – nobody could accuse him of a lack of ambition. What is utopia, if not social, political, and economic ambition realised?
Despite my reservations about some elements of his work, and centrally his technologically determined version of Marxism without a vision of struggle, I found Bastani’s book seductive, simply because it steps outside of the prison of capitalist realist thought. In this respect, I absolutely agree with the overall tendency of his thinking. We need utopian thinking, which is necessarily luxurious because of its transgression of the limited, closed utilitarianism of capitalist realism, more than ever before today if we are to escape the late capitalist impasse that seems entirely future-less. On this basis alone I would recommend Bastani’s book to those trying to think beyond our dark times.
References
Bataille, G. (1991) The Accursed Share: Volume I: Consumption. New York: Zone Books.
Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1993) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.
Mason, P. (2015) Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane.
Mason, P. (2019) Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Future. London: Allen Lane.
Mauss, M. (2000) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Stiegler, B. (2016) Automatic Society: Volume I: The Future of Work. Cambridge: Polity.
Mark Featherstone is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, UK. He is author of ‘Tocqueville’s Virus’ (2007) and ‘Planet Utopia’ (2017) and editor of ‘The Sociology of Debt’ (2019) and ‘Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader’ (2019).
Email: m.a.featherstone@keele.ac.uk
