“At a time when robots crowd factory lines, algorithms steer cars and smart screens litter the checkout aisles, automation is the new spectre. The robots, they say, are coming for our jobs.”
“Let them, reply the luxury communists.”
“Located on the futurist left end of the political spectrum, fully automated luxury communism (FALC) aims to embrace automation to its fullest extent.”
““There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions,” says Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media. “In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.””
“Bastani and fellow luxury communists believe that this era of rapid change is an opportunity to realise a post-work society, where machines do the heavy lifting not for profit but for the people.”
““The demand would be a 10- or 12-hour working week, a guaranteed social wage, universally guaranteed housing, education, healthcare and so on,” he says. “There may be some work that will still need to be done by humans, like quality control, but it would be minimal.” Humanity would get its cybernetic meadow, tended to by machines of loving grace.”
“Why couldn’t we have something like Uber with driverless cars provided at a municipal level without a profit motive?”
“The ideology springs from a tangle of well-observed trends. Generally, the rate of technological progress and labour productivity is rising, but wages are stagnating and factories are shedding jobs. Recent research indicates that 35% of jobs in the UK are “at risk” of being automated. And MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and James McAfee argue persuasively in their oft-cited Second Machine Age that the robots are just getting started.”
“Bastani says his conception of FALC is based on a modern reading of Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse.”
“Of course, history is littered with the blueprints of unrealised techno-utopias and work-free leisure societies. Thinkers as varied as Marx and Bertrand Russell were certain science, technology and human cooperation were on the verge of liberating humanity from the bondage of labour.”
““The vision of giving many, if not most, ordinary citizens vastly reduced workloads is a very old notion in utopian thought and writings,” says Howard Segal, professor of the history of science and technology at the University of Maine and author of Utopias: A Brief History.”
“He points to Edward Bellamy’s industrial army in Looking Backward (1888) and the writings of the Technocrats in the mid-1900s. But luxury communism perhaps finds a more current cultural analogue in sci-fi visions such as Star Trek, with its replicators and egalitarian politics, or the late Iain Banks’ high-tech post-scarcity Culture universe.”
“what you need to do is seize the means of production. We need to get automation and make it subordinate to human needs, not the profit motive. It’s about seizing the bakery rather than stealing the bread.” With robots presumably kneading the dough.”