By John Pickard
This new book by Aaron Bastani is a justification for socialism, specifically written for the modern age. The author is a co-founder of Novara, a left media organisation that has a huge following for its social media and YouTube output and which was described by the Financial Times last year as the “go-to interview spot” for left interviews: “Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Chris Williamson and the Green party’s co-leader Caroline Lucas are all past guests of Novara”. (Financial Times interview: https://www.ft.com/content/0e99fc98-4872-11e8-8ae9-4b5ddcca99b3 )
Fully Automated Luxury Communism, or FALC, as Bastani dubs it throughout the book, is pitched as a cross-over between politics and modern science and it does indeed offer a detailed (in places mind-blowing) description of the enormous social and economic possibilities that are inherent in twenty-first century technology.
Bastani suggests that there have been three great ‘disruptions’ in human history – the first and second being respectively the revolution in agriculture that led to human settlements and the industrial revolution. The Third Disruption is the one we are now living through – the contradiction between what is possible with modern science and what capitalist society is actually delivering. Such is the crisis in society today, Bastani argues, that we are living through a ‘great disorder’. “To say the present era is one of crisis borders on cliché…we inhabit a world in free-fall and yet we are all along for the ride.” He’s not wrong there.
“What matters now, is what comes next”
Bastani identifies five key areas of crisis in modern society, several of which overlap. They are climate change, resource scarcity, societal ageing, growing global poverty and the rise of the machines, or artificial intelligence. “Capitalism as we know it”, he argues, “is about to end. What matters is what comes next.”
There is ample public-domain data about the effects of austerity, even in the most advanced countries of capitalism, and Bastani adds his fair share of information. In relation to the United States, for example, he points out that in 2007, prior to the Great Recession, 26 million Americans received ‘food stamps’ but by 2019, the figure had nearly doubled to 46 million. He quotes similar figures in relation to living standards in the UK:
“A 2014 report showed how real wage growth in Britain has been on a downward trend for forty years, with wages increasing at an annual 2.9 per cent in the 1970s and 80s, 1.5 per cent in the 1990s, and 1.2 per cent in the 2000s. Since the 2008 crisis that incremental decline has gone into free-fall, with real household wages in Britain falling 10.4 per cent between 2007 and 2015, something entirely without precedent.” What we know for certain, Bastani suggests, “is that the status quo can’t hold.”
“Scarcity replaced by abundance…”
The answer to the five crises that the author mentions – and which capitalism is incapable of resolving – is Fully Automated Luxury Communism, “a society in which work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance and where labour and leisure blend into one another.” In decisive areas of science and technology Bastani illustrates the possibilities that are inherent. In the field of robotics and artificial intelligence he describes how increased automation under capitalism undermines tens of millions of jobs and livelihoods – something that threatens “political and social turbulence on a global scale”. But he also paints an alternative picture, a scenario in which automation could be liberating and could lead to undreamt-of increases in productivity of all the necessities of life, leaving an affluent population free to enjoy leisure time and a variety of cultural pursuits.
“Rushing full speed to oblivion”
A significant part of the book looks at the danger of global warming and the need to move away from carbon-based energy resources. “Properly understood”, he writes, “our present course isn’t one of inaction, it’s rushing full speed to oblivion.” He explains how renewable energy and particularly solar energy has enormous possibilities, with the promise of producing almost limitless amounts of electricity, enough to take it out of the realm of money altogether. It would be possible, using renewable energy, to produce so much electrical capacity that it could be virtually free at the point of use.
Not that long ago, before water companies were privatised, most households paid for their water as part of their general household rate and the charge was therefore a standard amount. Once paid, a household was able to use as much or as little water as it needed. In other words, water consumption was removed from the money economy, at least at the point of use. Bastani explains how that situation could easily be replicated today in terms of household electricity use, such have been the advances in the technologies of solar, wind and renewable energy.
Bastani deals with other issues like resources and population growth, with the same eye on modern science and technique. He offers a very stimulating and exciting look at the potential of technology. Suffice to say that he shows how humankind in the not too distant future will be able to mine minerals from asteroids and to produce as much meat protein as we want, but without the use of animals. The science for these processes are already well-established and the technological applications are catching up fast.
Bastani’s book claims to be a conjunction of politics and technology. But it has to be said that while the science and technology elements are strong – even inspirational – it is the political parts that are the weakest. Bastani steers well clear of quotations of dead Russians, but he frequently quotes Marx in his analysis of the failure of capitalism. The author accepts throughout the book that we face what is essentially the inherent inability of capitalism to deliver in any of the areas of crisis. Market mechanisms simply cannot provide the basic necessities of life for the global population, much less offer an abundance. The essence of capitalist social relations, he points out many times, is that production (and investment) is only for profit. Goods are not made and investment is not undertaken unless it is profitable. The way the ‘market’ works is that profit thrives on shortage and therefore the present system is inherently incapable of providing a situation of plenty. Neo-liberalism, he argues correctly, needs to be dumped.
A green politics of ecology need to be red
The book attempts to be a “manifesto” (as indeed it is sub-titled), but it splutters in the field of real politics. Correctly, Bastani argues that ‘green’ politics has to be ‘red’ if it is to have any meaning at all. “A green politics of ecology without a red politics of shared wealth will fail to command popular support.” He also points in the right direction when he argues that social change will need to involve a mass movement: “any social settlement imposed without mass consent, particularly given the turbulent energies unleashed by the Third Disruption, simply wont’ endure”.
But he settles after that for a rather vague form of ‘populist’ politics that advances a programme that may not be meant to be, but reads like a mish-mash of wishful thinking: networks of local banks, cooperatives and municipal socialism, for instance. Some of his statements have no meaning at all, like “What is required from us, in turn, is to transform this new understanding into a collective subject with specific demands”. What does that even mean?
Bastani at least recognises the need to face up to politics as it really is and not as he would like it to be. We need to engage, he argues at one point, “in mainstream, electoral politics”. In an interview before the book was published, he even suggested that the book was “like the road map for the leader that comes after Corbyn.”
But having said that, there is a sense in which the book is profoundly utopian. In the real world – and Bastani alludes to it without elaborating – the capitalist class is a political and not just an economic force. It will defend to the death its ‘right’ to power, privilege and wealth. Overcoming the political resistance of the ruling class will need not only a mass movement – he acknowledges that – but one that is clear in its aims, determined in its resolve and which understands enough about political developments to steer a correct path throughout all the ups and downs in political and social upheavals. This kind of political movement doesn’t come from a clear blue sky: it can only be built painstakingly over many years and that fact needs to be acknowledged.
Why is it that Bastani quote Marx as often as he does? It is because Marx’s ideas (and the many additions and developments of Marxism since) are a living tradition that needs to an integral part of a mass movement to change society. Bastani is right in pointing to the need for a mass movement, but he nowhere addresses the nature of it. The greatest and most powerful mass political movement will still need a political programme and some form of organisation to give it coherence and purpose. Otherwise it is a body without a head.
The Third Disruption as a necessary precursor?
Linked to this issue is one in which Bastani makes an assertion that is completely wrong. He suggests that his model communist society would have been impossible before today. “Only now we know that means technology as much as politics, the Third Disruption as a necessary precursor as class consciousness and collective struggle. Creating communism before the Third Disruption is like creating a flying machine before the Second [the industrial revolution]” Here, he is clearly suggesting that the level of ‘class consciousness’ and ‘collective struggle’ was necessarily too underdeveloped in the past. We believe he is wrong in that. Had there been, for example, at any stage in the last hundred years (say, in 1917-18 or in 1968) a successful socialist transformation across a number of advanced industrial economies, there is every reason to suppose that technology and science would have still developed as it has done today, and probably at a much faster rate.
The idea of organising the means of production, distribution and exchange in a planned and state-owned economy, is something that has exercised socialists for a long time. It was the basis of the Clause IV part 4 of the Labour Party constitution for nearly a century. In Anti-Duhring, a century and a half ago, Engels wrote that the main feature of a developed, communist society is that it would mean “The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things.”
Or consider these extracts, from a Militant pamphlet written by the Marxist economist Andrew Glyn in 1975: “The starting point [of a planned socialist economy] must be the broadest political decisions as to how national production should be divided up between consumption, investment and provision of social services…the development of capitalist production itself, in terms of computers, information systems, has rendered planning possible to a level of sophistication and complexity that could hardly have been dreamed of 40 years ago.” (Capitalist Crisis, Tribune’s ‘Alternative Strategy’ or socialist plan). Bastani’s fundamental ideas are clearly therefore far from new. But they do at least add an exciting and modern edge to socialist ideas in a way that is seldom written anywhere else.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a book well worth reading and it deserves to be pored over and discussed. Many Labour Parties have book clubs and it should be a popular choice for book of the month. Despite its political weaknesses, it adds considerably to the general armoury of facts, figures and arguments that justify socialist change.
“Sounds good, doesn’t it?” a reviewer wrote in the New York Times. It most certainly does.
July 8, 2019
