(2019-07-10) Could Fully Automated Luxury Communism Ever Work

Luke Coughlan: Could fully automated luxury communism ever work? Do we continue to allow technological innovation to be directed towards profit and social control? Or do we instead re-route towards emancipation?

Moving beyond our present situation, he argues, simply requires making the case that these advances should be put towards collective rather than private gain.

The major obstacle to this vision is the joint demand of national governments and Big Tech for complete knowledge of our desires, purchases, conversations and movements. Exploitation of what Shoshana Zuboff terms “behavioural surplus” – the use of datafied human experience to make predictions of future behaviour – seems to provide a durable dynamic for both capitalist expansion and governmental control.

So could FALC offer a viable alternative? Or is it just wishful thinking? We spoke with Aaron Bastani to find out more about its prospects in a datafied economy.

The premise that this engages with is a world of crisis (Long Emergency). Climate change, demographic aging, the end or collapse of neoliberalism. I look at these technologies and I say not only can they remedy these problems, but they can actually create the possibility for a much more sophisticated, much more civilised society.

That’s not communism. You could say that’s a variant of 20th century social democracy. So why have I called the book Fully Automated Luxury Communism? Because while in the short-term we should look to a progressive political project akin to socialism or radical social democracy, I believe that as these tendencies unfold they will undermine some of the core characteristics of capitalist production.

To me, the two alternatives that big data allows is an all-consuming surveillance state where you have a deep synthesis of capitalism with authoritarian control, or a reinvigorated welfare state where more and more things are available to everyone for free or very low cost.

Big Data can create incredible social innovations. But potential is one thing and actuality is another. Can you give the state all these powers, all this intelligence, all this data and expect it to act benevolently? I’d imagine you can’t.

Neoliberalism is fundamentally about the performativity of moral values. You don’t really have to believe that LGBTQ people are the same as straight people. You have to perform the belief and the second that performance comes into contradiction with actually having to stand up for an LGBTQ person that disappears. That, to me, speaks to a very sterile normativity.

I think that’s a decent explanation of what’s powering the rise of the far right. Actually, we’re now seeing quite a few people didn’t believe in this stuff, many more than we thought. (Blue Church)

An example of luxury populism can be seen in indigenous movements surrounding renewables, green activism in North America. They not only opposed the pipeline and fracking, but also put forward a community-owned renewable alternative.