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.
Cybernetic meadows and machines of loving grace
Located on the futurist left end of the political spectrum, fully automated luxury communism (FALC) aims to embrace automation to its fullest extent. The term may seem oxymoronic, but that’s part of the point: anything labeled luxury communism is going to be hard to ignore.
“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.
“Take Uber. Huge company,” Bastani says. “Its idea is that by 2030 it will have this huge global network of driverless cars. That doesn’t need to be performed by a private company. Why would you have that? In London, we have Boris bikes. Why couldn’t we have something like Uber with driverless cars provided at a municipal level without a profit motive?”
This is just the beginning
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.
The automatons of this new age offer a number of advantages beyond automation that promise to make drudgery redundant, including 3D-printing and algorithms smart enough almost to pass for human. An age of machine-abetted plenty appears to loom around the corner.
“I’m not saying we’re there yet, though in certain areas we clearly are,” Bastani says. “Take video and audio content – we’ve reached post-scarcity with that. A Spotify or an iTunes or a Wikipedia-style model doesn’t feed people, obviously. But the claim could be that this is the leading edge of a set of trends for software, but also, soon, for hardware. Because that’s attendant with the rise of solid freeform fabrication, 3D-printing, synthetic biology.”
Bastani isn’t alone in evangelising an era of mass robo-luxury. Members of the leftwing group Plan C deploy the slogan “Luxury for all” in their agitations, and a sharply-designed Tumblr, Luxury Communism, trumpets sympathetic ideas. The maxim has been showing up at student protests.
Likewise, Brynjolfsson doesn’t find the idea of machine-generated populist luxury outlandish. On the contrary. “A world of increasing abundance, even luxury, is not only possible, but likely,” he says. “Many of things we consider necessities today – phone service, automobiles, Saturdays off – were luxuries in the past.”
“Technology can create enormous bounty,” Brynjolfsson wrote, “but the road to abundance may be very rocky as existing business models and ways of creating value are disrupted.”
British luxury communism
British luxury communism has its origins in the mid-00s protest movement, according to Plan C, when its members spotted the slogan “Luxury for All” at a demonstration in Berlin.
“It seemed to us that this demand neatly summed up the aims of a modern communist movement,” say Plan C members. They believe its tenets were initially inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy, wherein a socialist utopia is established on the Red Planet. A Pattern Language, a 1970s utopian tract written by three architects, was also an inspiration. 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.
Eventually, Bastani sees FALC achieving something closer to that — a society with collective control over its own high-tech, work-reducing gadgets. He believes what little work will be necessary in the future, such as optimising 3D-printers and agricultural robots, will be organised much the way editors currently manage Wikipedia — in a decentralised, non-hierarchical fashion.
But before then, and in order to get there, he hopes to use the luxury communist label to win converts to the cause. Ultimately, this is about politics.
Consider the Atlanta rapper Migos’ hit song, Versace, he says. “You get these music videos the kids love, where it’s completely outlandish, luxury everywhere. The story of capitalism is that if you work hard and play by the rules you can get this, which is obviously bullshit.
“But if you say, well look, if you want this, 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.
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I'm in. Please automate me.
A word of caution invoking Iain M Banks' here. The Culture has a distinctly imperialist undertone (or it does to me anyway - I always assumed that element was satirical).
Otherwise yeah. Automation is a fundamental bug for capitalism - instead of improving society by, for instance, freeing us all to paint or do science or whatever - currently the point of automation is to maximise profit.
The ultimate folly of the project of capitalism really - it can never be effectively corralled for the good of global society.
Humanity needs a long term project - fully automated luxury capitalism, the foregrounding of human qualities that help us grow (science, art etc) all carefully managed to work in harmony with the constraints that our environment and available resources allow.
Automation - i.e replacing varibale capital (human labourers) with fixed capital (tech) - isnt a 'bug' for capitalism because profit can't be coralled for the global good, it's a bug because without wage labourers to buy commodities there is no capitalism.
Not really, Imperialism is predicated on an expansion of exploitation and control from the more powerful economy outward against smaller ones, whereas the Culture is depicted as post-scarcity and for the most part, non-interventionist other than through Special Circumstances, let alone assuming direct economic control. It could be portrayed as culturally evangelist I suppose, but that's not the same thing.
It's a nice idea. But it it won't occur spontaneously unless with live in not just a post labour world, but a total post scarcity world.
In the current world various resources are scarce. For the last few hundred years the dogma has been that you need to exchange something of value for your share, and for most that will be their labour. The problem is that for many there labour is becoming worth less and less. If we enter a world where there is still scarcity of resources, but no value in labour, we may find that most people have nothing to of value to give in return for these scarce resources.
To me the only outcomes are a society that makes today's levels of inequality look like a walk in the park, or a society that distributes scarce resources by some mechanism other than exchange. But don't expect those who currently control those resources to give them up without a fight.
Yeah, we need new systems of wealth distribution and new concepts of ownership. And, as you point out, we have to address scarcity. At today's aggregate level of material consumption we are living well beyond the indefinite capacity of the planet to support us. We need to initially reduce aggregate consumption, and also address population, in order to allow future generations to enjoy a life that both provides the technology to give them freedom, and is not dominated by scarcity and competition for resources and productive capital.
The big problem is how do we accommodate our natural imperative to compete with and outdo each other in terms of social status. Being a social ape, our relative status is very important to us, and material wealth is a very visible demonstration of status. We need to replace material wealth with other clear symbols of status in order to allow us to continue competing against each other in order to determine relative social status.
"how do we accommodate our natural imperative to compete with and outdo each other in terms of social status"
I don't think that's our natural imperative at all. That's just the capitalist revisionist history of humanity that we've been fed. Humans also have a considerable history and demonstrated ability to cooperate. We evolved by working together and being able to achieve more in groups than we can on our own. I personally don't view my life as an endless competition and feel the need to constantly one-up my neighbors and demonstrate superior social status. Do you?
Well, I understand where you're coming from, as I would sort of like to hold a similar point of view myself...
But even if I want to, I find it really hard hard to refute that we have a natural craving for social status within the group. By simple observation of any human society (not only modern "western" type societies) I think it is quite clear that there is intense competition for status. This is not only so in our species, but also observable in other, very similar species of social primates.
I think a lot of people do actively try to distance themselves from the most obvious demonstrations of status, and even to try to suppress the urge to maintain or build on their current status, but if we atually think clearly about our basic motivations for acting a certain way, I think it is necessary to suppress really strong natural urges at a basic level if we are to overcome the competitive instinct, and I'm not sure if that is even healthy...
Now, having said that, I do not by any means wish to argue against your point regarding working together. And I think competition inproves the end result of the cooperation so long as we find means to channel it correctly. We need to somehow seek to deflect the target focus from domination/oppression to recognition.
Artificial scarcity will occur, as people like power and status, and power and stratus are obtained by restricting access to resources even when those resources are abundant.
predictable "human nature" argue
It is a simple shift in thinking about what automation can do for us.
Up to now it has always been used for laying off workers, increasing instability and making larger profit for small numbers of people.
What it can in fact be used for is giving us more time to pursue more worthwhile pursuits which collectively help humanity.
Its an idea whose time has come
Or computer-aided anarchy, like the Culture?
See Yannick Rumpala, "Artificial intelligences and political organization: an exploration based on the science fiction work of Iain M. Banks", Technology in Society, Volume 34, Issue 1, 2012, available at: http://skryba.inib.uj.edu.pl/~krakowska/CATALOGUING/GROUP2/GroupB4.pdf
Or: https://yannickrumpala.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/anarchy_in_a_world_of_machines/
Anarchy == communism == anarchy. But I'm not convinced the Culture is actually communist/anarchist tbh. Automation is great in a non-capitalist society until the machines are sentient, but it would be difficult to argue that a sentient machine labour base is any less an exploited class than a sentient human labour base. And then there's the implication that most organics exist passively, rather than taking an active role in politics either
"Iain M. Banks thus eliminates a good number of factors that foster domination. As he explains in a lengthy article: “Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby. No machine is exploited, either; the idea here being that any job can be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a machine well below the level of potential consciousness; what to us would be a stunningly sophisticated computer running a factory (for example) would be looked on by the Culture’s AIs as a glorified calculator, and no more exploited than an insect is exploited when it pollinates a fruit tree a human later eats a fruit from.”
(http://skryba.inib.uj.edu.pl/~krakowska/CATALOGUING/GROUP2/GroupB4.pdf, p. 26)
I'm all for luxury communism, although like most articles on 'post-work societies' this completely fails to account for social reproduction. Is care for the young, sick, elderly and everything else involved in social reproduction not work? Will this work still not need to be done by humans post-FALC utopia?
I think a good way to make a distinction is between "job" and "work". People would always work. Virtually nobody enjoys sitting around on their ass all day and doing nothing, there is great satisfaction in helping others and in being productive. Right now, though, many if not most of us are stuck doing something we dislike for 8-10 hours a day just so we get to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table.
So much of the work being done today is literally useless, or worse than useless. Every banker, every ad person, every transportation worker, every office worker (almost) - their jobs are makework, invented nonsense that we do simply to move money from point A to point B. Without money or trade, those jobs would no longer exist.
But the need to care for the elderly and such is a real need, something we do regardless of social system. And that kind of work never will go away, even though that too may be augmented by robots. Instead of a human being lifting a heavy human being into and out of a bath, they can be there to help while a robot does it.
And it stands to reason that when we free people from doing nonsense work like office paper shuffling, we could easily get 10 people to help with the kids or the elderly where there currently is one. Helping the elderly can be brutally hard and doing that 8 hours a day, day in and day out, can be tough. If instead you could do it 2 hours a day, three days a week and the rest of the work would be done by many other volunteers, it would be better for everyone.
The goal is to stop doing idiotic things, to free people up to do what they want, and helping others is something many people feel good about.
Sounds like a nightmare. Personally, I'd prefer to live simply with technology which is easy to understand and fix, and rely more on craft and mutual aid, than depend on complex technology which separates us from nature and each other. Work is not an evil in itself; fulfilling work you enjoy is a great pleasure.
Your right but for all to have fulfilling work you must automate the drudgery that no one wants to perform. There are also those who's idea of fulfilling work is reading articles about and playing vid3eo games all day. While to you this may seem a nightmare and the height of unproductivity who should be allowed to determine what another individuals ideal to strive for should be?
You don't *need* to automate it. You need to share it equitably. And like you said, what is drudgery to some people is fulfilling work to others. What exactly is it that we think nobody wants to do?
It's much more enjoyable to make your own bread by hand than use a bread-making machine. You get better bread, too. And it's cheaper.
Style note: the Culture (as in Iain M Banks) should always be capitalised
This whole idea seems to be completely divorced from environmental realities. Is it even possible to manufacture and operate all this stuff with solar and wind power? As far as I know, manufacturing high-tech products is a very energy intensive process and there seems to be a lot of disagreement regarding how much total power we can realistically produce through renewable sources. There's also the issue of nonrenewable, limited resources like metals, which would be needed in vast quantities to produce all these gadgets. And that's in addition to all the metals we will need to produce enough solar panels and wind turbines to power it all. Maybe it's possible, but it's concerning that nobody proposing these ideas seems to even consider these things (or be aware of them).
But it's the automated farming piece that really bothers me. It's like these people are completely unaware of all the problems caused by industrial agriculture (like soil/mineral depletion). If anything, the science is pointing toward more labor-intensive, traditional farming methods in the future, such as intercropping to reduce pests rather than relying on toxic pesticides that harm pollenators and breed super pests. Given all the energy inputs (for which there currently is no fossil-fuel-free option), the monoculture, fertilizers, and pesticides, there is simply no way that industrial agriculture is sustainable.
Over in Asia they just built an indoor farming plant in a factory that produces lettuce many times faster than out in the fields. And since it's hydroponics, there is no need to worry about pests - and thus no pesticides. Technology is amazing and we need to fully unleash it, not worry about "maintaining jobs".
Do you have the FIRST CLUE how incredibly wasteful capitalism is? Look into "planned obsolescence" and think about what is driving the sale of, say, thousands upon thousands of phone variants, all cheaply built? The lifespan of a phone in a capitalism that's focused on "economic growth" is counted in weeks or months. Then they get thrown away and re-bought, and the manufacturers are driving that to extremes in the quest to make and sell more phones.
You're worried that this luxury communism or a tech-fueled future is going to be wasteful while living in the most exorbitantly wasteful and polluting time in human history - we literally exhort each other to consume more faster because that's what capitalism requires.
You should really think about these things before speaking up, because your ignorance is really showing.
And yes, we can absolutely power humankind with clean sources. The US can generate nine times its current electricity usage by on-shore wind power alone. If you add photovoltaics and (more interestingly) concentrated solar power using molten salt towers and the like (see Gemasolar multiplied many times over) we have zero energy crisis.
You can build robots that can recycle, recycling is not profitable now, despite being environmentally sustainable in long run. When you take away need to make money, then recycling can occur, without any hesitation.
I couldn't agree more with NaturalLimits.
Vertical farming exemplifies the problems with techno-utopianism - massively more carbon intensive than growing outdoors it's only real benfits are growing growing high value crops out of season. When we should just eat seasonally!
I visited a 300 acre sheep farm near Sheffield - employing 2 full time staff. They had sold 8 acres of land to a local Transition Towns group, and it will provide part-time or more towards 12 peoples livelihoods. That is change that involves people, that changes lives.
Apples grow brilliantly in the UK, yet almost all of ours are from other countries - why is that? Because we have driven down the costs by exploiting workers until there is hardly any fruit industry left in the UK, we now grow less than 10% of the fruit we eat (and the same process is happening to the dairy industry right now). We need a radically different approach, or the countryside will become robot-operated jobless green deserts.
It is about challenges to the economic model not technological ones, and that has to include the climate and the risks from our impact on it that will affect the poorest that will benefit least from technological change.
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