Review: Fully Automated Luxury Communism: a manifesto
Aaron Bastani, Verso 2019, hbk 288pp, £16.99
Commenting in 1880 on a French grouping within the International Workingmen’s Association who called themselves ‘Marxists’, Marx is supposed to have remarked that ‘all I know is that I am not a Marxist’. Marx’s quip would equally apply to Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, an anti-communist manifesto for the petit-bourgeois radical whose grip on reality has slipped so far that he wants to sidestep the laws not only of capitalism but of physics too, rather than try to seriously understand, or change, the world. It is a call to inaction, in defence of petit-bourgeois privilege.
A Brave New World
According to Bastani, a workless future where all humanity will ‘lead lives equivalent – if we so wish – to those of today’s billionaires’ (p189), staffed by robots and fuelled by endless renewable energy, is nearly upon us, developing entirely on its own steam; or with some credit going to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Capitalism, helped along by social democratic governments, will meet the serious challenges facing human civilisation, and in meeting them will organically become ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’, without any need for class struggle.
Laboratory-grown meat will feed the planet’s growing population. It is only a matter of time until we learn how to edit DNA, enabling us ‘to overcome nearly all forms of disease’ (p39). ‘Automation’ will mean ‘extreme supply’ in food, healthcare, and in what Bastani calls labour – robots can perform all the work. This will all be powered by energy, also in ‘extreme supply’. Bastani recognises that while solar energy may be ‘limitless’, resources like coltan, silver and tellurium necessary for capturing and storing it are not, and global reserves are rapidly depleting. This places no barrier in the way of ‘extreme supply’ of energy, however, because we will soon ‘mine the sky’, sending rockets to nearby planets and asteroids. Planet Bastani is a utopia indeed.
Back on Planet Earth, however, there are fundamental laws governing capitalist societies; laws which will continue to function as long as one class owns the means of production and another class must sell its labour-power to survive.
A tale of two planets
On Planet Earth, capitalism is rooted in the accumulation of capital: ‘natural resources are only utilised, the social productivity of labour only developed, labour is only employed if it serves the self-expansion of capital, ie the reproduction of the existing capital values and the creation of additional value, surplus-value.’1 This surplus-value is created by the exploitation of the working class in the production process. Thus is created an antagonism between the working class, which produces, and the capitalist class, which appropriates, wealth. This antagonism can only be resolved by the working class taking power and seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie, redirecting the economic foundations created under capitalism to the meeting of human needs. In the words of Marx and Engels, ‘what the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers’. On Earth, this accumulation process has driven capitalism into a new phase, imperialism, which is defined by the centrality of monopoly finance capital in economic life; the division of the world between the major imperialist powers; and relations of oppression and exploitation between the imperialist and the underdeveloped nations.
On Planet Bastani, capital has no accumulation process. There, profit is drawn from ‘information’ (pp49, 61) and not from the labour of the working class, and so it is possible to imagine a world where capital ‘becomes labour’ and where the replacement of workers by machinery does not lead, as on Earth, to unemployment and poverty but to a life of idle luxury. This is an old argument, made in a 1929 document that Bastani actually quotes: Keynes’s Letter on the Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren. Keynes argued that under capitalism automation would reduce the working week to fifteen hours within a century. The reason this did not even begin to happen in Keynes’s day is the same that it will not in Bastani’s: wage slavery is not caused by insufficiently developed technology but by the private ownership of the means of production. As the working class is irrelevant to the process of capitalist production on Planet Bastani, it has no special role in bringing an end to capitalism there. Capitalism’s gravediggers are solar power, gene-editing technology and rocket ships: ‘to paraphrase Marx, technology makes history – but not under conditions of its choosing’ (p237).
Capitalism on Planet Bastani has not become imperialism. While arguing for the ‘acceleration’ of the extraction of mineral resources needed for ‘green technologies’, Bastani does not mention the environmental destruction this wreaks when carried out as the imperialist plunder of the oppressed and underdeveloped nations (see FRFI 270). Perversely, Bastani argues that the new conditions of ‘extreme supply’ will mean that ‘historically underdeveloped countries’ will have a ‘comparative advantage’ because they have more sunlight to capture energy (p220), and that they will be able to ‘leapfrog over’ the developed nations (pp107, 148) much like how mobile phone technology has apparently helped African nations to ‘leapfrog’ over developed ones (pp108-9). Dismissing the peoples of the underdeveloped world out of hand, Bastani writes that it ‘turns out Marx’s early suspicion that the countries set to lead the revolution would be those at the cutting edge of capitalist modernity was right’ (p193). It is quite a worldview in which Trump’s US and a Britain mired in its Brexit crisis are ‘set to lead the revolution’, but it is the inevitable outcome of Bastani’s total denial of the existence of a world dominated by imperialism.
On Earth, Marx has shown that capital is ‘an alien social power’ standing above the working class: ‘Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate; but social production is not subsumed under individuals, manageable by them as their common wealth.’ The capital relation deprives the working-class majority of social power: the power to direct production, the state, and the course of society. The workers of Earth must fight to abolish the capital relation and take power into their own hands. But on Planet Bastani capital is a technical factor: inputs and machinery. The bourgeoisie will simply wither away. Centuries of class struggle prove Bastani wrong: the bourgeoisie will never willingly relinquish the social power afforded them by capital.
‘In either case they serve the reaction’
Novara Media emerged out of the 2010 student movement, founded in 2011 by James Butler and Bastani. According to Michael Walker and Craig Gent, key Novara figures, those involved had differing views, but ‘our perspectives have historically been broadly libertarian socialist in character’.2 The epithet ‘libertarian’ means that the writers wish to make it clear to existing bourgeois power that they have no intention of confronting it: it is a petit-bourgeois standpoint which believes that the question of class power (‘authoritarianism’) can be sidestepped. As Engels wrote, ‘either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.’3 Sidestepping the question of class power, Novara adopted a radical and media-savvy posture in order to attract a young audience of university students and graduates whose hopes for a secure middle-class future were being frustrated.
Bastani’s book has a certain popularity for precisely this reason: it provides a fantasy for petit-bourgeois radicals who want to ensure that a renewed interest among young people in socialism and communism is channeled into avenues that serve the interests of privileged layers within capitalism.
Originally, Novara’s attitude towards the Labour Party was, according to Gent and Walker, ‘not hopeful’. This changed in 2015 with the election of Jeremy Corbyn, who promised classless solutions to class-rooted problems, For The Many Not The Few. In fact, Novara could play a special role for Corbynism, posing as critics from the left. As Gent and Walker put it, ‘Where the BBC saw him as a hippy radical, we still wanted to be convinced this career politician (from the Labour Party) was worth our political support’ [their emphasis]. What Novara ‘wanted to be convinced’ of was Corbyn’s commitment to the interests of privileged layers of the working class and petit bourgeoisie. Their critique-from-the-left has not challenged Corbyn’s commitment to holding together the Labour Party at all costs; it has not criticised his instructions to Labour-run councils to implement austerity; and it has not challenged his constant capitulations on everything from Trident to Palestine.
In fact, Novara’s critique-from-the-left is indistinguishable from the one from the right. In February, Bastani and his fellow senior editor, Ash Sarkar, joined in the reactionary attacks against Corbyn over supposed anti-Semitism. Bastani tweeted that he ‘wouldn’t feel welcome in the party as a Jewish person’, and Sarkar called for further retribution against those perceived as supportive of the Palestinians: ‘Chris Williamson has […] had the Labour whip suspended pending investigation, which I think is the right decision. But much more work must be done to proactively confront and dismantle conspiratorial and antisemitic thinking on the left, and it goes much further than expulsions.’
New face, old opportunism
In December Bastani tweeted that he is ‘a big fan of capitalism from 1800-1980’. His opposition is to ‘neoliberalism’, an obfuscating way of describing a period of onslaught against the working class in response to the resurgence of crisis conditions following the post-war boom. Bastani’s practical proposals for a future Labour government (‘breaking with neoliberalism’) amount to government-controlled investment banks, increased funding for local government and the introduction of a more comprehensive system of state welfare (p208). This might be sufficient to sustain privileged layers under capitalism, but communism it is not. Bastani’s book has a certain popularity for precisely this reason: it provides a fantasy for petit-bourgeois radicals who want to ensure that a renewed interest among young people in socialism and communism is channeled into avenues that serve the interests of privileged layers within capitalism. In this, it is no different from countless other forms of opportunism.
Novara Media, the ‘soft critic’ of Corbynism founded by Bastani and James Butler
Bastani views the working-class majority with arrogant disdain: ‘communism’ will come about through electoral politics because ‘the majority of people are only able to be politically active for brief periods of time’ (p195). Or rather, Bastani wants to prevent ‘the majority’ being active as the independent action of the working class might spin out of the control of the petit-bourgeois layer he represents.
Not appealing to the working-class majority but trying to assure the ruling class that ‘communism’ poses no threat to their wealth or power, Bastani writes that ‘This Is Not 1917’ (p192). Sidestepping Marx’s support for the Paris Commune, we are told that Marx never believed the ‘transition beyond capitalism’ would simply require ‘replacing one group of rulers with another’ (p55). Having denigrated the USSR, the first successful attempt to construct a future beyond capitalism, as an ‘anti-liberal coup’ (p193), little more need be said of socialism and the millions who have dedicated their lives to striving for a communist future. Cuba, whose constitution explicitly states that it is striving towards communism, and which is leading the way in solving many of the problems that Bastani’s book discusses, is mentioned once in passing. Bastani is dismissive of socialism for not having provided ‘luxury’ where it has been constructed. Socialism was a fool’s errand: until now, ‘post-scarcity’ was impossible, and so socialism was ‘still defined by scarcity and jobs’ (p192). Communism, we are told, ‘is luxurious, or it isn’t communism’ (p56). Bastani’s anti-communism is a luxury that only a petit bourgeoisie attempting to blunt the class struggle in order to salvage capitalism, and with it its privileges, can afford. Capitalism’s gravediggers must reckon with capitalism as it really exists, and fight for class power. Bastani and his ilk will stand in the way.
Séamus Padraic
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 271, June/July 2019
- D Yaffe, The Marxian Theory of Crisis, Capital, and the State, https://tinyurl.com/yym9k4t4
- https://tinyurl.com/y3twzrok
- Engels, On Authority, https://tinyurl.com/nbhd5g5
