Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Meanwhile 69 per cent of the world’s freshwater withdrawals are committed to agriculture, most of which is in meat production, with the average cow consuming 11,000 gallons of water a year.

Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism.

While FALC is situated within a transformation as seismic as that of the arrival of agriculture, its concrete politics consist in specific, readily identifiable demands: a break with neoliberalism, a shift towards worker-owned production, a state-financed transition to renewable energy and universal services – rightly identified as human rights – placed beyond commodity exchange and profit.

management of discord between humans – the essence of politics

While Wycliffe’s Bible was widely distributed, it was not a printed document in the modern sense – meaning it could never find as large an audience as the vernacular pamphlets and books of a century later. That Martin Luther came to be the seminal figure in the Reformation was, therefore, a consequence of technological innovation rather than personal charisma or new ideas.

While levels of automation have arguably slowed over recent decades, primarily as a result of wages being pushed so low that replacing workers wasn’t profitable, the context within which waves of automation will unfold in coming decades matters. Contradictions internal to capitalism make a crisis of technological unemployment, terminal under-consumption and rising inequality unavoidable.

‘All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.’

‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’

Which is why the post-capitalist state would move towards an ‘Abundance index’ accounting for all of this, while integrating the emerging economic model of ever fewer things paid for with money. Initially such an index would integrate CO2 emissions, energy efficiency, the falling cost of energy, resources and labour, the extent to which UBS had been delivered, leisure time (time not in paid employment), health and lifespan, and self-reported happiness.

These two trends – of deflationary prices in the market economy and production of more free things in its non-market equivalent – will ultimately render GDP irrelevant as a means to measure people’s quality of life, especially once the post-capitalist state accelerates such tendencies. That, alongside the implementation of UBS, means GDP will only deteriorate as a significant measure of anything, as limited as it already was. What is more it will fail to calculate those things that matter most in the context of the five crises, including atmospheric CO2, the health and lifespan of the elderly, environmental degradation, access to clean air and drinking water, mental wellbeing and work that is socially and emotionally satisfying.