Fully Automated Luxury Communism

by Aaron Bastani

In 1830, less than two decades after the railway locomotive had been designed, the world’s first intercity route opened between Liverpool and Manchester. Another twenty years after that, Great Britain was home to over 7,000 miles of railway lines used by more than 48 million people annually.

time would have particularly profound implications for the world’s rising economic superpower, the United States. In 1847, the journey from New York to Chicago took at least three weeks by stagecoach. A decade later, the same trip by rail took three days.

under conditions of abundance capitalism pursues a form of rationing in order to ensure profits.

After all, from a biohacker’s perspective a cow is just a chemical reaction that converts feed and oxygen into beef.

A populist politics is one that calls upon, and claims to represent, ‘the people’. While this category does not exist as a permanent and immutable entity, what does prevail are parameters that elevate certain kinds of assembly, social trait or capacity. That is why the ‘ethnic people’ is defined by the community of blood and land; the ‘democratic people’ by the shared act of forging legitimate authority through elections; and the ‘ignorant people’ by a benevolent elite who generously keeps them at bay or defends them from themselves. The very essence of populism is to determine who ‘the people’ really are, rendering visible – and powerful – those elements otherwise framed as too incompetent, dangerous or docile to transform society.