Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto

by Aaron Bastani

In 2008 a Dutch professor named Mark Post presented the proof of concept for what he called ‘cultured meat’. Five years later in a London TV studio, Post and his colleagues ate a burger they had grown in a laboratory using those same principles. Secretly funded by Google’s Sergey Brin, the journey from petri dish to plate had cost approximately $325,000 – making theirs the most expensive meal in history. Fortunately, the results were promising, with the consensus being that the patty was ‘close to meat but not as juicy’. Here was confirmation that Post’s concept worked. The next question was the extent to which it might be refined, scaled up and made cheaper. Much cheaper.

While synthetic meat is the most prominent aspect of cellular agriculture and has already attracted vast amounts of venture capital, it is also the most technically difficult to perfect. What is more, while certain kinds of meat like fish, ground beef and chicken breast could soon be commercially scalable, specific cuts like ribs, a T-bone steak, or even fatty bacon, will prove far harder to replicate. The breakthrough will likely come from the same process used to grow muscle tissue being applied to fats and then using a 3-D printer to ‘print’ steaks, bacon rashers or even a leg of lamb.

A 2011 report conducted by the Universities of Amsterdam and Oxford concluded that cultured meat could potentially require 45 per cent less energy, 99 per cent less land, and 96 per cent less water than conventional meat, not to mention leading to 96 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

Leading this revolution in re-engineering our food is ‘heme’, the secret ingredient in the Impossible Burger. Heme is the molecule that gives blood its colour and helps carry oxygen in living organisms, but more importantly for Impossible it accounts for the rich, iron-like taste we associate with juicy medium-rare beef.

In response to that admission, an assertion: any successful politics that seeks to submit the possibilities of the Third Disruption to the needs of people rather than profit must be populist.

You can only live your best life under FALC and nothing else, so fight for it and refuse the yoke of an economic system which belongs in the past.

This ‘luxury’ populism must be both red and green. Red because it places the energies of the Third Disruption at the service of humanity – in the process enhancing personal freedom like never before. Green because it knows climate change is inevitable and that going beyond fossil fuels is a matter of critical urgency. What is more, rather than reducing our quality of life, it grasps how the transition to renewable energy offers a bridge to energy abundance – permitting more prosperous societies than previously possible under the petty limits of fossil fuels. A green politics of ecology without a red politics of shared wealth will fail to command popular support. Conversely, the promise of red plenty based on fossil fuels and resource scarcity will fall victim to climate breakdown, leaving the world’s poor exposed to devastation like never before. Which is why the only politics fit to fight climate change is the demand for FALC – driven by the impulse to lead fuller, expanded lives, not diminished ones.

Now we must build a workers’ party against work – one whose politics are populist, democratic and open, all while fighting the establishment which, through its power over civil society and the state, won’t rest in ensuring FALC never comes to pass.

This requires a basic admission that has been heretical for much of the left since Fukuyama declared history was over: quick, effective action can only happen through nation-states. Complete decarbonisation, in certain respects, is no greater a challenge than road-building, universal literacy or electrification. It’s time for us all to stop waiting and make history once more.

Although FALC is the political project befitting the Third Disruption, it is a historic moment that will require decades to play out, just as the Second Disruption did following Watt’s steam engine. That is no reason to wait, however. Instead we must begin where we stand, by breaking with neoliberalism and building viable alternatives.

So while the political horizon is one of a world beyond work and scarcity, the most pressing task is to discard an orthodoxy built on weak trade unions, precarious labour markets, falling wages and privatisation to break with, in a word, neoliberalism. In each sphere the tide must be turned and, while doing so, placed within an explicit commitment to creating a world entirely different to that of the present.

This break must start by switching off the privatisation and outsourcing machine. The reason why is simple: its prevailing logic demands that every public good – from healthcare and education to housing – be sacrificed on the altar of private profit and shareholder value. In this respect privatisation and outsourcing must be viewed as two sides of the same coin. While the former has taken centre stage in undermining the state’s provision of public goods – with whole industries privatised en masse over the last fifty years – the latter has proven equally effective in funnelling private profits while maintaining a veneer of public ownership and accountability. The consequences of this have been to make workers poorer and degrade services, often in the name of ‘consumer choice’, while draining communities of local wealth and know-how.

A favoured pastime of establishment thinkers is to query the very existence of neoliberalism, despite the fact some of the world’s most illustrious historians and social scientists have written about it at length. A sufficient response to their line of questioning is simple enough, however, to just utter the name of the former construction giant. How else can you explain the rationale behind a company funded by government contracts that, when it collapses, punishes workers and rewards the casino economy of financial speculation?

Privatisation is not about improving outcomes or services, but pursuing a political agenda which redistributes wealth from the majority of society to a small elite. This is not even the ‘free market’, but a bizarre hybrid allying the worst features of market capitalism with state socialism.

Just days after a general election where Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority, a fire broke which would ravage the building in a manner not seen in Britain for decades. The primary explanation for its rapid, shocking spread across the building – finished in 1974 and intentionally designed to minimise the possibility of such an event – was the installation of flammable cladding several years earlier, combined with poor safety standards and no functioning sprinklers – all issues highlighted by the residents’ Grenfell Action Group before the fire.

This is not a minor political point and shows the very real consequences of ‘self-regulation’. It was under the Thatcher government that fire safety standards in homes were deregulated, while enforceable requirements were abandoned for ‘guidelines’ which the building industry could choose to implement or ignore.

John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor, caused consternation among the same establishment which takes Rees-Mogg so seriously when he labelled Grenfell ‘social murder’ claiming that ‘political decisions were made which resulted in the deaths of these people’. Yet it was Clive Lewis who incurred the greatest wrath of all when he tweeted an image of the destroyed tower along with the words ‘burn neoliberalism, not people’. That drew gasps of anger from some quarters, but perhaps that was because those eager to defend the status quo grasped that much of the public would agree with the Labour MP.

Working with the Manchester-based Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), Preston Council approached the town’s anchor institutions in 2011 proposing to redirect as much of their spending as possible back into the local economy. Six agreed to participate. This cooperative effort between civic and public institutions meant that locally focused contracts covered everything from school lunches to large-scale construction projects. All of this meant that while local anchor institutions spent £38 million in Preston in 2013, and £292 million in Lancashire, by 2017 those figures had increased to £111 million and £486 million respectively. While that alone was impressive, even it fails to illustrate the extent of change that locally focused procurement achieved, with a multiplier effect taking off in the city as pounds continually recirculated throughout the local economy. That meant that while real wages for workers in Central Lancashire fell after 2008, much as they did across Britain, in Preston – despite austerity – they actually went up.

Replicating the Preston Model is the first step in building an economic alternative that breaks with neoliberalism without needing national state power. Despite being delivered in local contexts, the consequences of that would be significant. In the UK, for instance, the NHS alone employs an astonishing 1.4 million people. Between that and the country’s schools, colleges, universities and other public institutions, it is clear there is sufficient scale to radically remake the British economy from the bottom up. All in a country which, by international standards, is heavily slanted towards its national capital. The ambition of scaling the ‘Preston Model’ goes beyond simple damage limitation or mitigating the worst excesses of austerity. Far from lifeboat socialism, it would be the first step by which regional and national economies are revived. Street by street, town by town, city by city. How that is achieved is through municipal protectionism, where local, worker-owned business would be actively favoured over multinationals and industry giants.

Much of this won’t be possible without access to credit, with difficulty in accessing finance widely accepted as the single biggest hurdle for cooperatives and worker-owned businesses.

While Britain’s unions rightly resist austerity at the national level, they have around £200 billion of their members’ money invested in pensions. By putting this in local development banks, they could not only create more jobs but also ensure better returns for their members.

The positive benefits of growing the cooperative and worker-owned economy are well documented, from helping deal with low productivity to under-investment in small and medium-sized enterprises – not to mention reducing economic and regional inequality.

As exciting as it is, municipal protectionism and widespread adoption of the ‘Preston Model’ is not enough in isolation. It may prove the handbrake helping reverse privatisation while providing fertile ground to expand worker-owned business, but it barely scratches the surface when it comes to placing the potential of the Third Disruption in the hands of the people. Which is why Universal Basic Services (UBS) must be offered alongside it.

This is most apparent in a 2016 report titled ‘Social Prosperity for the Future’, published by the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. While the report did not explicitly establish its proposals within the context of the Third Disruption, it did situate them within a set of challenges comparable to those of the five crises, identifying six public goods – besides healthcare – which should be reconstituted to more closely resemble the NHS and Britain’s healthcare model. These are education, democracy and legal services, shelter, food, transport and information.

Importantly, UBS should be presented as an expanded set of rights, an upgrade on the constitutions that emerged alongside the Second Disruption in places such as Corsica, the United States, France and Haiti. Legal and political rights will remain of critical importance, but it will be increasingly acknowledged that these mean little without access to economic and social resources. Finally, we will have realised that liberal ends of personal fulfilment and self-authorship mean little without socialist means. The technology of the Third Disruption, combined with the politics of FALC, bring them finally within reach.

The demand, therefore, is as audacious as it is simple. The Global North must reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by an annual rate of 8 per cent each year for the decade following 2020. Then, starting in 2030, the Global South will embark on the same journey at precisely the same rate.

Take Saudi Arabia. While it is an affluent country as a result of its oil wealth, as with other countries across the Middle East, much of Africa and south Asia, it has huge solar potential. While it might be unsurprising that the Kingdom is increasingly involved in solar technology, the scale of a deal it negotiated in early 2018 – to build 200 terawatts of solar capacity across the country by 2030 – came as a shock. For context, that is four times the peak use for the whole of the United Kingdom, a country with a population more than twice its size. While Saudi Arabia has the funds to build such historically unprecedented infrastructure – when completed it will be the greatest solar development in history – this is precisely the scale and ambition that is needed to move the world beyond fossil fuels by 2040.

For those eager to proclaim the radical, disruptive potential of UBI, this severing of payment from work presents a challenge to capitalism itself, undermining its vital disciplinary function over workers who have to sell their labour in order to live. At a minimum, its advocates claim, this would serve to strengthen labour in relation to capital – much as trade unions did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – offering an immediate social democratic solution within the context of automation and technological unemployment. This may all prove to be the case. The truth is we don’t really know because UBI has never before been tested at sufficient scale before.

Furthermore, preferring UBS to UBI makes a great deal of sense within the context of the Third Disruption and the turn to extreme supply. As the price for everything shifts ever closer to zero, this will imperil production for exchange and profit, meaning the price mechanism is an increasingly inefficient way of allocating resources. What is more UBS begins the work of communism in the present, articulating resources necessary to a decent life – from housing to healthcare – as human rights rather than potential sources of profit. Necessitous people are not free people, and the UBS decisively ends such necessity.

Beyond highlighting the fact that the decisions of central banks are themselves deeply political, the goal for those pursuing FALC should be to openly champion political banking. Rather than joining the cries of ‘end the Fed’, a phrase heard with increasing regularity on the libertarian right, the response should be the opposite: to demand that the intentional, conscious planning at the heart of modern capitalism be repurposed to socially useful ends rather than socially destructive ones.

In terms of how central banks might keep a lid on property prices – presently a major source of value and profit in financialised economies – a paper released by the IPPR think tank in July 2018 is instructive. It argues that the necessary measures are relatively straightforward, with the Bank’s Financial Policy Committee best placed to set a target for house price inflation – similar to how the Monetary Policy Committee is presently tasked with consumer price inflation. Under such a target the Bank of England would aim to keep nominal house price inflation at zero while the UBS of housing was guaranteed through a programme of mass home building by central and local government.

But it is also clear that additional protocols will be needed in the management of capital flows. A financial transactions tax on currency trading would be an obvious means of capital control. This tax would be levied at two variable rates: the lower one, which could be as little as 0.005 per cent would be imposed on day-to-day transactions in order to curb volatility, while a higher one would be deployed in the case of speculative attacks or large capital outflows – a probability as ever more countries turn their back on neoliberalism.

Marx to Market offered an extended revision of an argument offered by Brus in 1961 in The General Problems of the Functioning of the Socialist Economy. There, heavily influenced by the thinking of Kalecki, he argued that both democracy and market mechanisms were necessary in the transition to socialism. This was expanded further in 1989 with Brus and Łaski claiming that under market socialism, publicly owned firms would have to be autonomous – much as they are in market capitalist systems – and that this would necessitate a socialised capital market. In the countries of actually existing socialism, even in 1989, this was as heretical as it had been in the early 1960s, with such thinking at odds with the top–down, nationally controlled industries that came to dominate the economic landscape not only of the USSR but other countries such as Cuba and North Korea.

Peter Drucker may have been the leading theorist of information in the modern economy, but he did so as a management theorist rather than economist or historian. It was this obsession with management which inspired his most memorable quote ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ – a favourite dictum of executives for decades and now the calling card of data-driven performance.

This was most famously expressed by the economist Robert Solow when he claimed in 1987 that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere but the productivity statistics.’ That conclusion was a response to the ‘productivity paradox’ which so troubled economists at the time – namely, how investment in information technology over the 1980s had a seemingly negligible impact on productivity measures, which actually slowed over the decade. But what if, rather than digital technologies failing to increase productivity, the changes they wrought were so significant as to require a new way of measuring success altogether? What if we are only at the beginning of an economic shift so profound that, as the Third Disruption continues to unfold, GDP will prove increasingly incapable of capturing all the value being created?

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.

Universal basic services will be fundamental in the transition to FALC and will be progressively easier to provide. But the measure of success can’t be the volume of transactions through the price system – to do so would be using the definition of progress that belongs to a world already passing away.

Melvin Kranzberg put it best in his ‘Six Laws of Technology’ when he outlined the first of those laws: ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ In other words, how technology is created and used, and to whose advantage, depends on the political, ethical and social contexts from which it emerges. To paraphrase Marx, technology makes history – but not under conditions of its own making.

Perhaps that’s what Kranzberg meant with his sixth law, ‘All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.’ Technology may not determine history, but it can disrupt and shape it like nothing else.

In short, technology made what was impossible in Wycliffe’s time seemingly inevitable in Luther’s.

Isaac Deutscher once wrote ‘socialism is not evolution’s last and perfect product or the end of history, but in a sense only the beginning’. This is how FALC is perhaps best conceived. It is a map by which we escape the labyrinth of scarcity and a society built on jobs; the platform from which we can begin to answer the most difficult question of all, of what it means, as Keynes once put it, to live ‘wisely and agreeably and well’.

Of course, any effective map must instruct its user about immediate next steps, the clarity of which must be as apparent as the intended destination. It is for this reason that FALC demurs from idealism or an overly optimistic view of human nature, offering immediate action instead. 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.