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Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani – a manifesto for the future

ffsear said:
Aron Bastani is a weapons grade narcissist. He's a capitalist, his currency is likes, retweets, shares and views... All adds up to one thing.... £££
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Winding it back for a second, that in itself isn’t a reflection on his ideas.

It’s interesting that there are left-wing pro-technology ideas out there that are not transparently a front for right-wing libertarianism.
 
NOVARA MEDIA LIMITED - Filing history (free information from Companies House)

I had a good old read at the OP's link, then pissed myself with wonder that anyone could think that will ever work.
Apart from the gentleman who penned that work being a failed capitalist playing at being a communist, his work is total and utter bollocks.
The sound of a communist utopia with poverty a thing of the past and work something only machines do is frankly lovely, but also hopelessly impractical for a set of basic reasons:
  • With no financial incentive to do anything, who is going to bother getting their arse out of bed?
  • There's always someone who will see an angle, a way to get something other people don't have, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop that because that's human nature
  • Nobody would have anything to do all day so they've sit in from of their free computers, get on to forums while getting fat, then do a keyboard warrior gig about how great capitalism is and how the world should try a new, updated version of it where everyone is a property owner, owns shares in companies, and has a true stake in society.
  • Nobody would bother looking after anything because everything is free so you just pop off and get another
  • Can machines look after the elderly and infirm, and keep them company, or would we still need doctors. nurses, and care staff? If we do, why would anyone want to do those jobs when they get nothing for their efforts?
This is just communism of old, but with a bit of added sci-fi.
 
I’m fairly sure the future is run by massive corporates/companies who are omnipotent and use androids and naughty humans to fight their wars to exploit the materials/minerals on other planets

Anyways, i’ve Kindled the book so I can read make my own judgement. Maybe the final nail in his coffin
 
These are not even particulary sharp critiques. FALC isn't shit because it's impractical, FALC is shit because it's techno-utopian. The arrow of progress in big tech (the kind pushing for the future, e.g. SpaceX, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) has been so dominantly towards ever greater concentrations of money and power in fewer hands, it makes other industries which took 100s of years to fully crush the idea of collective ownership and collective bargaining look like dinosaurs.
 
I had a brief skim read of it, but must've skimmed hard as I missed all the asteroid mining lol.
My impression was it's not really a manifesto, it's a beginner's guide to a material view of history and the possibilities of a techno utopia, and it seemed okay on that score in terms of floating the possibility.

Sounds as if there's a lot wrong in the detail that fills the book out... That critical review posted up thread didn't seem vindictive.

I think a really good short contribution to this subject is Four Futures
Verso
... Which recognises that automated communism is an option, but places it as one of four outcomes within a matrix of political power. That power matrix is what should be at the front of our minds, not how are we going to pull asteroids into our orbit

Four Futures summarised by the author here
Four Futures

images
 
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Not a fan of Bastani, but if his book reaches a (slightly) wider audience and gets people thinking, including thinking about critiques of the book, then that's a good thing.

OTOH if it just adds an extra few buzzwords into an unthinking and inward looking bunch of career stepping wannabe commentariat types and Twitter posers....well, then it's not such a good thing.

We'll see.
 
they're fake though. its tough to accept that a vibrant, confident, 'media competent' group are ultimately, and crucially, living in their own bubble and really have not shown anything interesting or achieved anything creditable.

I can't even parse what they are saying verbally (loads on you tube) or in the myriad poorly written articles. Why bother?
 
ska invita said:
I had a brief skim read of it, but must've skimmed hard as I missed all the asteroid mining lol.
My impression was it's not really a manifesto, it's a beginner's guide to a material view of history and the possibilities of a techno utopia, and it seemed okay on that score in terms of floating the possibility.

Sounds as if there's a lot wrong in the detail that fills the book out... That critical review posted up thread didn't seem vindictive.

I think a really good short contribution to this subject is Four Futures
Verso
... Which recognises that automated communism is an option, but places it as one of four outcomes within a matrix of political power. That power matrix is what should be at the front of our minds, not how are we going to pull asteroids into our orbit

Four Futures summarised by the author here
Four Futures

images
Click to expand...

Yeah, I enjoyed that book too and thought it was an interesting and easy to read contribution to this kinda subject.
 
belboid said:
Haven’t got onto the political economy part (which I’m presuming covers ‘how do we get there’), but Gareth Dale rips the science apart in his the Ecologist review

Climate, communism and the Age of Affluence?
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Aaron Bastani’s overriding concern is climate breakdown. Anything over a 2°C rise “could be cataclysmic, creating a cascade of feedbacks” that would accelerate global heating and the sixth mass extinction. The glaciers that provide drinking water for billions are evaporating, nine-tenths of the largest fish in the oceans have disappeared, and soils are suffering from industrial farming and salination.

Although “humanity’s rise” was built on agriculture and on our “unique ability to reprogram the gifts of nature,” the planet’s natural limits are now being trampled with such violence that the prospect of human extinction begins to appear plausible. Our present course is worse than inaction. It is “rushing full speed to oblivion". We have a window of ten or twenty years.
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Where. Seems the author of that has never opened an IPCC or IEA report from the opening couple of hyperbolic paragraphs.
Its hard to figure out which parts are Bastani's and which Dale's but what is there is in large parts drivel.

Yes the 2C guardrail figure is important. But the risks going missing it slightly are not that great. And the economics of renewables are rapidly shifting while deployment hits new records every year.
Solar, onshore wind costs set to fall below new fossil fuel energy - report
Methane emissions would fall but CO2 emissions could even rise.
Click to expand...
:confused:

The fulcrum of the renewables revolution will be our four-wheeled friends. “Cars won’t just be data processors on wheels, they’ll be giant portable batteries.”
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What is controversial here? Is this an article from 1995?

Bicycles and public transport can cover most urban personal transport needs but EVs is are the hottest thing in the motor industry these days. An EV is the best selling luxury car in the US. (The polish comes of that a little as it excludes luxuary SUVs )
With the exponential ramping up of wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries, Bastani recognises that the supply of such minerals as nickel, zinc, copper, lithium, platinum and rare earth metals —will ”quickly become strained".
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We have been exponentially ramping up solar and wind for a couple of decades now. And where is there any threat to copper (for gods sakes what moron wrote this), zinc or nickel supplies.
Start with copper the worlds has reserves of 830 billion tonnes of reserves on about 19 billion tonnes of consumption
https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazo...on/s3fs-public/atoms/files/mcs-2019-coppe.pdf
The world has 1.9bllion tonnes of zinc in reserve on global consumption of about 13 million tonnes
https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazo...dium/production/atoms/files/mcs-2019-zinc.pdf


We are not facing extinction. Artificial meats are arriving, renewables are out competing fossil fuels in many applications, for better and worse automation is here and EVs are banging on the door pretty damn hard.
 
Communism (and extreme socialism) has never worked wherever and whenever it's been tried. Tagging on a bit of sci-fi won't help.
 
nardy said:
Communism (and extreme socialism) has never worked
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Universal suffrage democracy had never worked, until it was tried properly.
The highest growth rates the western democracies achieved was in the social democratic post war era. We have not begun to explore what could be achieve with more collaborative models of organisation when the people at the top are not Stalinist fuckwits.
We have a lot of history in front of us.
 
ferrelhadley said:
Universal suffrage democracy had never worked, until it was tried properly.
The highest growth rates the western democracies achieved was in the social democratic post war era. We have not begun to explore what could be achieve with more collaborative models of organisation when the people at the top are not Stalinist fuckwits.
We have a lot of history in front of us.
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Oh, the "communism's never been tried properly" argument. Or is it "we've never seen proper communism". :rolleyes:

Here's an idea. Even though we live in a capitalist society, start a communist society anyway. Start a co-operative. Start lots of co-operatives. I'm sure that when the rest of us see how superbly they work, the whole nation will be swamped with co-ops, all offering goods and services so superior to the capitalist variety that capitalism will soon be put out of business :thumbs:
 
nardy said:
Oh, the "communism's never been tried properly" argument. Or is it "we've never seen proper communism". :rolleyes:

Here's an idea. Even though we live in a capitalist society, start a communist society anyway. Start a co-operative. Start lots of co-operatives. I'm sure that when the rest of us see how superbly they work, the whole nation will be swamped with co-ops, all offering goods and services so superior to the capitalist variety that capitalism will soon be put out of business :thumbs:
Click to expand...

You don't know what communism is, do you?

A clue:

"co-ops, all offering goods and services so superior to the capitalist variety"

Is not it.
 
chilango said:
You don't know what communism is, do you?

A clue:

"co-ops, all offering goods and services so superior to the capitalist variety"

Is not it.
Click to expand...
Rearrange the following words to form a well-known phrase or sentence:
Cheek Tongue In
 
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