Just finished the book - crossposted from the
reading challenge thread:
30/30 Aaron Bastani - Fully Luxury Automated Communism: A Manifesto
This was always going to be a bit of a hate-read for me but to his credit the author is slightly less annoying in book form than in his media incarnation. Most of the book describes technological developments which are probably going to shake things up in the course of the rest of my time on this shitpit of a planet. I found a lot of this section pretty tedious and it reminded me of the breathless puff pieces you would get in 1990s tech mags like Wired, Boing Boing and Mondo 2000. I don't really give a shit what Bastanti thinks about genetic engineering.
Where those magazines fell down was that their utopianism relied entirely on technology to make our lives better. Which it has in some ways but the fact remains that I now exchange most of my time in a windowless basement frantically answering emails, tinkering with Word documents and trying to understand spreadsheets for the money I need to pay for my mortgage and the Morrisons bill. Oh and for the latest iPhone.
So you'd hope Aaron would get to grips with this what the Communism being in the title and all. As many other reviewers have noted he doesn't do this. The optimism of the book is not tempered with any suggestion that these technological innovations might cause us some problems. For example the prospects for a workless dystopia enforced by robots and genetic engineering. Or even that the technology itself, as developed under the capitalist mode of production might have some horrific knock on effects in the same way that the industrial revolution lead directly to the climate crisis.
He also, weirdly, thinks that, during the twentieth century "Whether you were an employee or an industrialist, it was in your rational interest to protect the system" and "until now, communism was impossible". Which kind of shits on the workers' movement, but whatever. Now that it is possible, how do we get there? Again, as others have pointed out, it's through the ballot box, daddio. Because most people are too knackered by life to get into politics in a sustained way. Which is on the one hand a neat criticism of hyper activists like Extinction Rebellion, but on the other hand flies in the face of the fact that it is "kicking off everywhere" as Bastani's fellow techno-optimist Paul Mason has it. Clearly a lot of people in Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon etc do have time for this sort of thing. As do the campaigners out to save Latin Village in Seven Sisters just up the road from where I am typing this. (It's also strange that there is no futuristic techno-utopian vision of how political campaigning may change in here but perhaps that is another book).
So in summary - there is a huge change in how we live and work on the horizon. And there is an optimistic vision of how this will make our lives better. But it relies on political specialists in parliament, and technological specialists who are currently developing everything at breakneck speed under the capitalist mode of production. Here comes the new boss.
