Fully Automated Luxury Communism(versobooks.com)
versobooks.com
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2757-fully-automated-luxury-communism
27 comments
lim bookPrice(x) -> 0. Mind blown.
Haven't read the book, but here are two (notably harsh) reviews:
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17006_fully-automat...
- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors
- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.
- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera
https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism-and-a...
- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.
- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily
I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17006_fully-automat...
- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors
- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.
- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera
https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism-and-a...
- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.
- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily
I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.
>Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input
e.g. by selling mineral rights or valuable beachfront land.
e.g. by selling mineral rights or valuable beachfront land.
But where does the money for whom that is purchasing those things come from? Eventually, all profit can be traced to human labour input.
I’ve been enjoying Karl Widerquist’s “Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No”, which notes that access to natural resources is an important input as well. That is, one form of freedom is a freedom to use a proportion of Earth’s natural resources to meet one’s own needs. While many may contract into a system to provide e.g. defense or luxuries, the lack of choice in the “social contract” as regards property rights can nonetheless be interpreted as a regrettable loss of a form of freedom.
In other words, while labor is required to sustain human life, different forms of labor should not be considered fungible — I am happy to labor to directly feed and shelter myself, but may be less accommodating to serving others in exchange for a form of these benefits.
In other words, while labor is required to sustain human life, different forms of labor should not be considered fungible — I am happy to labor to directly feed and shelter myself, but may be less accommodating to serving others in exchange for a form of these benefits.
All wealth (and hence profit) is derived either from human labor or nature.
Money is simply a unit of account and convenient medium of exchange. It has no intrinsic use.
Money is simply a unit of account and convenient medium of exchange. It has no intrinsic use.
Marx begins to deal with this in his theories of rent; a more accurate criticism of Bastiani would be that he believes one can have profit without surplus. It is obvious, and was so when Marx was writing, that not all profit is due to exploitation of labour.
[deleted]
But the exchange of labor has nothing to do with profit, since financialization. There have been many smart people for decades now, making this be so. It's very important today to come up with profit scenarios that don't depend on labor in any way.
'nothing to do with profit' is a pretty strong claim. I think Marxists (and others) would argue that the two are stochastically linked. Decreases in the value of a good (the amount of labour-time used to generate it) roughly tracks with a decrease in the price (and thus amount of profit that the producer gets for each item) over longer time frames. I think that's what the author was implicitly referring to but I may be wrong!
As for financialization and profit: I think contemporary labour-value theorists, and even Marx, talk about fincancialization as 'fictitious capital'. The 'value' of financial instruments comes from the claim on future labour-time, and is thus generally parasitic for a well-functioning economy. Cedric Durad is a recent example of this. I'm stepping into territory I know very little about though, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt / generously.
As for financialization and profit: I think contemporary labour-value theorists, and even Marx, talk about fincancialization as 'fictitious capital'. The 'value' of financial instruments comes from the claim on future labour-time, and is thus generally parasitic for a well-functioning economy. Cedric Durad is a recent example of this. I'm stepping into territory I know very little about though, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt / generously.
It's worth adding to this: even if the LTV would not hold in its "quantitative" form, which it is often only taken to be, even given the power of financialization in the last century there is reason to believe it would hold at least qualitatively. Several leading Marx value-theorists argue that the theory does not work (or could not work) on the level of the individual commodity, as illustrated by Marx, but only on an aliquot representative of the lot.
Next, theories of exploitation regarding labour are going strong; they don't feel challenged by the idea of the financialization of social labour. For example, there is the theory of unequal exchange (UE) exploitation in which one agent (the exploiter) among other factors contributes less labour than the exploited, but receives the same or greater amount of labour back (i.e in the form of goods and services). There are two principles at work by which analytical Marxists have analyzed exploitation: the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle and the Class-Exploitation Correspondence Principle. I'd recommend looking at the work of Roberto Veneziani and Naoki Yoshihara (both academic economists) on this matter.
Finally, there is some work arguing for the fact of exploitation or the status of the LTV in financial capitalism[0][1][2]. I would not say that financialization poses a serious problem to Marx's value theory, which is primarily a social theory of production - any society must reproduce itself through labour, which forms the material basis of survival of all within that society. There is disagreement as to how the LTV works regarding "non-freely reproducible" commodities, which in today's capitalism come in the form of goods protected by copyright and trademarks. The theory Marx proposed was never meant to deal with this, so I wouldn't say it's a defect in the theory, only that the theory lacks some explanatory power. But neoclassical theories of value also lack the ability to explain the price of such goods.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/153650421348770...
[1] https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~fmoseley/Working_Papers_PDF/money...
[2] https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=ma...
Next, theories of exploitation regarding labour are going strong; they don't feel challenged by the idea of the financialization of social labour. For example, there is the theory of unequal exchange (UE) exploitation in which one agent (the exploiter) among other factors contributes less labour than the exploited, but receives the same or greater amount of labour back (i.e in the form of goods and services). There are two principles at work by which analytical Marxists have analyzed exploitation: the Profit-Exploitation Correspondence Principle and the Class-Exploitation Correspondence Principle. I'd recommend looking at the work of Roberto Veneziani and Naoki Yoshihara (both academic economists) on this matter.
Finally, there is some work arguing for the fact of exploitation or the status of the LTV in financial capitalism[0][1][2]. I would not say that financialization poses a serious problem to Marx's value theory, which is primarily a social theory of production - any society must reproduce itself through labour, which forms the material basis of survival of all within that society. There is disagreement as to how the LTV works regarding "non-freely reproducible" commodities, which in today's capitalism come in the form of goods protected by copyright and trademarks. The theory Marx proposed was never meant to deal with this, so I wouldn't say it's a defect in the theory, only that the theory lacks some explanatory power. But neoclassical theories of value also lack the ability to explain the price of such goods.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/153650421348770...
[1] https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~fmoseley/Working_Papers_PDF/money...
[2] https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=ma...
Here's a more enjoyable review from The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/29/fully-automate...
By enjoyable I mean less po-faced.
By enjoyable I mean less po-faced.
These seem like rather insular concerns. "He takes some stuff from Marx but he's not quite Marxist enough, ergo he's wrong."
While there might be some puritanism in there, I think the implication is these theoretical errors lead to erroneous conclusions. I.e: Bastani is using certain conclusions from Marx, while changing certain premises, and not doing the work to then argue the conclusions still hold. I didn't read the piece closey enough (and my Marx isn't strong enough) to really go in-depth there though.
It’s a reasonably interesting topic and an important one to discuss - but I’d caution that Aaron Bastani is generally a bit of a controversial left- wing provocateur figure with a knack for mis-predicting events, and his book mostly has middling reviews.
None of that is to say you shouldn’t read it and consider it in the context of the future of automation, but expect a somewhat over-earnest political manifesto rather than a critical analysis.
None of that is to say you shouldn’t read it and consider it in the context of the future of automation, but expect a somewhat over-earnest political manifesto rather than a critical analysis.
He who controls the robots controls the world.
Unherd's review was a good read, the reviewer talking about how the book was wrong in an interesting way.
https://unherd.com/2019/06/are-you-ready-for-fully-automated...
this is just an ad?
>feed a world of 9 billion
How does the book suggest to maintain this population in a way that isn't immoral? Does this book's plan work with 90 billion people?
How does the book suggest to maintain this population in a way that isn't immoral? Does this book's plan work with 90 billion people?
If current population growth estimates are to be believed, the world population is projected to peak at around 12 billion people. The fertility rates in large parts of the world (North America, Europe, East Asia) are already below replacement level and others around the world are falling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
Yes, that is because the growth estimates assume that we live in a world where scarcity problems are not solved.
Is there a moral alternative to a 9, 10 or 12 billion population?
Actively reducing the population of the planet is tricky, if you don't want to wait for it to flatten / fall off naturally.
And stuff like Chinas one child policy is both hard to enforce and takes time to take effect. So you might still peak over your target population.
It's also questionable if such a policy is moral in itself.
Actively reducing the population of the planet is tricky, if you don't want to wait for it to flatten / fall off naturally.
And stuff like Chinas one child policy is both hard to enforce and takes time to take effect. So you might still peak over your target population.
It's also questionable if such a policy is moral in itself.
I believe we call it "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism", comrade.
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/fully-automat...
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/fully-automat...
Well, Iain M. Banks' SF - the 'Culture' with orbitals and AIs as adult supervision, sort of - had at least three of the adjectives checked, and seemed past concern about the fourth ...
http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=74D760E6B634982B0C0E4DAD...