Fully Automated Luxury Consumerism

Aaron Bastani has made a bit of a splash with his book Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It pretends to be brave new thinking, but really it just combines two old ideas. 

One idea is extreme technological optimism. He talks about innovations like cultured meat and mining asteroids as if there had never been technological progress before this era.  He apparently doesn't realize that technology has been progressing steadily since the beginning of the industrial revolution. He doesn't realize that some of his ideas are not practical in the foreseeable future, such as mining asteroids, which will not be possible until there is a virtually limitless source of cheap, clean energy. And he doesn't realize that, to keep the planet livable, we need to limit destructive technologies as well as to develop beneficial technologies. 

The other is the old Communist idea that capitalism can produce this wealth but we need Communism to make it available to most people.  He apparently doesn't realize that many European countries have vigorous capitalist economies and welfare states that use their wealth to benefit everyone.  He doesn't realize that world poverty has already declined dramatically, with 70% of the world's population living in extreme poverty at the beginning of the twentieth century and only 10% today, and that the majority of the world's population now is either affluent or "global middle class." He doesn't realize that Communist economies tend to be stagnant and not to produce the wealth that is needed to make life better. 

He doesn't realize that world poverty could end during this century, if we avoid ecological collapse - and the real challenge we fact is to save avoid collapse so technology can keep improving people's lives as it has in the past.

Far from being new, his attitude is something that I often encountered at the beginning of the 1970s, when people were still impressed by 1960s affluence and attracted by 1960s leftist politics. I have never known what to call this attitude, but Bastani has given me the name. 

The common attitude at that time can be called Fully Automated Luxury Consumerism. The capitalist economy would keep providing everyone with more and more consumer goods, as it had already provided almost everyone with big cars and big freeways to drive them on. The future would be hog heaven for those who love to consume.

A more extreme version of the same attitude can be called Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The government has an obligation to run the economy to create hog heaven for everyone. 

In the early 1970s, I was talking about building walkable neighborhoods, and I ran into people who called themselves Communists and said the government should build automobile-centered sprawl suburbs for everyone. I was talking about recycling, and I ran into one person who called herself a Communist and said that it is inconvenient to have to separate recyclables, and the government should set things up so we can just use them once and throw them away.  

I realized that one form of Communism was just an extreme form of consumerism.  Consumerists believe the technological economy should produce everything for us, and our role is just to passively consume. These Communists raised their dependency to the level of principle and said that being a passive consumer is a human right. 

I even remember one Communist orator on campus who was talking about earthquake proofing and took the standard of living so much for granted that he said, "Earthquake-proof freeways are a human right."

This attitude made some sense in scarcity economies, where people go without necessities. It makes no sense when you reach the level of affluence that makes you claim that better freeways are a human right.

If we manage to avoid ecological collapse, the world will achieve widespread affluence during this century. At that point, we will have to focus on how to use our affluence to live good lives rather than on demanding that the fully automated economy produce more and more luxuries for us to consume.