by nope » Fri Sep 30, 2016 1:19 pm
It's ok. The broad message that fully-automated luxury communism (henceforth FALC) isn't going to magically solve everything is good, but I didn't think the specific issues it raised were particularly compelling.
1. Points out that many (most) "luxury" items are Veblen goods, thus scarcity is the whole point. Therefore we can't just give Cartier watches to everyone. This is crashingly obvious. I think to interpret the stated goals of FALC so literally is missing the point. It seems apparent to me that nobody (not even Aaron Bastani) is actually all that fired up for equally distributing ostentatious fountain pens. I've always assumed that all the champs and designer clothes angle is just lolzy memeing and the actual point is that the standard of living that could be given to everyone for "free" thanks to automation is surprisingly high, so it's primarily functioning as a rejection of the "exaltation of frugal living" that often accompanies communist utopian ideas. The intro specifically mentions this, so I don't know why it goes back to such a literal reading of "luxury" to make this point.
2. Claims that even if all work is automated we can still run out of resources. Also fairly obvious. The example given (electricity required for data centres) is terrible though, such energy use is tiny (a couple of %) and could trivially be achieved with renewable sources right now if anyone cared. In terms of raw materials it's almost impossible to actually "run out" of anything, it just gets less and less economical to extract from the earth. Presumably if everything is automated there's basically nothing else to do with what ever post-money concept we'll be dealing with so the economics of well, everything, but mining in particular becomes moot. Again I don't think the point of FALC is actually that we can all live like the (current, ecologically disastrous) rich and famous. If you are taking full automation as a starting point then abundant clean energy doesn't seem like a difficult ask.
3. Points out that actually automating everything is never going to happen, especially so-called "reproductive labour" (this term is really confusing btw, I don't get why it is the standard term for this stuff. Surely "domestic labour" would be better?). This is actually a good point and one that is massively glossed over in almost all UBI chat. Spending more time with your kids / aging parents is usually the top line example of what we'll be doing with all this additional spare time when we don't need to work to survive. Can totally see some really repressive social norms coming up round this if UBI (or similar) ever happens. Will they be predominately directed at women? Yeah almost certainly. Capitalism didn't come up with misogyny, and is not in fact the root cause of everything bad. Sorry, tedious Marxists. Smashing the heteronormative nuclear family seems like a great plan but I'm not sure FALC really needs to be addressing it.