No amount of ‘full automation’, green investment, or ethical consumerism will fix the fundamental issues of supermarket supply chains, agribusiness, dependency on low-paid seasonal labour, and cash cropping. These, and the water table and soil depletion that goes alongside them are the result of production of food as a commodity rather than to feed people. Good luck harvesting soil nutrients and clean water from space.
Novara are not alone in advancing that nationalisation of energy companies can avert climate change. Jacobin magazine recently published “A Plan to Nationalize Fossil-Fuel Companies” by Peter Gowan using Norway’s Statoil as an example. The author implies that Statoil was nationalised by the Norwegian State, and that this is why it is successfully starting to move away from fossil fuels. In reality, Statoil was privatised in 2001 with the Norwegian government retaining a majority of shares, and boasts on its website that it has increased oil and gas production sixfold since 2000. So a part-privatised company that’s sextupled fossil fuel production in the past 18 years is being used as an example of nationalisation to reduce fossil fuel production. The world turned upside down, or just the camera? Like many energy companies, Statoil is trying to rebrand as a 'broad energy company’ via a rename to Equinor, involving diversification into renewables, but there is no indication that it will reduce oil and gas production as a result, merely talking about more 'climate efficient’ oil and gas production, as it also expands into new areas.
…Keynesian theory was a kind of bourgeois adaption of Marx’s critique of political economy,4 in that it acknowledged that capitalism’s crisis could be found in the declining rate of capital accumulation. For Keynes, this was because capitalists hoard profit for irrational reasons (“animal spirits”5), instead of investing it productively. Hence, to counteract a crisis, the state must intervene in the sphere of production through deficit financing to stimulate private spending and consequently private production. As Marx observed however, the problem of an ‘overproduction’ of capital isn’t because there’s too much capital, rather, there is too little relative to the scale of accumulation. In other words, because “the development of the social productiveness of labour, involves an increasingly large mass of total capital to set in motion the same quantity of labour-power and squeeze out the same quantity of surplus-labour”, when the absolute mass of profit is no longer sufficient to make continued accumulation possible (i.e. when the rate of profit falls quicker than capital expands) capital appears as excess because it cannot be profitably employed – after all “it must be so, on the basis of capitalist production” that “the absolute mass of the profit […] can, consequently, increase, and increase progressively, in spite of the progressive drop in the rate of profit”.6 For Keynes, a former British civil servant who once remarked that “the class war will find [him] on the side of the educated bourgeoisie”7, the purpose of state intervention is to halt capitalism’s decline, meanwhile securing some level of social stability.
Although production generated by the state enlarges the capacity of overall production, because it cannot increase the profitability of private capital, there is a general agreement that the state sector of the economy be as small as possible. In fact, production generated by the state is usually found in industries where the produce is not consumable (e.g. defence), and as a general rule, state production will fall outside the market for it is reluctant to further frustrate private capital in an already diminishing market system (in 2009 Sweden, the benchmark for contemporary socialism, SAAB on the brink of bankruptcy, Minister Olofsson announced: “The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories”8). However, because a growing national deficit cannot be repaid out of state production (after all, the state cannot tax itself), the state must make further inroads into the economy and hence further the decay of the private capital system. Incidentally, this is the source of bourgeois hostility to Keynesianism and its pitiful identification as socialism. However, much like capitalism reproduces a working population rather than an individual worker, capitalism reproduces a class structure rather than the social standing of an individual capitalist.
Adopting the disingenuous buzzword ‘post-capitalist’ indicates that Bastani sits on the more radical end of the Keynesian spectrum. We understand post-capitalism to mean that the acceleration of non-profitable production can transform capitalism into a system that is not capitalism altogether. However, it is only through taking seriously the general laws of capitalist development that the transient character of a distinct period of capitalism can reveal itself. Post-capitalism, or more accurately radical Keynesianism appears not as the transition stage toward ‘fully automated luxury communism’ but rather towards a state-capitalist economy. In which case, post-capitalism is nothing more than a theory of social reform and hence at complete odds with the goals of communism.
So, it is not at all a surprise that Bastani attributes all the ills of the world upon “contemporary globalisation” and an ideologically driven financialisation of the global economy, or evoking the late Mark Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’. Despite ‘Capitalist Realism’ being an altogether confused polemic sprinkled with some interesting thoughts, Fisher couldn’t have been clearer when he said, “capitalist realism need not be neoliberal” and “[i]n order to save itself, capitalism could revert to a model of social democracy”.9 In fact, the financialisation of the economy is proof of the overproduction of capital. For the only way “idle capital” can avert the collapse of profitability is “through the export of capital or through employment on the stock exchange”10.
…A lot is made of the much-promised technological revolution and the abundance it can supply, but we have been here before. In 1964, an open letter titled “The Triple Revolution”17 signed by various prominent socialists was sent to the then President of the U.S., Lyndon Johnson. The letter offers many of the same concepts and dilemmas mentioned in Bastani’s formulation of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”: basic income; post-scarcity/abundance; converting military infrastructure into civilian infrastructure etc. Decades later the predicted ‘triple revolution’ was described as “illusory” based on a dismal Malthusian analysis. The ‘revolution’, however, was illusory all the same, for the very simple reason that abundance is impossible in a class society. Of course, the promise of communism is found upon the potential for abundance, but it is contingent upon the complete destruction of class relations. Bastani much like his intellectual predecessors are both guilty of putting the cart before the horse.
In truth, since Bastani caricaturises grassroots movements, it is difficult to determine who exactly he is trying to sell the dream of Fully Automated Luxury Communism to, jumping from primitivists, to ethical liberals, to lifestylists only to find himself on a hiding to nothing. Equally striking is the absence of any mention of class struggle, or the revolutionary implication that struggles assume within a period of crisis, whether or not the working-class themselves envisage their struggles as the pathway to revolution. To be clear, the object of Marx’s analysis is not crisis per se but the capitalist process of reproduction in its totality. The tendency of machines producing “a relative surplus population, or the setting free of labourers”18 is a process that appears throughout the history of capitalism. It is therefore difficult to comprehend why merely bestowing this process with the exotic expression ‘automation’ all of a sudden posits issues that we haven’t seen before. Perhaps this provides ample opportunity to delay the certain proletarianisation of the middle-classes but for the working-class no historically unique problem appears.
Marx identified the tendency for fixed capital to increase relative to labour increasing productivity and creating surplus populations in the 19th century, not as a progressive thing to be continued for two centuries, but as a driver towards revolution, with the Haitian, French and English revolutions, then the Paris Commune all showing the potential for the working class to transform society.
Capitalism for Marx was a pre-condition for communism, something that by its own logic was heading towards crisis and revolution not merely something to be steered in the favour of the working class but to be overthrown. Communism means the abolition of the commodity form, direct production to satisfy human need, and thus the abolition of all authority, including states (regarded by Bastani as “the greatest instruments of collective action yet created by humans”) except the will of the producers themselves - not merely a reconfiguration of social safety nets which have never been there for most of the world’s population. These remain urgent tasks a century and a half after the machine fragment was written, as the continual carnage of colonialism, international warfare, and - increasingly over the past fifty years - climate change, wreaks havoc on the international working class.
If we still regard the left as a relevant movement, it is to provide meaning to the class struggle within the context of capital production, not merely to realise some special program of our own. While Jacobin and Novara are fantasising about how they’ll manage the capitalist state after the next election, workers internationally are taking on both the state and capital in an uptick of class struggle not seen for over a decade. Teachers in West Virginia gained a 5% pay increase for all public employees after a weeks long wildcat strike. Teachers in both Kentucky and Oklahoma are on wildcat this week over schools funding without full support from their unions. All of these struggles look set to win major concessions against Republican state administrations, a Republican senate and a Republican president. In the UK there has been unprecedented strike action at universities by lecturers and support staff, bringing rank and file workers into direct conflict with the “the incumbent organisations of democratic representation – unions” as they protested at their own union HQ over an early attempt at capitulation. While these are defensive struggles over wages and conditions, the struggle against new oil pipelines and fracking in the US and UK continues with major protests such as in Dakota with #NODAPL. Social democracy is a politics of retreat and demobilisation of these struggles, no matter how much radical frisson it’s able to conjure up.
The Poverty of Luxury Communism
