ESSAY: Fully Automated Luxury Agonism

Read this exclusive essay from the MAN'S WORLD Annual 2023. It's never been published anywhere else.

I had great fun writing this essay, which you won’t have read unless you’re already the proud owner of the 2023 MAN’S WORLD Annual. If you are, thank you. If you aren’t—why not?

Anyway, this essay is a direct response to a retarded book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which argues that, with the advent of AI and automation and with technologies like asteroid-mining in sight (or so we’re told), the time is finally ripe for real communism. You know, where nobody works or ever has to do anything they don’t want to do. If this were even possible—and I have my doubts—the new communists would soon run up against various inconvenient facts of human nature, not least of all man’s propensity to be bored stiff by abundance and leisure.

So what’s the answer to a “post-scarcity” world? Fully automated luxury agonism. If you want to know what that is, read on…

---

Some time in the late 22nd century, one of the great men of Mars decided to marry his daughter away. She was said to the best of the Martian women, who were famed for their beauty throughout the solar system. On the appointed date, in the shadow of Olympus Mons, in a great dining hall constructed especially for the purpose, 12,000 suitors were gathered. The best young men of all the great houses were there. It was the old man’s desire to put them to a series of tests—physical, mental, moral and artistic—to find the best eugenic match for his fair daughter. The tests would last exactly 687 days: the length in Earth days that it takes for Mars to complete one full orbit of our sun. And then, finally, the groom would be chosen.

During the feast to inaugurate the spectacular contest, the preferred candidate, a man of high birth and distinguished political career, disgraced himself by becoming drunk and dancing on his head on the enormous banqueting table…

*

Despite over a century and a half of catastrophic setbacks to the cause of national and global communism, we are still, even now, being told that the future belongs to the ideas and the heirs of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. All the failures of theory to translate into reality, all the blood and tears and suffering, the counter-revolutions and the collapse or disappearance of the Soviet Union and every communist regime except North Korea have done nothing, apparently, to dissuade the fanatics from believing that the final revolution of the working classes is not only good but also inevitable.

No, Marxism isn’t wrong, a botched theory that should be abandoned once and for all. Instead, we are told, Marxism was simply too far ahead of its time. Although Marx and Engels could see the future, they couldn’t quite see it clearly enough to predict when the dialectic would reach its final synthesis and catapult the world beyond capitalism and into communism.

Aaron Bastani, the hamburger-headed author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, likens Marx and Engels to John Wyclif, the English priest whose heresy foreshadowed the Reformation a hundred years later. What distinguished Wyclif the failed revolutionary from Martin Luther the successful one was technology, plain and simple. The two men basically shared the same views about the Church, its hierarchy and its theology (this is true), but Martin Luther had access to the moveable-type printing press and John Wyclif did not. This medieval equivalent of the internet’s information superhighway allowed for Martin Luther’s polemics to be spread widely and easily and prevented the authorities from suppressing them like Wyclif’s writings had been. And so the Reformation began in Germany in the sixteenth century and not in England in the late fourteenth.

Today, according to Bastani, we are approaching the eve of another “moveable-type” moment, when Marx and Engels’ ideas will finally come of age and acquire the technology that will, at last, make them feasible. Bastani calls this approaching watershed the “Third Disruption.” The First Disruption was the Agricultural Revolution, which took place in the Near East about 10,000 years ago and saw the emergence of the earliest agricultural states, which used fixed-field farming and the domestication of livestock to build urban settlements whose like the world had never seen before—civilisation as we know it was born. The Second Disruption, which began only a few centuries ago, was the Industrial Revolution, when the invention of steam-powered machines allowed us for the very first time to exceed the brute power of beasts of burden, transforming our productive capabilities and the way we live just as much as the invention of farming, if not more.

But it’s the coming Third Disruption that will prove the most transformational of all, because it will abolish those factors that motivated humans to strive towards previous Disruptions—scarcity and want—as well as the social structuring—the hierarchy of haves and have-nots—that was essential to make all previous forms of civilisation work, however imperfectly. Full automation, limitless renewable energy, endless natural resources derived from asteroid-mining, and new technologies like genetic editing and lab-grown food will release us from the duty to work to survive and the need for anybody to have more or less than anybody else. This situation of “extreme supply,” of inexhaustible information, resources and labour, will undermine the whole edifice of capitalism, destroying two of its central presuppositions: that scarcity is unavoidable, and that things will cease to be produced if the marginal cost of producing them falls to zero.

For a time, perhaps, the powers-that-be will resist the Disruption, creating situations of artificial scarcity to justify the continuation of the present regime, but ultimately any such attempts will prove as futile as present attempts to censor and control the internet. Under conditions of extreme supply, “fully automated luxury communism” is all but a foregone conclusion.

That may be so. If the promise of unlimited energy, labour power and production is realised, then it may indeed be untenable for the world to be run as it currently is or ever has been. But that doesn’t mean that a new dispensation where everybody gets exactly what they want and need, for free, as a basic human right, will work or satisfy everybody in the long run. Quite the contrary, in fact. The prophets of “fully automated luxury communism” are ignorant of the real lessons of Francis Fukuyama (and behind him, Nietzsche), although they claim to know and understand them well.

Contrary to the way it’s generally portrayed, Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis was not simply a triumphalist ode to the victory of liberal capitalism over the Soviet alternative. It was also a warning about the effects such a victory, and the unipolar world it ushered in, would have on our ability to flourish as human beings to our fullest capacity. The book Fukuyama’s essay became is called The End of History, but the second half of the title—and the Last Man—is usually forgotten.

The Last Man, a creature first identified by Nietzsche, emerges only at the so-called End of History, when the dialectic driving man’s historical progress comes to a stop. As Fukuyama explains,

“Nietzsche’s last man was, in essence, the victorious slave. He agreed fully with Hegel that Christianity was a slave ideology, and that democracy represented a secularized form of Christianity. The equality of all men before the law was a realization of the Christian ideal of the equality of all believers in the Kingdom of Heaven. But the Christian belief in the equality of all men before God was nothing more than a prejudice, a prejudice born out of the resentment of the weak against those who were stronger than they were…

“The liberal democratic state did not constitute a synthesis of the morality of the master and the morality of the slave, as Hegel had said. For Nietzsche, it represented the unconditional victory of the slave. The master’s freedom and satisfaction were nowhere preserved, for no one really ruled in a democratic society… For Nietzsche, democratic man was composed entirely of desire and reason, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. But he was completely lacking in any megalothymia [Greek for “the desire to be recognised as greater than other people”], content with his happiness and unable to feel any shame in himself for being unable to rise above those wants.”

Although Fukuyama saw the Last Man as a product of the triumph of liberal capitalism rather than Marxism, which at the time of writing appeared to have been confined to the dustbin of history, the Last Man would be just as at home, if not more so, in a society of “extreme supply.” There would be ample nourishment there for the Last Man’s unique spiritual disease. Because, at base, that is what the Last Man embodies: a rot of the soul which prevents man from developing his inborn desire to seek distinction through meaningful challenge, to cultivate what the ancient Greeks called thymos, which might best be translated as “spiritedness” or “warm-bloodedness.” In a world where everything is given to you, where your value as a human—ethical, economic and political—is the same as that of every other one of the billions of people who inhabit the earth with you, what place would there be for men who are not content simply to be part of the crowd?

For any man of passion, living in such a world would be stultifyingly boring. Pointless, even. One is reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ remark that he’d rather go to hell than heaven, because at least there would be interesting people to talk to in hell. As glib as Hitchens’ commentary on religion may have been, this remark strikes at the heart of the secularised, bastardised heaven-on-earths utopian socialists have been dreaming up for the last two centuries. The advent of extreme supply presents a dilemma, yes, but not the one idiots like Aaron Bastani think it does. With everything provided and nothing left to strive for, why go on living at all?

Why indeed.

So what, assuming we are about to end up in a world of “extreme supply,” would be the alternative to this smothering equality? What could invest life with meaning and purpose and make our existence worthwhile once again?

Agonism. Fully automated luxury agonism. Let me explain.