![]() ![]() My favorite is “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism,” a page with more than 83,000 likes, but you can also find “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Satanic Communism,” “Transhumanist Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism,” and more. Most of the pages spend little time talking about politics, instead sharing in-jokes blending disgust for capitalism with gestures toward the possibilities of wild futures. A quick search of Facebook for “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” turns up a clutch of pages, groups, and at least one self-declared “political party,” as well as a lot more memes. Its specter has haunted the millennial-Left Web ever since. ![]() The first time I can recall seeing the term full communism in semi-ironic form was in 2011, on a Google Doc that was being passed around during Occupy Wall Street it spread rapidly, additions proliferated, and then someone deleted the whole thing. The word communism returned, like so many things, as a meme. Not so Aaron Bastani, the cofounder of Novara Media, a platform for left-wing articles, podcasts, and radio and video programs, whose new book Fully Automated Luxury Communism attempts to take the word back to Marx’s post-work, post-scarcity future. And the regimes that called themselves “Communist” in the twentieth century put many of today’s socialists off the idea. Such a system, of course, has never been achieved. The state would fade into memory and work would cease to be work. The proletariat would seize control of the state and run it for themselves, to produce the conditions under which communism would be possible. To Marx, socialism wasn’t the end point-he considered it a transitional stage preceding communism. And when socialism no longer shocks, what’s next? The word, it seems, has lost its ability to shock. Fascism is back, it’s true, but so is socialism, in the pages of prestige magazines and even on nighttime TV news and in contests for president or prime minister. Yet fissures have appeared in capitalist realism’s facade, and old ideas have begun to creep into those cracks. For the past few decades we’ve lived under what the late cultural critic Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”-the feeling that it is impossible to imagine an alternative to the current system. Or, rather, as Marx once noted, it is continuing its natural tendency to concentrate wealth at the top and misery at the bottom. In New York, where I live, they are in the crumbling subway system, its stations jam-packed with frustrated commuters trying to get to work even as the city begs to give tax breaks to Amazon for the honor of hosting its new campus. They are in the ubiquitous homeless population sleeping in the door-nooks of closed stores or in tent cities. Yet even in those cities, the signs are everywhere. We know this deep in our bones even if we live in one of the few cities where life is bustling and busy and we can pretend that this situation can continue. ![]()
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