Reds with Pastries

The Rise of Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Apr 12, 2022

The American far right sees communists and communism everywhere. I got chased out of a militia rally in Idaho in 2020 by a man screaming that I was a “communist journalist.” The Affordable Care Act was communist. The original New Deal was communist, and the Green New Deal is communist. Anyone who doubts that Donald Trump won the election is a communist. Health care is socialism (they use these words interchangeably, so I will too). Sex ed for teenagers is communist. Black Lives Matter is a “Marixist” terrorist group, according to…well, let’s not quote or name the idiot spokesmen for a movement based on collective delusion.

When they aren’t claiming that everyone who opposes them is a pedophile, American conservatives claim that … everyone who opposes them is a communist. You’d almost think there was a pattern of desperately reaching for some boogeyman. I guess it used to be Satan and witches; now it’s devilish Democrats and uppity women.

It all seemed surreal to me. Really? You think teaching people about the legacy of slavery is Communist? There ain’t no communists no more, buddy!

Then I moved to Lisbon.

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Custard, coconut cream, chocolate. In a democracy you have choices.

Portugal is full or Reds. The actual, communist-party, old-school kind, the people that used to scare us in the Cold War and still today make these right-wing American politicians wet their beds at night.

It’s a little startling when you see bright red billboards strewn across prosperous neighborhoods of Lisbon, with a hammer and sickle at the center and the letters PCP, or Partido Communista Português.

The signs start to make more sense when you read the words below: WE ARE WITH YOU. WAGES. PENSIONS. HEALTH CARE. HOUSING.

In Portugal, the PCP is a mainstream party. It has some noxious elements—their delegates were among those recently voting to oppose EU help to Ukraine, because leaders in the group still retain a fidelity to Moscow. That’s stupid but not too surprising. In the 1950s, as Portugal suffered under the Salazar dictatorship, Moscow paid for them to operate a radio station in Prague that beamed Cold War propaganda into Portugal.

But sometimes even Commies get stuff right. Back then the PCP became the main underground force opposed to the dictatorship, running newspapers that called for human rights and democracy. Their imprisoned militants were famous for never cracking under torture, and organized numerous daring and picturesque jail breaks (I like the one where they smashed an armored Ford right into the prison courtyard at Peniche and, in the middle of a gunfight, prisoners piled into the car and drove back out). A Portuguese photographer I once worked with told me his parents had been tortured by the secret police; everyone in his family was still a hard-left socialist today.

Last week I wrote about the 1974 Carnation Revolution that finally overthrew the dictatorship; it was effectively a communist-led revolution, and the only example I know of a democratic communist revolution that chose elections and alliances over retribution and sezing power.

Now they pick up the trash. “Communists” in Portugal are the party of municipal services, of fair wages and affordable housing. The Communists fight corporate corruption and support pensions that aren’t controlled by Wall Street. They vote to fund the national health care system. They eat pastries just like everyone else here (I’ve got five in the room with me right now).

Health care. Pensions. Housing. Picking up the garbage on time. I’d vote for that. I usually do.

Pastry Socialists. Utility Communists. It’s like the Brooklyn Food Co-op is running Lisbon, except more efficient and professional. That old discipline from the days of torture is paying dividends.

The panicked preachers of American conservative politics may hate it, but in the future we could need more communism. Not the old Stalinist-Maoist type, nor today’s left-authoritarians who claim that Moscow is somehow anything other than a kleptocratic autarky built on lies. What we might need is more properly called democratic socialism on a European model.

What we might need has been called “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” or FALC. The name is deliberately quixotic and the idea is deliberately utopian. Simply put, in an age of mass production and mass prosperity, where robots build unprecedented levels of material goods, the solutions for creating stuff (see: Capitalism) and distributing it (see: Communism) may merge.

One of the biggest challenges we face in America, and most of the developed world, is Artificial Intelligence. It seems likely to displace huge numbers of people from work that machine intelligence can do. This has already happened to many working class people—farming is now done with satellite-controlled, autonomous tractors, not men with hoes (Just 2% of Americans are farmers). Automotive plants now rely on humans mostly to restock the robots.

But A.I. is coming for the clean people too. Ya’know, the…the…white collar jobs. A startup in India has already created robotic journalists who cover local sports and city council meetings around the US. Entire sectors of the service economy will be taken over by algorithmic production, from “robo-investing” to retail. The Guardian reported recently that “the rate of technological progress and labour productivity is rising, but wages are stagnating and factories are shedding jobs. Recent research indicates that 35% of jobs in the UK are “at risk” of being automated.”

The famous Michigan anthropologist Ronald Inglehart, who I quote often here about authoritarian systems and the values changes in the world, mentioned in passing during one of our interviews that A.I. would profoundly challenge America in the immediate future.

When people lose work they lose more than income; they lose purpose, identity, social systems, and the story of who they are. When societies lose work, they lose more than GNP; they lose trust and confidence and replace it with fear and division. The idea that capitalism would pay for everything was always premised on having everyone in the work force. What happens when there are fewer and fewer jobs? Insecurity makes people selfish, conformist, and violent.

I asked Inglehart how we should respond. My notes read: income replacement, retraining and job support, increased social spending.

In so many words, Universal Basic Income. In so many words, Europe. Sweden, for example, has been successful in keeping full employment while building one of the most automated economies in the world by retraining people to do new, better jobs.

In so many words, Portugal, where subsidies support employment, unemployment, housing, health care, public transport, schools (the university where I teach is almost free), culture, agriculture, and drug treatment programs. Europe’s social model is about smoothing the hardships of life. In the future, unprecedented levels of material achievement and diminished shortages of food and shelter might free many people to be artists, poets, and athletes, rather than coal miners, widget welders, and salesmen.

The good news: we will still get to eat pastries.

The bad news: America is uniquely unsuited to this transition, mostly because of a panicked, unrealistic, paranoid political culture that pretends cowboys with guns are the moral basis of society. There are changes afoot—Andrew Yang has championed universal basic income, and more and more young Americans favor some version of European democratic socialism.

But the cult of the entrepreneur, the thoughtless populism of billionaires and their bootlickers, is not going to accept Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The Commie-haters are not going to accept “evil pedophile socialists” and their crazed demands for things like better health care, free college, job retraining, and healthy pension plans. Great God Jesus forbid such a nightmare!

I’m gonna go eat a pastel de nata now.

The Authoritarians

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