Fully automated gay space luxury communism
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Space pessimism is ascendant. While being served anti-communist propaganda in school, we binged at home on a show set in a post-scarcity socialist universe. That value conveyed a powerful message: that ethical advanced societies are not just wealthy, they are good. Lewis doesn’t even try to. But it’s not just a knee-jerk ideological fetish. Sophisticated alt-right tacticians rode to ascendancy on the ghostly anxieties emanating from extinct factories across the Rust Belt, cruelly stimulating and manipulating a masculinist fantasy of resurgent manufacturing power.
Cleverly but dubiously, the right-wing narrative has identified trade agreements and globalization as the instruments of working-class disempowerment.
When it comes to celestial exploration, our space epics reflect an ethos of capitalist pessimism. She has taught writing and literature at New York University and Fordham University. Fully Automated Luxury Communism offers a hopeful vision of a possible future, one that, with its blend of utopian energy and careful argumentation, is worth taking seriously.
Thomas Connolly is an Irish lecturer and SF scholar who has published work on H.G.
Wells and Arthur C. Clarke, and is currently compiling an edited collection of essays examining pulp SF magazines. Grief persuasively argues that contrary to our most deep-seated capitalist values, a viciously redistributive social system would actually make everybody—including rich people—happier and more fulfilled.
But there’s a shadier side to UBI as well.
That is what brings us here together: the pursuit of a good society, not just a rich society. The phrase lays bare the future we are being denied so that private enterprise, in partnership with imperial forces, can pillage the planet as it drives all species to extinction.
Part of this difference is technological: it is easier now to realistically depict space travel on film than it was a generation ago. On Star Trek, anyone who wishes to can float through the “womb of worlds” in great comfort, as Elwin Ransom does. But the longest journey begins beneath one’s feet, and Bastani gives a credible account of what the first steps might be.
For example, he suggests three pillars of social action—strong municipal protectionism, people’s banks, and universal basic services—as starting points for a shift away from market-based governmental forms.
But whereas the first two sections of the book are respectively concerned with outlining the three “disruptions,” and the various forms of post-scarcity technologies that are likely to emerge over the coming decades, it’s in the final section of the book that Bastani turns towards the potential means of actually achieving FALC.
Even more shocking: 10% of all national income takes the form of capital income flowing to the richest 1% of the economy. With something minimal to fall back on, the overworked and deeply miserable working masses might have a chance to take a breather once in a while, and begin to escape the sheer despair of late capitalism.
In previous decades, the idea of UBI would’ve been dismissed as commie nonsense.
You can’t really be a person. Instead of reaching out to the universe from a place of scientific inquiry, the wealthy look to flee a planet they have stripped of resources, leaving the rest of us to scrounge off our scorched, starving world.