Upstream - Fully Automated Luxury Communism with Zarinah Agnew and Eric Wycoff Rogers

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Fully automated luxury communism. Fully automated luxury gay space communism..? Fully automated, queer, neo-decadent, meta-modern communism? Okay so, what does all of that mean? You’ve probably heard the phrase fully automated luxury communism before, whether in a podcast like this, or in a meme maybe, but what exactly does it mean? Maybe the phrase conjures up images of a utopian, moneyless society where all of our jobs have been taken by robots and we just frolic and play all day? Perhaps it evokes ideas of a Starship Enterprise tech utopian world marked by adventures and quests. Maybe it's something in between. In this conversation we’ve brought on two guests to explain what fully automated luxury communism is, what some different iterations of it might look like, why it's an important Northstar for the left to reach for, and how we might get there. Zarinah Agnew is a trained neuroscientist formerly at University College London, and then UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist, and part of the Beyond Return organization. And Eric Wycoff Rogers is a scholar, organizer, designer, artist, and currently PhD student in American history at Cambridge and also part of the Beyond Return organization. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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If you can, if you're in a place where you can afford to do so, and if it's important for you to keep this content free and sustainable, please consider going to upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to make a one-time or recurring monthly donation. Thank you. Don't wait to become rich to go and build a post-carsity economy for yourself. Go and start prefiguring it now. I think it's very important that people learn how to imagine futures that are worth living for. I read this quite the other day that said, think about what you'd die for and then go and live for it, which I think is

important. Going to read sci-fi, there's lots of sci-fi stories that sort of depict a post-guestive world. Create a vision for yourself that you feel invested in and have these conversations at your home with your friends and family. I think it's really important that we collectively learn to strive for something better. I think it's really important that we collectively learn to strive for something better. It's also really important that we learn to think critically about the stories that are fed to us, so it's very common to think about the right to full employment and the right to work and the right to own a house. But what if we fought for the right not to work, the right to not need to own a house? Because imagine

a world in which housing was so abundant that it would seem absurd to own a house. You don't feel like you need to own oxygen right now because oxygen is abundantly available to us and so we don't need to own it. And so really think about the stories that are sort of instilled in you and how they're shrinking the kinds of things that we're striving for. You are listening to upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. A podcast of bi-weekly conversations and quarterly documentaries that invites you to unlearn everything you've thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Rain. And I'm Dela Duncan. Fully automated luxury commons. Fully automated luxury gay space communism. Fully automated queer neo-decadeant, metamottern communism? Okay, you've probably heard the phrase fully automated luxury communism before, whether in a podcast like this or a meme maybe, but what exactly does it mean?

Maybe the phrase contrasts up images of a utopian, moneyless society where all of our jobs have been taken by robots and we just frolic around and play all day. Perhaps it evokes ideas of a starship enterprise tech utopian world marked by adventures and quests. Maybe it's something in between. Well, in this conversation, we've brought on two guests to explain what fully automated luxury communism is, what some different iterations of it might look like, why it's an important North Star for the left to reach for, and how we might get there.

Zarina Agno is a trained neuroscientist formally at University College London and UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist, and part of the Beyond Return Organization. An Eric Wyckoff Rogers is a scholar, organizer, designer, artist, and currently a PhD student in American history at Cambridge, and also part of the Beyond Return Organization. Here's Della with Zarina and Eric. So welcome, good to be with you. I'm wondering if we could just start with introductions. How might you introduce yourself for this conversation

around fully automated luxury communism? What feels important by way of introduction to you? Thank you so much for having us here. It's really exciting to be on upstream. My name is Zarina. I'm a neuroscientist by training and left my academic post a couple of years ago to dive into working on prefiguring and engineering new spaces and social systems as well as studying the governance and socioeconomics of collectives that occur in these spaces. And both Eric and I have been working on an organization called Beyond Returns, which began in the early phase of the pandemic. It's

an organization that aims to open up the collective imagination to more just political and economic futures. And we do this by exploring various research themes that explore various kinds of diverse futurisms such as Beyond Gender, Beyond Family, Beyond Ownership, Beyond Speciesism, and of course Beyond Capitalism, as well as the sort of modes and tactics that can get us there. Hey, it's great to be here. My name's Eric Leica-Frogerz. I'm just finishing a PhD in history at the University of Cambridge and my research broadly centers around the historical production of scarcity and the politics of desire. So I look a lot at commercial and military mobilization of heterosexual

design in particular in motivational campaigns in the early 20th century. And the advent of this thing, we call perosexuality, in other words, the creation of spaces and cultures that are simultaneously hypersexualized and sexually restrained to motivate people to do things. So, in addition to looking at this stuff, I also write and lecture on speculative, prefigurative and experimental alternatives. So, alternative poses living, experimental aesthetics, queer desire, and residential commons. Wonderful.

It's a very complex term that we're discussing today. I'm wondering if we can first start with some basic, how are we understanding the more simple forms before we look into an advanced form of one of them? Maybe starting with Eric, how about you differentiate capitalism, socialism, communism, and anarchism? Just the basics, just to help us then be able to explain fully automated luxury communism. What are some differentiations that you might introduce here?

Sure. I'll do my best. I'm not an economist, but I do feel like just having political discussions with people you do need to often define these very basic terms. So I'll do my best. I think capitalism describes an economic system where you have the private ownership of the means of production.

I'm not talking about personal property. I'm talking about what Marx called it private property, but basically factories, investment capital, stores, the goods in circulation, those things are privately owned, also often the physical and digital spaces of distribution as well, so stores, distribution networks and so forth. So that would be capitalism. Socialism, I understand that there's sort of two main schools without in this. One is that socialism is a transition from capitalism to communism. So some people would say it's the sort of,

yeah, this transition phase. Others would describe socialism as this sort of portion of non-capitalist sharing, whether that's public expenditure, taxation and public programs and so forth, that actually help mediate capitalism and keep it sort of reigned in, you can think of the welfare state

or something like this here. And then communism describes basically where you end up if you transition fully out of capitalism. So a communally-owned means of production, where the factories and so forth are owned by everyone, and ideally the benefits of that ownership are distributed equitably. I think those are the broad strokes I would offer there. I couldn't tell you what anarchism means from an economic system standpoint because anarchism refers fundamentally to people enjoying freedom, usually in reconciliation with each other's freedom, and that seems more like an ethics than an economic system. One thing I'd love to add is that I think these concepts are really muddled,

often by the way they're used in the media and also how sort of historical attempts to enact them have gone terribly wrong. And as a result, I think these terms are sort of laden with emotion for a lot of people. And I think in order to think about future possibilities, it's really important to be able to talk about these things in a sort of neutral sense. Yeah, thank you for those, those differentiations. And so what about this term, fully automated luxury communism? How might you introduce that to someone who's never heard of the term? Like what might you say by way of introduction? Yeah, I would say essentially it's a position that insists that with the advent of automation and robotization, in other words, machines doing

much of the work without human assistance or with as little human assistance as possible, our society should leave most work to robots to produce abundance that you can get away from a scarcity-oriented economy towards an abundance-oriented economy, and that we should equitably distribute what's produced in that economic system in some kind of a post-capitalist economy where everyone is taken care of no matter what. I should also say it really pushes back on the image and stereotype of a sort of bleak, drab, sort of bread-line poverty that many people associate with the term communism and tries to re-in reinvent that term from a position of abundance. So fully automated luxury communism really emphasizes communism instead of capitalism too, because capitalism has these internal mechanisms that prevent it from generating abundance. It really relies on scarcity.

Moreover, in a world where human labor is largely valueless in the production process, that is a world where robots can do it so much better. Wege is no longer makes sense. So you would just gain either an income or some version of access to material benefits without necessarily putting in working hours. It's also worth mentioning, and we can talk maybe more about this later,

there's actually a manifesto style book that explains the concept by Aaron Bistani, entitled fully automated luxury communism and manifesto published by Verso in 2019. Those are the broad strokes of the term, I would say. And Eric, what's your personal relationship with the term? Well, if we could reveal maybe how you feel about it, but also how did you come to know about it? What's your story with it? I guess the first time I really ever thought about the idea, I was maybe 19 years old, and I was reading Herbert Marcusa's book, Aeroson Civilization, which is kind of a critique of Freud and Freud's idea that in civilization, we necessarily need to be repressed in order to

coexist in that civilization. Herbert Marcusa said, basically, if you could generate this system that produces all the value in society, then actually we wouldn't need to be as repressed as Freud that we need to be. And the thing that Herbert Marcusa just mentions briefly and he's writing the late 1950s I think up and you wouldn't have to work at all. You could just play and be an artist and enjoy your life. And that idea was so captivating to me at the time. And I've not been able to abandon that basic political vision sense. It's a really exciting thing. And so it feels so unreached in some ways given the advances in technology. So anyway, I think that's my own history of the term. I think my thinking on it has evolved over time, but yeah, that basic vision has continued

to really animate my politics. Thank you, Eric. And what about you, Zarina? How might you describe fully automated luxury communism to someone who's never heard it before? And also, if you can, what's your personal relationship with the concept? Yeah, I think for me, I sort of came across this idea first in Marx's

Fragment on Machines, which is a very difficult to read. Peace, but they talk about this sort of transition to abundance through automation. And then later on, you know, came across the meme. So the memes that entered the meme industry was probably the first time I encountered these ideas in modern-day society. And for me, that brought this excitement because it was starting to create a vision of the world that there's like not just centered in austerity and personal restraint and ethical consumerism and individual responsibility for a heinous world, but instead is pointing to something that we can get behind, you know, that we can really like strive for and be collectively excited to build. And I think fully automated

luxury communism for whatever critiques you might have of it creates quite a unique affirmative vision of the future, and it's a future that's worth fighting for and creates sort of possibilities. I think something that's this really difficult on the left right now is that so many of the things that we're fighting for are against things. We're fighting to abolish things, we're fighting rena, we're anti-capitalists, we're anti-fascists, anti-authoritarian, anti-racist, you know, all of these things, which are very important, these are really important things to defend our society against, but they don't tell us what we're fighting for. And I think we both need to resist these sort of structures of oppression.

And with the other hand, also need to be anchoring ourselves in a future that we really, really can get behind. Yeah, I hear that. And I also, I have too seen how a lot of folks are saying the importance of visioning is really alive right now, that we need to be able to imagine a post-capitalist future and really feel it and also be inspired by it. And so, yeah, there's what do we need to be able to imagine a post-capitalist future and really feel it and also be inspired by it. And so yeah, there's what do we want to say no to, but there's what do we want to say yes to, and what are we heading towards. So I love, especially Eric, in your

relationship with the term, you had an image come to you and you really felt a connection to it and that it's influenced your politics since that moment. So maybe let's go deeper into that description, because I think this is a very clear way to feel into the concept. How might we walk in the world under fully automated luxury communism? Like, what would the world look like, feel like? How might we meet our needs? Like, what would we be seeing and feeling and sensing in that world?

Yeah. Well, maybe I can start with this quote that I think really captures some of this. So this is from Futures and Fictions by Mark Fisher and Judy Thorne. Luxury Communism provokes you to imagine what would be possible in a world where we held all wealth in common and applied it to advancing the joy of humanity as a whole, where everything was for everyone. Luxury and communism together point to a system of value other than that of the commodity. Communist luxury is not going to be exclusive, decadent, or wasteful. It's not about signifying high that is higher than you, status. Our luxury is not the pleasure of possessing exclusive goods, but rather the pleasure of luxuritating.

The central joy of having to do less work, time to be unproductive, the possibilities for more intense sociality, eroticism and adventure that this opens up. As a way of imagining what public luxury would look like, I always start thinking of cities. A city which is truly beautiful, full of theaters, forest gardens, waterways, cafes, gorgeous buildings, curving arcades, life

and art is for me the clearest way to imagine communal luxury. Yeah, so we're imagining a city where there's a forest and there's theaters and cafes and yet they are accessible to all, right? It's this public communalism, and it's this luxurrating in our ability to be in those spaces and enjoy them and the sensuality of that, and the lack of barriers or walls or gates in that world. Right, you know, and the idea is that, you know, we have luxury, it's just been privatized.

And so sometimes we get to go into those spaces, you know, hotels and various other spaces in luxury accommodations. And you get a glimpse of what it could be like. But public luxury is about bringing this to everyone. Yeah, in preparation for this conversation, I was reflecting on times in public parks or public beaches where they may be full, like a lot of people there, but everyone has their own blanket or whatever, or they're with their friends, and they're just enjoying it. And there's a real sense of sharing. Like folks can be singing and dancing over there

or playing and there could be children and folks with differing abilities. And it's just kind of, everyone is welcome. And even if it's very full of people, like I'm thinking of Dolores Park here in San Francisco, there's a welcomeness to it and in the sense of luxuriering in this public sphere. And yeah, we have all these privatized beaches or privatized spaces or privatized land, right? And so even if it could be very

full and we could be luxurierating, we also could be spread out a bit more and enjoying and luxurrating in spaces right now not accessible to anyone, but the very few. So that was a great thing to reflect on in light of this visioning. Eric, I'm wondering what about you? Like you described this sense of being in a grocery store and a machine kind of delivering the goods on the shelves. What else might we see or feel in under fully automated luxury communism? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think like Mark Fisher, I also start with questions of urbanism. I think urbanism is really important. It's important to imagine our built environment operating under different logic.

So when I try to imagine a fully automated luxury communist world, the key thing I ponder is how our relationship to space and time would change. And something I really want to know is what cities would be like. Again, if they were not oriented around work and consumerism, I may think about like how much of the street level experience is dominated by those things. And what it could be like if it wasn't. This is something that a friend of mine, a collaborator, Andra Bria and I were working on and a project we had going last year called Imagining the Postwork City where we invited artists and designers to submit visions of what postwork cities in an automated society could look like. And these were some of the prompts,

which I think start to really answer the question. So in terms of public space, what kinds of public spaces might exist in place of offices and factories and stores that currently dominate the landscapes of our downtowns and central districts? What facilities and attractions might exist to occupy the time that's freed from work? How might people interact with the forms and functions of the city and determine its uses? In terms of housing, what kinds of dwellings would people have in such a world?

Would people even continue to have homes in the traditional fixed sense, or might they just drift? Either from fixed place to fixed place, or else become part of a sort of urban hunter-gatherer society, just eating, sleeping, playing, wherever you happen to be at the time. Entirely in public spaces, never really claiming these as your own. Or perhaps we would always be on vacation and just follow some around the world who knows. This also leads into questions about the sort of regional distribution of the population. If you're no longer working, then you're not going to be somewhere based on economic opportunities. That being the key driver of both migration and settlement patterns throughout history.

So who knows, maybe everyone would live in tropical regions or maybe people would live in the types of regions that make them happy. This big question is whether certain regions would perhaps depopulate and others would grow because they're just more conducive to human happiness. Would existing cities dissipate as people became free of the economic tethers that keep them there?

Would everyone become rural? I like to think we would continue to value cities, but for new and better reasons. There's infrastructural questions. What kinds of, you know, transit might we have, how we get around. How would goods be distributed? I mean, this vision of the grocery store that's just sort of roboticized. Isn't an interesting one. Would it continue to be a grocery store?

I'm not sure. I don't even know if you need walls around it anymore, because there's no point in stealing in a world where all the things are available to you. Lots of questions to you to ask about how we spend our time. And there's no more sort of distinct breakdown between like leisure time and work time.

You're kind of always being creative. You know, you'd have new kinds of divisions between space. Maybe you have spaces specifically for rest and other spaces specifically for healing or for thinking or for feeling good. I don't know. It becomes a really exciting design problem really. And it was fun to see what these artists and designers came up with and respond to these prompts. There were lots of visions of green spaces, multi-layered urbanisms, drawing inspiration from resorts, you know, seeing resorts, and currently like, luxury and exclusive spaces almost as prefigurative little aspects of what the whole world can be like. So those are some of the concrete answers we got back.

Yeah, I think, you know, it's also worth remembering that to Eric's point, we've never seen what non-capitalist cities look like. And cities are wonderful experiences as they are, but they're different for different people. And they also have a lot of toxic elements. The pollution in cities, I think there's a Lancet report in 2017 that reported that pollution was the largest environmental cause of death and premature death in humans

responsible for more deaths in AIDS tuberculosis in malaria combined cities are very bad for mental health the sort of like noise pollution is very high and There also a source of wonder But the sort of point is is that we've never seen what a city Not based on sort of insatiable growth Could look like and I think think it's worth it considering what cities that grow in emergent ways that aren't centered around a financial capital

and consumerism could look like. And I imagine that they could be incredible playgrounds where a lot of these negative externalities that we see in present-day cities are reduced. Yeah, I'm recalling the work of Mark Lakeman and the City Repair Project and Portland, Oregon and how he looks at how cities, the grid is really about control and about ease of traveling, right, usually to work or goods and services. And so what if we were to reclaim our streets?

And he has this intersection repair project where community comes out and they rethink their intersection and they paint a mural and they put a solar panel, T station, and a free library and all this kind of stuff. So, yeah, I'm just thinking of the glimpses that I have seen to the visions that you're sharing. And also festivals. I think that's another space where folks can be very expressive and playful and luxuriating and their spaces for rest and their spaces for play and for healing and yet, unfortunately, as of now, they're mostly exclusive spaces and

also temporary. But what do they give us in terms of an experiential playfulness into the gift economy or into a post-capitalist economy? So thanks for inviting those glimpses into what it could be and also what's here already. Yeah, there's one other thing I want to mention which is I think important because I think when people think of communism, they think a lot of austerity and bleak equality where everyone has access to the same things but the things that they have access to are kind of rubbish. And I wanted to mention something from David Grabers's most recent book in which they reference indigenous and native forms of economics. And they talk about, you

know, in these early forms of economic societies, people still had private ownership. They could have trinkets and objects and symbols, things that they used to denote their individualism, things that they gifted to others to sort of say, thank you, and so on and so forth. But crucially, the things that were privately owned could not be turned into power over others. And the resources that were fundamental for collective survival like land couldn't be privately owned. And so I think what luxury communism points to is both the ability to make sure that everybody's needs of men we have a good life, and also this sort of luxuriant quality of being able to have our

own aesthetic and our own ways of being and adorning our lives that I think is really important. Absolutely. And so you spoke about how Marx alluded to this in the fragment on machines, and then you also mentioned the book, fully automated luxury communism. Is there anything else we want to say by way of history of the term? Just other people or places that have been exploring this just historically? Yeah, so I think fully automated luxury communism has been listed, you know, unwicapedia underpost-gast economy. And I think actually this started to appear in the meme affair in about 2016 under the fully automated gay space communism meme, which is for interesting

it's such to appear in Reddit threads and became very popular on various Reddit threads. And of course, Marx's fragment on machines was probably one of the earliest pointers to this idea. Eric, anything you, Dad? Just a few things that maybe listeners might want to poke their heads into. Readings wise, is Kristen Ross's book, communal luxury, the political imaginary of the Paris commune. And I think the second chapter on communal luxury,

and especially the second half of that chapter, is a really great reading on this, just trying to imagine a luxury communist society. There's also Stephen Chiviro's essay, no speed limit, three essays on accelerationism. In chapter three, parasites on the body of capital, I think Shavira does a really nice job. Just imagining and asking some of these questions

and imagining some of these futures. And then Peter phrase also, points out in the book, four futures life after capitalism in chapter one, communism, equality and abundance. Also sort of frames some of these matters for us. It would be worth touching on some of the iterations of this Falk that being the acronym term. Zarina mentioned fully automated luxury gay space communism.

There's been debates about whether we should be talking about, you know, fully automated, luxury, queer communism, and so forth. You know, other things that you might slip in. Personally, I think my preferred one, although the acronym starts to really get ridiculous at this point, would be fully automated, neo-deckident, metamotorne communism. And I think there's a discussion to be really that we need to have. And this is where the gay or the queer come in. And actually this question of luxury versus neo-deconvences. Engaging critically with the things that we desire in realizing that much of what we

consider to be luxury now is really just status signaling artificial scarcity, those things that we chase forever that not everyone can have, that don't necessarily even make us happy when we get them. The thing that comes to mind immediately here is a circular drive way, you know, the ones that are in front of a mansion

with a big fountain in the middle. It's like, we can't have a world where everyone has that, I don't think. And normally we want one. The only reason you'd have a stupid where everyone has that. I don't think. Normally, we want one. The only reason you'd have a stupid driveway like that is the signal to everyone else that you're better than them. And things like that that take a huge amount of resources, whether space or otherwise, money, effort to upkeep and so forth.

They make no sense, I think, in the type of world that we're describing here. And I think if that's the kind of thing that everyone wants, that is those status symbols that show that they are somewhere higher on a hierarchy than other people, I think in the type of world that we're describing here. And I think if that's the kind of thing that everyone wants, that is those status symbols that show that they are somewhere higher on a hierarchy than other people, I think we really need to rethink those things. And for me, that begs questions, whether luxury is really the right term here versus what I describe as neo-decedence,

which describes a widely distributed variety of experiences that are readily at hand, aesthetic experiences specifically, that's not about, I don't know, high quality leathers or whatever, it's more about just the felt experience that you're able to have, moving through space, moving through time in unusual ways that are delightful. And I think that that is perhaps more important as a goal than luxury per se. I hope that makes perhaps more important as a goal than luxury per se. I hope that makes sense to the listeners.

Yeah, I think that's right. Like hierarchies of desire is really important to sort of focus on here. And I think, Eric and I've been talking for a while about the distinction between sort of horizontal desires, you know, horizontal variants of experiences that can feel novel and luxurious to you when you first encounter them as opposed to everybody trying to create sort of more status over the other as a sort of horizontal form of hierarchy. And I think it's important to distinguish between those. And I think they refer to luxury as a way, you know, as a term that's understood by most people and conjures the image of something worth fighting for, but it might be that the term needs to change into something a bit more intentional.

You're listening to an upstream conversation with Zarina Agnew and Eric Wycoff Rogers. We'll be right back. I'm gonna take it easy, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, easy, yeah, I'm gonna leave on an explain home. I'm gonna let out my worries, ain't gonna hurry, cuz all the risk goodbye. I'll get up and get down, down, down, and take it easy I'll get up and get down, down, down, down Where the skies and the waves keep rolling And I'm birth to sing in every day Yes, I can listen to the real us calling

calling to the secrets that they have to say Hear them say, I'll get up and get down, down, down and take it easy, I'll get up and get down, down, down, out There's not a sound to be heard Except the waves on the shore The people that are friendly No need to like your girl I heard a luring call That the wind and waves have sung

But do they change my gypsy heart When my old dreams were young I'll get up and get down, down, down It's a good reason I'll get up and get down, down, down And take it easy I'll get up, and get down, down, down Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Headin' for the Northwestern Way Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Something I've gotta do today Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing.

I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. That was Take It Easy by Archie James Cabinot. Now back to our conversation with Serena Agnew and Eric Wykov Rogers. So going back to this question of what luxuriation might feel like or what decadences. I'm thinking of Manford Max Neath, the Chilean economist who looked at needs, and he talks about what are the ways that we meet our needs, the status fires,

but then he says what are the ways that we meet our needs, the satisfies, but then he says, what are the ways that we violate our other needs to meet those needs or violate, and this is kind of a, like going beyond his personal work, but like, then how do we violate the planet's needs or other people's needs in trying to meet those needs? So I'm just thinking, maybe what I'm hearing from you, Eric, is like an ethics or morality in looking at desires or luxuriation and you know does my desire for this or my luxurrating in this way hurt or impact

either the planet or other people. Is that a little bit related to what you're saying? Yes and I think what it's trying to do is respond to one of the, say, post-capitalist discourses that I think fully automated luxury communism in some ways refutes, which is the degrowth movement. There's been a lot of critiques leveled at fully automated luxury communism. And I think it would be irresponsible if this world that we sought to create this fully automated world was wasteful for no reason. And I think you're right to point to the question of ethics as well, this fully automated world was wasteful for no reason. And I think you're right to

point to the question of ethics as well because fully automated luxury communism doesn't speak at all to like how do we take care of people and that's why I would also slip in this meta-modern question and that's a whole conversation that's met how do you build a sort of meta-modern welfare state that we don't need to get deeply into but I think it's important to say whatever apparatus we create, it should look after people's subjective well-being. It should take care of people, it should preserve friendships and socialization, should look after the sick and the elderly and the vulnerable and so forth. And I think it's important to also try to fit those things into whatever acronym it is that we use to describe the future

because otherwise it sounds like the musings of like just like a young person who's healthy and able-bodied and doesn't have to worry about things. There's a lot we have to worry about, a lot of people we have to take care of and that will probably always be true. And so, anyway, those are some of the things that I guess come to mind here. Yeah, I think that's right. I think one of the things that the book sort of misses is the social relations and the nature of power and how we get to this world, which I think is really important.

And what work looks like when we don't have to have these jobs, and I think the kinds of things Eric's talking about, will come into play in a world where we don't have enforced work. There will still be things that need to be done, taking care of each other, taking care of the land, taking care of our society. And that's still really important work. Yeah, and this topic of work is really the main tension point for me around the topic, because one of the things I do is identify as a right livelihood coach, like I love working

with folks on how their work can be part of their spiritual path and also part of the transition to a post-capitalist economy. And so I think I have a little bit of a romanticization around work. And this comes from a mentor, my name is Satish Kumar, who's a former Jane monk who talks about the beauty of like baking bread or growing things and how, you know, what is work?

And does work always have to be kind of a negative thing? I think it's an ongoing question. So yeah, can you talk a little bit about work under this model? Because there is a part of me too that when I heard about fully-automated electric communists and the image that came to me was in Wally, if you've seen Wally, the film, there's this scene of people laying back and recliners and they're like, all have a screen in front of them and they're just being zoomed around. And the feeling is that they're quite unhealthy and like they're not able to move like one

of them falls out of a chair at one point and can't get back up. So for me that kind of came up about fully automated luxury communism. So how do we reconcile this, this joy that we can feel in, in baking food or, or in growing food or even in other types of work as well. Like, how do we reconcile that with this vision? I'll briefly just say that I think this is one of the places where like conservatives are often very compelling to me as in their like existential angst about what happens if we make life too easy for humans.

Like are we all just going to become like anxious co-heads who do really reckless things to try to distract ourselves from the barrenness of like existing in this vast universe? And I think this is where creativity and so forth becomes super important. I know Zarina has some really interesting thoughts on this, so I might just turn it over to them. But I just want to say, like, that's a problem that we should not just brush to the side, we should take it very seriously.

But I do think there's answers for this. Yeah, I think there's a really important and valid critique in this. We do need sort of meaningful ways to show up in a world to give ourselves a sense of connection and responsibility in the world. But I also think it's worth naming that probably a lot of the ways in which we engage in our free time in present day society is in reaction to living in a world of extractive labor. And so it's hard to know what we will do in our free time in this sociologic, but I do think there's something really important then.

So I think in thinking about the nature of work, I think in a post-gasty world, it will look fundamentally different and I think it's going to be hard for us to imagine that. We do want to make a distinction between extractive labour and participating in the world. These are really different things and we definitely need the latter. In a post-gusty world, we are still going to need to participate, take care of each other, take care of the environment, do art, philosophy, science, building innovative technologies and so on and so forth. I think when we're talking about a world beyond work, we're talking about not selling our time and energy in exchange for the means to survive. And that's what I hope will be different. Instead, the means of survival and thrival will be a given, and everyone will have that, and our work will be layered on top of that.

And so that's really important. I just want to share this quote from Andre Gortz's farewell to the working class because I think it helps depict this. So the quote is, the abolition of work does not mean the abolition of the need for effort, the desire for activity, the pleasure of creation, the need to cooperate with others and be of some use to the community. Instead, the abolition of work simply means the progressive, but never total suppression of the need to purchase the right to live by alienating our time and our lives. The abolition of work means the freeing and liberation of time, so that individuals can exercise control over their bodies, their use of themselves, their goals and productions. The demand to work less does not mean or imply

the right to rest more, but the right to live more. Wow, thank you. I love that. And then another part of the phrase, fully automated luxury communism that we haven't touched on as much as the fully automated part, right? The part about technology. And so I do appreciate that it's kind of in the realm of, I would like EF Schumacher appropriate technology where it's like Technology can be a positive thing that serves the thriving of people in the planet or it can be something that is detrimental to our thriving of people in the planet So can you talk a little bit more about the fully automated piece? Obviously in this fully automated piece

Everyone would benefit from that automation. That's one thing that we do not have right now under capitalism. But what more would you say about our relationship with technology and the fully automated part of the term? Yeah, I mean, obviously the book, it sort of relies on extractive technologies to guess us to this post-guestive world. They talk about asteroid mining and so on and so forth.

And I think it's worth pointing to the acceleration of slitch richer here. This is also something that they touch on in their philosophy. And there's all sorts of critiques about that that are worse people going to look at. But the main point I want to make is that technologies generally can either be utopian or dystopian. And the main thing that determines whether a technology is utopian or dystopian is the incentive structure in which it's created and for whom it is accessible. And so many of our technologies would look very different

today, I think, if they were collectively owned or managed in a different way. And so I think what's really important here is that we develop structures for the governance and accessibility of these technologies. And I think that's the key point. So for example, you know, we see this sort of automation happening in our life all over the place. Like, we see machinery and robots taking over sort of elements of life.

But that time that is saved by those machines doesn't go to us. It goes to the company, right? It's used to increase their profits. And so this would just be a reversal of that, where that time saved by a robot or a machine goes to the people rather than to private profit. Just the thing I'll say about automation and the technological requirements of doing that, I'm not a tech person, I'm not technical,

but I think it's important, first of all, that this automation process that we go through be done in a different type of an economy than a capitalist one, the release that we go through be done in a different type of an economy than a capitalist one, the release that we don't end up in an automated capitalist economy. Because automation is just about processes executing themselves. And if your processes are creating mass extinction events and inequality, then your automation is just going to exacerbate those.

So you need like a different modality to automate. So I think it's really important that this is why we talk about fully automated communism, not fully automated capitalism, because automated capitalism is likely to be really terrible. However, there's a really compelling argument put forth in this book entitled, A People's Republic of Walmart, which is essentially an accelerationist argument for letting capitalist innovation do the hard work of producing the hardware and software that automates the production process and distribution process and corporations like Amazon and Walmart are getting very good at this. Like they know how many watermelons you're going to need

and Walmart are getting very good at this. Like they know how many watermelons you're gonna need on that particular weekend in July, in that particular small city in Ohio, and they three weeks ahead know already what you're gonna need, and they're on it. They are sending them there. And it begs the question, the author says, you know, what if this, basically the Soviet Union

had technology like this, or what if some post-capless society does? And the fact of the matter is, we will have those technologies. They will have been funded by venture capital and financial capital, and they will be at our disposal, hopefully forever. And so if we change our politics and change our economy,

we'll still have those tools. And yeah, I think that's a really a pretty sound idea for letting at least innovation continue. It's course, even while we struggle to gain control of a more equitable version of politics and economics in the future. Absolutely. So yeah, the decision-making about the technology and then also the purpose of it, right? And if it is to go towards profit or if it's something that would be supportive of larest and leisure and luxuriation. So you know this may feel very futuristic to some folks like I I sense that in myself so I'm wondering you know we talked a little bit about the spaces that we already see that are possible you know fully automated

luxury communism but what about some? What are some policies that are kind of a bridge towards this vision? Also, that would be really helpful for this vision. So what do we know by way of policies? Yeah, I mean, I think we really need a new politics and it's difficult to imagine how our current political system could get us to this world. And so I'm not sure I'm going to lean too much on the electoral system to get us to this world But I am going to emphasize social technologies. I think it's really important that we work on our culture and our media that these things Seem accessible that we can have conversations with our parents around the table about these kinds of things And I think that's really important Precursor to politics actually only when these things become

dinner table conversations and Fall into the sort of sense of collective common sense politics actually, only when these things become dinner table conversations and fall into the sort of sense of collective common sense, can a politician run on these kinds of policies. So the thing that people can do at home is to really normalize striving for just futures instead of sort of like harm reduction economics, and I think that's a really important part. I do think we're seeing in the meantime some sort of like legal and court-truth tools that can sort of transition us into these sort of systems. So there's a few tools that really lean into sort of intergenerational legacy that are

starting to appear. So one is perpetual purpose trusts. So these are non-characable trusts that can support a social good or a cause after the owner departs. And so putting your project into a perpetual purpose trust is a way of ensuring that you're sort of encoding long-term ethics and morals into your project that will exist long beyond your lifespan. So I think those are a really important tool that's coming up. We're also starting to see corporate structures such as the public benefit

corporation, which is again a full-profit corporate entity, that includes positive impact on society, workers, community environment, as a sort of legally defined goal. And so what you can do with your sort of company is ensure that these sort of ethics are baked in from the beginning. And I think these are sort of structures,

just a couple of examples of structures by which companies or organizations can hard code social good into their sort of legal obligations. And I think if more of us were doing this in a generation's time, we'd start to see that we're inheriting a world that is collectively run, collectively governed, servicing social impact and so on and so forth. This is very much a sort of post-capitalist politics in the JK, Gibson, Graham framework that Zarina is describing. Also I really appreciate your comments there, Zarina, that we need to change culture before

we can change politics. I mean, I'm assuming that the name of this podcast upstream is referring to the way in which culture is upstream of politics, at least that's something we talk about in cultural studies. You know, it's not, but I love that. It's actually a metaphor. It's from public health where you see people in the river drowning and you go upstream to figure out why are they following it in the first place.

Oh, wow. And so it's about going upstream from the ecological, political, and economic crises of our time and saying, what are the upstream root causes? That's the inspiration, but I love your take on it as well. But Eric, what else might you say around the policies that would get us there? The policies or the actions that one might take individually, too? So, but what are the efforts that would move us towards this fully-onimated luxury communism?

Sure. Well, there's experiments going on with universal basic income. In a few places, people will probably remember the Andrew Yang sort of ran on a platform that, you know, you need a universal basic income to start to make inroads into tackling the crisis that automation is likely to bring for employment. It was a meager amount that he was proposing. It's clear that he is a capitalist who who's trying to use this, to keep the capitalist system going, to save it from itself. But still, I think these are the kinds of things that stick in people's minds and change how we imagine what's possible. And I think we should totally accept these kinds of experiments. Something comes to my, oh, and by the way, we shouldn't just accept universal basic income because our buying power is individual, so if I'm given a chunk of money, I can't get the best deals with that

money, but we should also embrace universal basic services. In other words, some universal apparatus of care that provides things for us, especially because when the government goes into the direct production of things, it can often achieve enormous economies of scale. And yeah, I'm hugely in favor of services becoming universal and publicly owned, especially as an American living in England. We have the NHS, the National Health Service there. And so there's free healthcare for everyone.

And it's quite good. It's underfunded and, you know, limping along, especially after the pandemic, but it's quite good. Other things, I think, are quite important. Our first to also just try to change the discourse of how we're addressed as citizens and not buy into the idea that the thing we all need is more jobs, all the time jobs, jobs, jobs.

But I think this is something that universal basic income and services can shift as well. If we can delink income from employment, then perhaps we can stop turning to politicians to constantly be worrying about jobs as the one thing that everyone needs. I do think there's also an idea proposed by Andre Gore's that could be useful, which is reduced working hours, so trying to increase wages and decrease the hours that you're expected to work so Andre Gore's was a socialist economist from France and and he invented the growth actually but a big part of his argument was that we should basically have everyone universally employed everyone who's able to be

and reduce their hours and increase their pay and do all this things at once. And that feels quite interesting as a policy proposal. I mean, none of these things are likely to be on the agenda and the next say federal or national elections. But I think the things that people should be pushing for and talking about because the more we talk about these things, the more people will demand them. So last question for you, each. So I just kind of want to summarize because we've explored a lot here. So maybe Eric, if we start with you, you mentioned how you first heard of

the idea and your first connections with it, but you hinted that maybe things have changed or adapted. So I'm wondering about, you know, where are you now with the term fully automated luxury communism? And also if you could locate it within post-scarcity economics, because I hadn't heard of that term before looking into this too. So what is that relationship there? And where are you at with this frame right now in your life and in your work? It's a good question. So what's changed for me is just that I think we need to critically engage in desire, as I mentioned, in my comments around, you know, maybe it needs to be fully automated luxury queer, or maybe it needs to be fully automated,

neo-decade, queer, meta-modern communism. I think we just need a lot more than luxury, and we need to, I think it's worth specifying those things. Another thing is that I also believe that it could be worth breaking it down into its component parts and trying to seed each one of those things and people's minds and really working towards prefiguring those distinct elements in people's lives. So by prefiguring what I mean is people gaining some direct experience and encountering aspects of this logic in their lives. And then pairing that with utopian thinking and then pairing that with making demands on our existing political and economic infrastructures.

So in other words, experimenting with things in your life on the ground in reality, which make you realize that your reality can change. Imagining from that new standpoint that is, I realize I made some small change in my neighborhood. Maybe we create a community garden or something like this. And from that perspective, I can see that things can change. And from there, actually imagining further futures

of what we can do. And then using those things to make demands of the system actually moving that direction, those feel really, really important. I think fruitful ways of implementing or tackling or bringing some aspect of fully automated luxury communism into our lives now. It needs to be a practice.

It cannot just be some distant abstract theory. The last thing I'll say is that, and this ties into this very much, is that I think we need to start creating imminent abundance in our worlds today through practicing things like DIY, resisting sort of capitalist luxury, scams, and grifts and so forth, engaging in sort of queer or non-normative desires, like seeing how the things that we desire are constructed and constricting on purpose,

and really widening the things that we take pleasure in, and joy in, indulging in abundant and playful aesthetics, sharing things with people in your life. I mean, honestly, just pooling your resources with another person or a few other people is such a vast, wealth-generating machine that nobody ever talks about. You can improve your life so much and your life's not so much coming together

to create the kind of paradises that you and others might crave. Not inheriting the world is some merely given an unalterable thing, but something that you can actually play with and remake and redesign. Remembering that anything can be anything. The situation as this radical French group in Paris in the 60s, urged Parisians to locate the so-called beach beneath the streets. So any parking lot or back alley or cheap apartment could be a paradise in a place of autonomous and free communal abundance creation.

And why not make it so? I think this is the kind of thing we can start right now in our day-to-day lives. And I really encourage people to do that. So I think thinking about the future in this projective way, but also engaging in the present in a critical way, like using that future vision to transform the present feels really important to me. And I think that's what I would say there. Yeah. For me, I think I feel both energized by this vision

and I think the last two years have instilled more skepticism than ever. I think, as we've seen in the pandemic, for a lot of people their lives became more luxurious. For lots of people their lives became much better and for a lot of people their life became much worse. And so there's this sort of like fragmenting of people's lived experiences that I've really watched happen.

And I think the thing about this sort of like luxury idea is that, you know, what's that quote? There's that sci-fi author quote. I think it's like, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And to some degree, we already have what we're describing here. It's just only that a small group of people have it. A minority of the population not evenly distributed. And to some degree we already have what we're describing here is just only that a small group of people have it. A minority of the population are living in a post-gestial economic system, but it's enclosed. And I worry that we have to actually make sure that these things are available to everybody, if these are going to be truly transformational for society. So yeah, I think I agree with Eric in terms of like what people

can do. Don't wait to become rich to go and like build a post-gasty economy for yourself. Go and start prefiguring it now. Like I think it's very important that people learn how to imagine futures that are worth living for. I read this quote the other day that said, think about what you die for and then go and live for it. But to think is important. Going to read sci-fi, there's lots of sci-fi stories that sort of depict a post-gasty world. Create a vision for yourself that you feel invested in and have these conversations at your home with your friends and family. I think it's really important that we collectively learn to strive for something better. And it's also really important that we learn to think critically about the stories that are fed to us. So, you know, it's very common to think about the right to full employment and the right to work

and the right to own a house. But what if we fought for the right not to work, the right to not need to own a house? Because imagine a world in which housing was so abandoned that it would seem absurd to own a house. We don't feel like we need to own oxygen right now because oxygen is abundantly available to us and so we don't need to own it. And so really think about the stories that are sort of instilled in you and how they're shrinking the kinds of things that we're striving for.

And I think it's right to sort of point to like today and like go and build shared resources somewhere in your life and learn what it feels like, try and cultivate these sort of principles and ethics and think about your desire and think about how you can create joy for the Luxurian experiences in common and what's to be learned from that, as well as building companies, projects and organizations that aim for a future that we cannot yet imagine. Beautiful. Thank you both so much for your invitations and making them very practical, intangible, and things that we can all do.

I think something shifted for me when you spoke about, we can imagine fully automated capitalism. And then what about fully automated communism? That distinction to me was very helpful, because it gets to the purpose part, also the decision who makes the decisions and how it's allocated and all of that. So that was really helpful. And then just to uplift that quote, it's, let's see, William Gibson. The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.

So beautiful. Thank you so much for your time today and for the work that you're doing and so excited for what happens with this conversation and beyond. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure to talk about this. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Zarina Agnew and Eric Wyckoff Rodgers. If you want to get deeper into a couple of the topics that we explored in this conversation, If you want to get deeper into a couple of the topics that we explored in this conversation, check out our two-part audio documentary on Universal Basic Income at UpstreamPodcast.org forward slash documentaries. Also, Dell and brought up Mark Lakeman of the City Repair Project. If you want to dive deeper into that project, check out our conversation with Mark at UpstreamPodcast.org

or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Thank you to Archie James Cabinal for the intermission music. This episode's cover art was designed and illustrated by Instagram's Rad Left Dad and adorable communism, too. That's Rad Left Dad one word and adorable underscore communism underscore TOO. Upstream The Music was composed by me, Robbie. Support for this episode was provided by the Gorilla Foundation and by listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love.

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