By Comrade Conrad
I seek answers to life’s biggest economic and social questions. How will we as humans achieve post-scarcity? How can the lowly worker finally be free from oppression and exploitation? How can our LGBTQIAARP+ comrades finally find the love and acceptance they so desperately seek? How can we extend our reach to the stars above? One simple phrase gives me hope for the future: fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Let’s break it down, because being on the right side of history can be a bit overwhelming at times. “Fully automated” is any worker’s dream come true – not the piecemeal automation that our fast-food worker comrades or factory brothers have had to deal with, but the total satisfaction of every human need through the mind and hands of a machine. The only jobs humans would need to do beyond the jobs done by machines is oversight and repair if something breaks in the pursuit of living in luxury.
This is the second component of my grand utopia: “luxury.” No matter if you’re bourgeois or proletariat, class traitor or ally, when machines take over, your basic human needs and rights will be provided for. Granted, the bourgeois would not be a part of our happy ending for the workers, but hypothetically speaking, the hierarchy imposed by different groups’ costs of living are otherwise negated With many fewer hours to work, all a proletariat needs is to to change that hard labor into supervision of machines that would have done the same work into supervision of those machines. The rest of one’s work week can also be spent however the worker now wants.
With free time comes free love. As the power of bourgeois oppression decreases on the path to total integration of machines into our lifestyle, members of the working class have as much opportunity to be “gay” as they like. In addition, with enough collaboration between workers of many disciplines, human beings can complete the “space” aspect of my utopia in the name of acquiring more natural resources to divide not among the rich but among everyone. This is, of course, assuming that our machines are still powered by natural resources and not 100% sustainable.
“Fully automated luxury gay space communism,” with the “gay” and “space” removed from the debate, is actually gaining ground among modern intellectuals. Aaron Bastani puts forth his argument in an article from Forbes, where capitalism’s tendency to cheapen labor through automation must be wholly embraced by “luxury communists” and communally owned to distribute the benefits of this automation to everyone. Coming up with these wonder machines may prove difficult in the first place; if inventors won’t make a profit building a world-ender to tear down all existing systems of profit, they wouldn’t feel like it is worth it to continue. How can we motivate people other than profits?
You’ve heard it said that communism and socialism work on very small scales. I seek to have those small scales expanded but maintain the same close-knit group that is now open to others coming in. People will become socially minded after viewing the sufferings and injustices done to their neighbor, someone they have known their whole life and valued. In turn, the neighbor sees an injustice a while back, and the chain is followed far enough back to when the first injustice was done. Through this hierarchy of values, you or me can be found to care even about the people we don’t know and have never met, merely because of the fact that somebody somewhere does. A little compassion here, a little caring there, and suddenly we are at utopia before you know it. That wasn’t so hard, now was it? Of course, the other alternative is gulags and Secret Police Forces and heavy-handed government action, all unfortunately necessary sometimes to provide an extra incentive for the nation. However, keep in mind that this is utopia we are striving for.