MAINE: Imagine being so out of touch with reality and historically clueless as to think of putting the words “luxury” and “communism” together and then building a premise that such a concept is a good thing. You can’t satirize the idea because it satirizes itself.  Aaron Bastani has done that very thing in his upcoming treatise titled  Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto.

San Francisco and Los Angeles: A Tale of Two S*itties

At its root, this screed hawks all the principles of socialism and communism, where no one profits, but everyone benefits.
Bastani extolls the virtues of a utopian ideal. A place where technology and advancements are for the purpose of enhancing the collective good of society.

Reading the text we soon come to Bastani’s perceived obstacle to the implementation of his ideal.

He writes:

Aaron Bastani is co-founder of Novara Media

“For the crises that confront our world today — technological unemployment, global poverty, societal aging, climate change, resource scarcity — we can already glimpse the remedy.

“But there’s a catch. It’s called capitalism. It has created the newly emerging abundance, but it is unable to share round the fruits of technological development.

“A system where things are produced only for profit, capitalism seeks to ration resources to ensure returns.”

So it’s Capitalism, that pervasive wet blanket, keeping the world from living in Luxury Communism.

Just a cursory glance at, oh, I don’t know… say, Venezuela would show Aaron Bastani how eventually human nature supersedes idealism. How those in power reap all the benefits of their power while everyone else suffers in squalor.

“Luxury Communism”  simply enhances the lifestyles of despots.

Lead Image: Compilation of Images by Karen Arnold – https://pixabay.com/users/kaz-19203/and Brigitte Werner https://pixabay.com/users/werner22brigitte-5337/ from Pixabay Free Use