Communism works given abundance? Or does it?

Amazon

Iain M. Banks with his ‘Culture’ novels has given us by far and away the best imagining of a future communist society, namely: The Culture. 

Typical is this, from Iain M. Banks' short story "The State of the Art" where the narrator reflects: "Money is a sign of poverty. This is an old Culture saying I remember every now and again..."

The Culture's post-scarcity society has transcended the need for money. From such a vantage point, the presence of money implies that resources are limited and need to be allocated, whereas in the Culture, advanced technology ensures abundance for all. 

Marx, himself, could not have put it better.

But Banks’s Culture had something else present day humanity does not: ubiquitous genomic engineering.

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Luxury communism: a world where automation, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology have eradicated scarcity. The conventional (Marxist) vision is one of equality, abundance, and freedom from toil. It seems almost churlish to entertain deep skepticism regarding such a utopia.

The material logic of luxury communism is straightforward. Advances in technology make goods and services cheaper, energy cleaner, and human labour effectively unnecessary. Automation manufactures products with little to no human oversight; AI runs everything; biotech revolutionises agriculture and healthcare. A universal basic income (or free goods and services) ensures that everyone has access to life’s essentials and, soon after that, life’s luxuries.

Freed from the drudgery of work, they say, people could pursue creative, intellectual, or spiritual fulfillment (cf. the projected fantasies of those bourgeois intellectuals: Marx, Engels and Trotsky).

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

History tells us something else. When material concerns diminish, struggles for symbolic goods - status, power, recognition - intensify. Privileged elites in ancient Rome, medieval Europe and beyond often engaged in bitter rivalries not for survival but for prestige.

These conflicts were no less destructive than battles over land or wealth.

Think of the culture wars we see around us. Their ‘precariat’ foot-soldiers are not starving - although they plainly aspire to those enhanced material privileges to which they feel entitled - but their elite leadership is generally well-provisioned: it’s power, prestige and dominance which motivate them.

The sociologist Thorstein Veblen famously described the "conspicuous consumption" of elites, where the display of excess becomes a competitive weapon. Prestige, by its nature, is a scarce commodity. A luxury communist society, no matter how materially abundant, would still foster competition for symbolic dominance.

The result? Endless power struggles dressed in new clothing.

If only these patterns were merely ‘cultural’. But culture is the expression of biology. Humans evolved in environments where resources were limited, and high-position in dominance-hierarchies ensured survival. Traits like competitiveness, aggression, negotiation skills and status-seeking were selected over millennia. Those hierarchies don't look like going away.

Could we genetically-engineer our way out of this trap? We didn’t evolve for abundance, but given it, perhaps we could engineer the necessary adaptations? The resulting "dove society" might prioritise empathy, cooperation, and collective well-being over hierarchical and competitive drives.

Technically this could, of course, work. Genetic traits influencing aggression, impulsivity, or competitiveness will be understood and may be edited out. Likewise, empathy, patience, and long-term thinking could be genetically enhanced. The result? A society designed for harmony, not strife.

The evolutionary "hawk-dove" model now makes its voice heard. Hawks are aggressive, taking what they want by force; doves are cooperative, caving in to avoid conflict. Generally dove societies are unstable, their members replaced by hawks, although under some boundary conditions a 'mixed strategy' can be stable, though still one in which conflict is necessarily built in (those hawks!).

And perhaps a dove society is just too boring, too stationary and too stagnant. Doomed to extinction through tedium. 

Even Iain Banks preferred to write about Special Circumstances, the least ‘harmonious’ and ‘placid’ wing of the Culture, comprising those individuals ruthless and devious enough to deal with uncouth, vibrant and so very alive ‘barbarians’.

So perhaps the real problem with luxury communism is that it only works in a society of losers.

We’re never going to colonise the Galaxy that way, are we, Mr Elon Musk?

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