No, AI Won’t Make Communism Work

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Communism failed when the monopolization of industrial and political power by a totalitarian state ended up oppressing all classes while failing to compete against industrial democracies, but the advocates of the constantly failing ideology have found a great new hope in Artificial Intelligence.

Podcasters and social media influencers are selling Gen Zers on the wonders of what they call ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ in which most jobs will disappear and AI controlled industries will allow everyone to enjoy a guaranteed minimum income while producing everything they could desire.

Even by Communist standards, this latest incarnation of a failed ideology is a complete dead end.

Socialism at least presumed a power shift between labor and capital by leveraging the power of the working class, its postmodern stepchild assumes that it can eliminate labor entirely, turn the working class into the welfare class and yet somehow shift power to this now non-working class.

The welfare class exists and exercises a great deal of political power on behalf of socialist parties in western democracies only because they have not yet made the transition to full socialism. In truly Communist countries like the USSR, Cuba and China, a failure to work was considered ‘social parasitism’ and unacceptable because it deprived the state of the full use of its slave labor force.

Once the socialist state has achieved unchallenged power, it no longer needs the welfare class, which in western nations tends to consist of members of troubled minority groups, and it ruthlessly eliminates this unstable element through political repression and forces them into labor camps. If the West ever went fully Communist, the welfare state would be its fourth casualty (preceded by political, religious and economic freedoms) and its members would have a choice between work and prison.

In the Soviet Union, a failure to work could mean being sentenced to five years of hard labor. (Soviet anecdotes thrived on such ironies that abounded in a people’s republic ruled by the political elites.) And those were in more liberal times. During the early days of the Bolsheviks, they were simply shot.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism can only work by monopolizing its hypothetical AI means of production through state power, but its only means of doing so is using the power of the state to seize  the technology from those companies that have developed it. And once the government controls a means of production that allows it to eliminate most workers, what would it do with them then?

The notion that a Communist government would maintain a massive population it has no use for is (like most Communist schemes) a fantasy that has no grounding in actual historical experience. We already know what Communist regimes in the USSR, China and Cambodia did when faced with millions of people they had decided were useless or an unnecessary obstruction to their plans.

They killed them.

Communism, far more than capitalism or any system since the medieval world, has a class system in which an oppressed working class with no mobility existed to service the whims of a tiny upper class.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism would allow the ‘nomenklatura’, the elites, to eliminate most of the population that they considered unnecessary through resource allocation in the old Holodomor style. Instead of luxuries, the public of this hypothetical state would be starved to death. If the regime were more liberal, it might simply sterilize the population and wait a generation for it to die off.

But let’s even assume that Fully Automated Luxury Communism would work through mass taxation of a handful of AI supercompanies, as some AI tech fantasists predict, and ‘democratic socialism’ would create a balance between the companies and welfare voters demanding more free things.

Democratic socialism allocates resources by maximizing the size of the state and its allied institutions while compensating for the resulting inefficiencies by finding and eliminating inefficiencies within the general population. That’s why in the real world, socialized medicine leads to runaway bureaucracies and resource shortages that are addressed through extended wait times for service and killing patients.

There’s a reason that Canada promotes euthanasia through its MAID program to hospital patients and the UK barred the parents of sick babies from escaping to the U.S. for treatment. Free market systems may have financial tests for medical care, but socialist systems maximize efficiency by deciding where to allocate medical resources and, as a result, who should live and who should die.

A regime able to control  resource allocations on a total societal scale might start out as democratic socialist, but would end as fully Communist and every resource would be used to eliminate inefficiencies by rationing not just luxuries, but basic staples, and would seek to use every means to reduce the size of a dependent population. Euthanasia, under such a regime, would not just be an option in hospitals, it would be a street corner booth, and birth control would swiftly become mandatory.

Genocide would follow in a more sedate and slow-motion manner, perhaps even with voter approval, but it would follow nonetheless, as the bureaucracy would increase and the population would fall. Indeed we see this very same phenomenon in major cities like Chicago and Detroit where the size of the bureaucracy grows even as the population falls. With no further need for the public, except as a playground for its social experiments, the commissar class would eliminate the former working class.

The only incentive for dispensing luxuries to the population would be to prevent it from rioting either in the streets or at the polls (and socialist regimes tend to frown more on the latter than the former) and those threats would be simpler to deal with by getting rid of the public than by endlessly bribing it.

The only thing that the absurdity of Fully Automated Luxury Communism reveals is that Communism and Marxism have completed their transition to becoming the preoccupation of an upper class with no real interest in work and no real understanding of work. The old socialists had believed that work was power. The new socialists propose to eliminate work without understanding that they’re eliminating power, first the power of the working class, then their own power, handing it over to something else.

A truly AI run society might see both the welfare class and the commissars at inefficiencies to be eliminated. And that would lead to a genocide far in excess of anything Mao or Stalin pulled off.

But none of these fantasies are going anywhere.

Whatever the impact of AI may be, the fundamentals still involve harvesting resources, putting them through a manufacturing process and then allocating them based on demand. Automation is used to create greater efficiency, but ultimately all these systems serve the demands of human nature. No one will build end-to-end production systems that have no reward except eliminating human labor because no one sets out to eliminate themselves.

People work and strive to to build up their status, impact and wealth. Take that away and you either have slavery or societal collapse. A society with no work would go extinct in a matter of decades without the need for any Stalinist or Maoist genocides. Those would just be the cleanup efforts.

Marxists would understand this if they actually worked for a living. But from Karl Marx on down, they rarely do, and instead entertain fantasies of how society would work if only they were put in charge of it.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism is their latest unworkable fantasy that could only end in misery, slavery and death.