For the fifth season of Antifa Book Club, we are going to read Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, written by Aaron Bastani, presents a political project intended to leverage the potential abundance created by technological advancement to build a society beyond scarcity and work.

The book’s Introduction, titled "Six Characters in Search of a Future," sets the stage by using six fictional accounts (featuring characters like Yang, Chris, Leia, Peter, Federica, and Doug) to explore current trends that feel like science fiction but are rooted in contemporary facts. These vignettes touch upon subjects such as automation in factories and retail, private space exploration (including asteroid mining), the dominance of solar energy, the implications of artificial intelligence (AI), and low-cost genetic engineering. These dramatic transformations are defined as the "Third Disruption," a rupture in history comparable in significance to the prior shifts brought about by the emergence of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution. The Introduction argues that the foundations for a society beyond scarcity are cohering through disruptive technologies in labor, energy, resources, health, and food, requiring a new political map—Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC)—to ensure these possibilities benefit the collective rather than just a wealthy few.

Chapter 1, "The Great Disorder," begins by examining the legacy of Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay "The End of History?," which proposed that the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the permanent triumph of Western liberal democracy and market capitalism. This thinking infused a political "common sense" known as "capitalist realism," which holds that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. However, the 2008 financial crisis decisively demonstrated that history was "back" and that the status quo was giving way to a historic moment defined by profound crises. The chapter outlines five overlapping civilizational threats that challenge capitalism’s capacity to reproduce itself based on infinite growth and wage-labor. These crises include climate change, resource scarcity, societal ageing, a growing surplus of global poor who form an "unnecessariat," and a new machine age leading to technological unemployment. The book asserts that confronting these existential crises is the basis of FALC, arguing that capitalism is nearing its end, and the key question is in whose interests the dramatically different world resulting from these converging challenges will be created.