In the third episode of season 5 of Antifa Book Club, we're reading chapter 3 titled "What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism?"

It serves to introduce and define the central political project of the book, designated as FALC. The chapter immediately addresses why the term "communism" is used, acknowledging that many view it as a failed 20th-century experiment. The author clarifies that "communism" is employed precisely for its precision, denoting a society where work is eliminated, scarcity is replaced by abundance, and labor and leisure merge. This vision is presented as being technologically possible now due to the possibilities arising from the Third Disruption and the emergence of "extreme supply" in information, labor, energy, and resources, defining FALC as the conclusion of these trends.

The chapter explores the intellectual foundations of this concept by looking at three thinkers who believed capitalism was a contingent, finite system that would eventually lead to a society beyond itself: Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Peter Drucker. Marx, particularly in the "Fragment on Machines" from the Grundrisse, recognized capitalism’s contradiction: its compulsion to automate progressively replaces labor with machines, unintentionally reducing human labor to a minimum, which would be the "condition of its emancipation" under a new system. Keynes, writing in 1930, predicted that the "economic problem" (scarcity) would be solved within a hundred years, leading to a world where humanity could address how to use its freedom and leisure "wisely and agreeably and well". Drucker, a theorist of management, identified that information had become the primary factor of production, creating a post-capitalist society where the application of knowledge to knowledge drove the "Productivity Revolution". The chapter then details Paul Romer's economic analysis, which identified technological change as an immaterial "improvement in the instructions for mixing together raw materials," leading to the contradiction that the most valuable part of a commodity—its instructions—is capable of infinite replication at near zero cost, fundamentally challenging capitalism’s necessity for profit and scarcity.