Communists seem to be fixated on the idea that once we enter into communism, we’d never have any reason to go back to any prior system. There’s this idea pushed that civilizations evolve as material conditions do, and that once we enter post-scarcity, communism would become the natural arrangement of things. In this article, we’re going to look at the Surplus Statist answer to how we’d transfer into and out of communism on a periodic basis, as the next technological breakthroughs caused adaptive radiations in other industries and gave humans the opportunity to update their Standard Template Constructs. In this article, we’re going to look at how society could economically evolve under Surplus Statism, as people transferred into and out of communes as new work that needed to be done came up from time to time. In this article, we’ll draw up how a post-scarcity Surplus Statist society would function, laying out what we dream of in ways that give purpose, pleasure, and achievement to human life. We’ll dive into the careers that humans would mostly be getting to paid to be on-call for throughout their lives, look into how our relations to machines ensured human society stayed anthropocentric, and look at what purposes Standard Template Constructs would serve in society. Unlike previous theories regarding how to bring about communism and what life would resemble in such societies, this article will define how to go about achieving communism in an organic way and lay out how best to achieve post-scarcity.
Starting this off, the first point to bring up is the idea that technological innovation is necessary for continued human survival and prosperity. Throughout nature, many species exist for hundreds of millions of years unchanged, having perfected living within their evolutionary niche, never going extinct due to emerging predators, and never specialized to the point that they’re easily killed off by fluctuations in the environment. Unlike these animals, through the power of technology, humans have largely outgrown the threat of predators and control our environments to a far higher degree than any other form of known life. In advancing technologically, humans have managed to move past the daily struggles of other organisms, while all other hominids went extinct due to predation, resource scarcity, and changing environmental conditions. Its not that we are special but rather that due to technology, humanity isn’t as stagnant and prone to extinction as we used to be. Human species have traditionally not lasted very long on their own and the only reason we are special is because we can communicate and coordinate with each other much more effectively than our other fellow hominids could, allowing us to collaborate and innovate. We weren’t the strongest hominids, we possibly weren’t the smartest hominids, but due to the very real power of teamwork, enabled by our sophisticated vocal cords, we were able to work better and more cohesively. Technological innovation is the name of the game for modern humans, allowing us to slay mammoths with spears, allowing us to feed our horses with hay during the winters, allowing us to cross oceans to reconnect with other humans, and so on. Teamwork, exploration, and technological innovation might be what makes humanity as special as we are in the history of the universe, and it doesn’t hurt us to continue that trend. By continuing to advance our technology, we gain greater control over our environment, thereby making extinction less likely, while making potential encounters with anything from beyond Earth less threatening over time. With each new scientific fact and technology we acquire, humanity’s eventual extinction is only pushed further back, our knowledge only further blossoms, and our life only further improves.
An interesting thing about technology is that it changes and adapts industries in waves, rippling across every aspect of society in every place it can be implemented, necessitating redesign and reorientation. When we look at the automobile industry, for instance, we see that from decade to decade, cars and trucks each share similar shapes to their peers because of the existing technologies and known science being the same at the time of their manufacture. In each decade of their existence, automobiles and trucks have largely diverged in form on just matters of utility and market niches, with Mercedes offering cars with more luxurious features than Fiat and so on. When new technologies are introduced to the industry, we see something similar to evolution take place in the products offered for sale: adaptive radiation. In nature, adaptive radiation occurs when extinction events occur or new niches open up for life, during which lifeforms begin to exhibit bizarre new mutations in order to try and adapt into living within these new niches. Over time, as the question of what works is settled, the species left in these new niches exhibit more standardized forms again, as the evolutionary pressure to experiment is replaced by the evolutionary pressure to continually refine what already works until the specimen is perfectly suited for its environment and niche. In the same way that nature periodically opens up new niches for animals and plants to move into and occupy through the continuous process of extinction and the introduction of new vacuums waiting to be filled, industry does the same for both workers and products through the continuous process of innovation and the introduction of new technologies waiting to be implemented. In nature, those that can begin to occupy these newly opened niches do, as its just another source of food that lacks preexisting competition as much, making it very convenient for creatures who can adapt into these niches to do so. In competitive industry, those actors that can begin to implement these new technologies do, as its just another potential source of income that lacks preexisting competition as much, making it an easy way to gain an advantage over competitors. The market and its economic actors, in this way, mirrors the natural adaptation of creatures to new niches that open up, with new mutations (i.e. innovations) and forms being tested out before the most efficient and ideal forms are settled on.
Standard Template Constructs, in this scenario, would be the standardized templates for products in industrial society, based upon forms and providing features that had been settled upon as being the most ideal in terms of efficiency and practicality. Standard Template Constructs, due to the fact that no new innovation would be required or possible by market actors until the next wave of technological advancement rippled across society, would require far less human input to design and refine, in a world where factories and maintenance facilities were automated. During this period, QUANGO-MAs would mainly occupy their own market niches, with established forms and features varying by market niches. Company communities during this time would function more similarly to leisurely communes, with their employees being on-call and mainly enrolling themselves in educational courses, having children, and pursuing whatever they liked with the free time they had. When human labor was needed for troubleshooting purposes or other momentary assignments, people would be dispatched to handle the situation, before getting back to enjoying their lives. The creation of these Standard Template Constructs would be an organic movement, as once technological progress slowed down, QUANGO-MAs would specialize in appealing to whatever market niches they had captured out of convenience. Ensuring this setup, wherein QUANGO-MAs’ facilities entered into automated standby states when innovation wasn’t needed, while the market still offered diverse choices for consumers, would prevent work from wasting peoples’ time and would avoid monodominant products from occupying entire industries, leaving society less vulnerable to widespread technological failures. From an evolutionary perspective, this setup in each individual market during stagnant times would appear to be an established and functioning ecosystem. Different industries might still have full-time employment, while others were in standby states, allowing for a range in incomes to perpetuate these market niches. In such a society, both work and communism would be voluntary, with people opting into and out of employment and communes at will, depending on what they wanted. If the communes couldn’t offer what someone wanted, that person could seek it in the full-time portions of the economy, while if work became inconvenient or stressful for someone in the full-time portion of the economy, they could transfer into a standby industry and move to a commune. In this arrangement, people would act based on desire, rather than out of necessity or force. The only thing not up for debate here, in this society, is the necessary inclusion of humans in production.
While there’s no doubt that artificial intelligences will eventually be designed that far outperform humans in creativity, there’s a threat in not leaving humans at the center of production. While the performance losses from relying on people can be mitigated through the use of genetic modification, mind uploading, and machine implants, what we lose in giving up control will be far greater in the long-run and possibly existential. The reason that the economy must remain anthropocentric is that, without a need for humans to make the decisions, the decision-makers won’t be human for long. Just as we don’t want the rich and powerful making decisions on behalf of the proletarians, we don’t want artificial intelligences making decisions on behalf of humans. Humans already greatly rely on one another to live in modern society, with no one being a Jack-of-all-trades today simply because the total sum of knowledge is far beyond any person’s ability to comprehend. That isn’t a problem in the modern world, when we all have similar constraints, needs, desires, and interpersonal commitments, but we couldn’t rely on that solidarity of interests once we handed over control to machines. For this reason, the idea behind a post-scarcity world in Surplus Statism is that humans would still control the vital functions of any organization, but would be saved from performing tedious and inhumanely boring labor. Human work in a Surplus Statist future would constitute a variety of troubleshooting roles, scientific roles, engineering roles, and officer positions, amounting to mainly controlling, designing, and reorganizing the means of production. Just as farmers today work with labor-saving technology that can do the work of hundreds or thousands of humans, the industries of the future will have the same dynamic in regards to how much time and labor technology saves us in other occupations. A world where an accountant spends several hours a month proofing the automated accounting program’s outputs, while earning a union wage and benefits, is far better than a world in which humans only hope to live off the divided surplus of the economy as infantilized adults. Being able to stay current with how things function and are produced, while earning a wage from performing duties critical to the economy, would keep humans alive out of necessity in our industrial ecosystem forever.
As technological progress becomes slower over time, as our knowledge is fleshed out to the point that newer discoveries take more time and resources to make, Standard Template Constructs will come in handy more and more. Creating a system that is incentivized to adapt to new waves of innovation, that allows people to live how they want by sacrificing tiny parcels of their time each week during standby times, in a society which encourages people to remain involved in learning about the world around them, is the key to constructing a sustainable and healthy post-scarcity society. Healthy humans aren’t beneficiaries but workers, after all. Looking at the ways in which we evolved, humans’ greatest strengths are our ability to work together on projects and collaborate with one another. The reason autism is a detriment in human society is because these people can’t work as well in teams, can’t express themselves as well, and can’t collaborate very much at all. Work as humans know it today, while in excess can result in our quality of life deteriorating, is what makes us who we are. Those that suffer from personality defects often are just deprived of meaningful work to do, with careers forcing these people to straighten themselves out or be justifiably washed out of society. Keeping human labor in the picture, however minimal it is, will be essential to preserving humanity’s quality of character in addition to the many other things stated above. We already see the problems that arise in communities dependent on welfare and the lack of moral fiber and purpose that people with trust funds struggle with. An entire society subsisting off of unearned income, while it sounds heavenly, would be nothing more than a stunted place full of infantilized humans unable to understand anything, unwilling to compromise with one another, and destined to go extinct due to our growing inability to form interpersonal relationships. Individuals function best as members of groups, rather than as hermits, and any post-scarcity society should be built on sustaining the interdependence between people that ties society together. Our destiny is not to die on this planet, as a people stupefied by our technology, isolated by our addiction to digital distractions, and deadened to the beauty of this intricate universe. Our destiny, should things turn out well, will be to continually grow as individuals, as a culture, and as a community. The only guarantee of survival in nature is growth, adaptation, and progress after all, and humans are no exception to that rule.
