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Waking up under mosquito nets each morning, we would use plastic jugs to fill the cisterns of the toilets and hose ourselves down with cold water in the showers. For breakfast there’d be bread and eggs again, so I’d just grab a banana and bag of peanuts before I got on with hand-washing my clothes to get rid of the red dirt that stuck to our trousers while we worked. But looking out over the Cuban landscape as I brushed my teeth each morning, watching the cattle in the next field as the sun rose, any notions of luxury were entirely forgotten. Outside Caimito, on a small camp, we worked with farmers who used old tools that were fixed with rusted nails and sheer force – bent back into shape again and again until they were broken beyond repair. Had I got my hands on Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism sooner, I’d have quoted to the farmers, ‘Communism is luxurious – or it isn’t communism’, and we all would have laughed.
Now, sat in England, turning to my tattered review copy, it’s difficult to muster the same sense of humour. It’s hard to not see this book as a vanity project. Not in the sense of social media personality writes a book, but in how Bastani places himself in relation to Marx and his audience. ‘The reason you’ve likely never heard of either before’, he writes, either being the Grundrisse itself and the small section ‘Fragment on Machines’, ‘is that the Grundrisse never extended beyond a series of incomplete manuscripts remaining unpublished in Germany until 1939.’ And although we should be thankful that Bastani has uncovered the Penguin Classics edition of the Grundrisse, it is here that Bastani’s use of Marx both abruptly begins and ends.
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