The "how."
The society imagined by the Venus Project is pretty standard Utopian Communist fare -- no money, resources the shared property of all, productive capacity used to provide material abundance fairly for everyone's benefit. The ecological, social, and technological dimensions are lifted pretty much straight from Iain M. Banks's "Culture" novels.
The big problem with all Utopian Communist projects isn't the "what" -- who wouldn't want to live in a society where everybody lives in abundance, nobody is forced to do anything they don't want to, there's no crime, coercion, expropriation, oppression, or violence? -- but the "how." How would such a society work? Most importantly, how could we get there from here?
Marx and his followers -- Lenin, Trotsky, Bernstein, and Mao, in particular -- did describe, in considerable detail, both of these things. Bernstein was the only one whose program came close to working; all of the others only solved some of the problems they set out to solve, while simultaneously exacerbating many or most of the others. Lenin did, for example, make great progress on inequity -- but he made coercion and oppression much worse, and despite a promising start, failed miserably on prosperity and sustainability.
The Venus Project doesn't appear to get into any detail at all about these problems. Their "Aims and Proposals" page [
http://www.thevenusproject.com/introAims.php ] is extremely general. They say they want to build a community that puts into practice the principles they enunciate; however, they say nothing about *how* these principles would be reflected in practice. They want to "engineer a new consciousness," but the only concrete proposal they have about how to do this is to make a feature-length film about it.
It ain't that simple. I can't see how this attempt is any different from the hundreds or thousands of Utopian Socialist projects that have preceded it, and failed. They're just saying that "technology will solve it" or "a new consciousness will solve it," without specifying what kind of technology, what kind of consciousness, and how to create said technology and consciousness. Hell, they even admit as much:
These proposals, from an engineering standpoint, seem fantastic and unfeasible within the present monetary system; and they are. The sums involved in ventures of this magnitude would be too huge and inconceivable. No government today can possible afford this prodigious undertaking. All of this could only be accomplished in a resource-based world economy where all of the world's resources are held as the common heritage of all of the earth's peoples.
[
http://www.thevenusproject.com/techCitySystems.php ]
(That's the Trotskyist flavor right there, btw -- I think they are Ken McLeod fans too.
)
So, basically, they admit that their society will only work if there's a technology that's advanced enough to provide everyone with what they need without human intervention -- governance, production, services, recycling, housing, and everything else is
completely automated, with humans only deciding what they want and getting the machines to build it. That'd be absolutely awesome, but it's not exactly practical with our level of technology: the monetary system we have isn't the limitation; our ability to manipulate nature is.