Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone. New technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. Solar power will deliver the energy that we need, while asteroid mining will deliver the necessary resources, allowing us to end the devastation of our environment. Innovations in AI, gene editing, food technology will leads us to new ways of living better lives. In his first book, radical political commentator Aaron Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history.

In 100 years' time many of the ideas in this book will be mainstream, while kindergarten students laugh at our mainstream economic textbooks. Bastani's genius is to see the future with crisp clarity, unafraid of the consequences of being right, One of the most important books to come out of the British left in recent years. Incredibly ambitious and wide-ranging, but also well-written and readable, it provides a fascinating glimpse into a future beyond scarcity and beyond capitalism. Not simply a set of predictions about an unknowable future, it is a call to action to those seeking to bring an entirely new world into being., The debate is no longer about tinkering with our current broken social order, but replacing it: this fascinating book is an absolutely critical contribution, and a must-read for all those who aspire to build a new society., At a time when our horizons have shrunk, when instead of striving for a better world we look backward to old comforts, Aaron Bastani calls us to dream and struggle for the type of society finally fit for humanity to live as humans should., Rousing

Aaron Bastani is co-founder and senior editor at Novara Media. He holds a PhD from the New Political Communication Unit, University of London, examining social movements in the digital environment which fail to correspond to the traditional logic of collective action. His research interests include new media, social movements, asymmetric strategies and post-scarcity political economy. He has written for Vice, London Review of Books, Guardian and Open Democracy.