Aaron Bastani

The concept has been compared to a 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, that predicted improving technology would lead to a 15-hour working week within a century.

Hobson and Modi criticised FALC as a misunderstanding of economics and how technology relates to social orders, saying that it assumes a gendered notion of labour and ignores ecological factors.

In The Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler argued that the idea is "complete baloney" because it would "fail in real life" due to "productivity".

Kessler saw government actions in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States as "a version of partly automated luxury communism".

The phrase, and variant "fully automated luxury gay space communism", circulated online as a meme after Bastani's usage.

In the essay Socialist Imaginaries and Queer Futures, Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi said that the phrase originated as a "tongue-in-cheek" phrase used by "London-based lefties".

Beckett said that the phrase was characteristic of Bastani, as it is "attention-grabbing" and "armoured against attack with a sparkly coating of irony".

Aaron Bastani (born 1983/1984) is a British writer.

He held a significant role in the 2010 United Kingdom student protests against increased tuition fees as an activist and organiser.

During protest attendances as research for his PhD, Bastani was arrested twice, leading to a six-month extension.

He co-founded the left-wing media organisation Novara Media in 2011, and has hosted and co-hosted many of its podcasts and videos.

After he used a bin to jam open an HSBC bank door at a 2011 protest, he was convicted of a public order offence and served a year's community service at Mind and as a leaf sweeper.

In 2011, Bastani co-founded Novara Media, a left-wing news outlet, with James Butler.

They were introduced to each other by Laurie Penny in the tuition fee protests.

Named after the Italian city central to The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Novara Media was initially an hour-long radio programme on Resonance FM.

In its early years, the organisation produced short-form media that Bastani compared to BuzzFeed, but it branched out into long-form content.

It experienced an increase in popularity under the Labour Party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, whom it was positive towards.

Novara Media interviewed Corbyn and other major Corbynist figures.

However, it was critical of the party under its following leader, Keir Starmer.

Bastani has run video and podcast series for Novara Media including IMO Bastani and The Bastani Factor.

Along with Michael Walker, Bastani has co-hosted The Fix and TyskySour.

For his role in Novara Media, New Statesman named Bastani the 50th-most-influential British left-wing figure of 2023.

Bastani has been credited with popularising the term "fully automated luxury communism" (FALC).

After a 2014 video for the publication, he popularised the term "fully automated luxury communism", which describes a post-capitalist society in which automation greatly reduces the amount of labour humans need to do.

He took his father's name Bastani in 2014.

Bastani completed an undergraduate and master's degree at the University College London.

At the Royal Holloway, University of London, Bastani completed a PhD thesis titled ''Strike!

Occupy!

Retweet!: The Relationship Between Collective and Connective Action in Austerity Britain'' under the supervision of Andrew Chadwick.

At weekends, he sold tomatoes while working on Novara Media projects.

Bastani first used it in a 2014 IMO Bastani video for Novara Media.

He argued for public ownership of automation as a way to improve falling living conditions and wages.

He later said that the concept is based on Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Grundrisse, and imagines a society with decentralised control over technologies that reduce the amount of human labour required.

Universal basic income (UBI) can be a short-term step towards this goal.

Aaron Bastani was born as Aaron Peters in Bournemouth to a single mother, who died in 2015.

She was employed in cleaning, the service industry and social care, and voted for the Conservative Party.

His Iranian father Mammad Bastani was made a British refugee during the Iranian Revolution.

He completed the PhD in 2015.

He wrote a book in 2019, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, about the subject.

Bastani has also written for The Guardian, London Review of Books, openDemocracy and Vice, and is known for his Twitter activity.