Fully Automated Luxury Communism

By: Aaron Bastani

Narrated by: Shaun Grindell

A different kind of politics for a new kind of society - beyond work, scarcity, and capitalism.

In the 21st century, new technologies should liberate us from work. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury, and happiness - for everyone. Technological advance will reduce the value of commodities - food, health care, and housing - toward zero.

Improvements in renewable energies will make fossil fuels a thing of the past. Asteroids will be mined for essential minerals. Genetic editing and synthetic biology will prolong life, virtually eliminate disease, and provide meat without animals. New horizons beckon.

In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani conjures a vision of extraordinary hope, showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society merely heralds the real beginning of history.

©2019 Aaron Bastani (P)2020 Tantor

Where futurism meets communism

I have heard about much of the technology discussed in the book, but connecting it to the idea of limitless resources was novel.

If you liked this please check out people’s republic of Walmart

GREAT book detailing the rise of new technology and how socialism and communism could be born from it.

A vision for a better world

What’s not to like? These are solutions for the great threats of our time that aren’t about sacrifice - they’re about abundance.

high tech left utopianism

the book spends a lot of time going over the exciting potential of new tech, but, as is normal for communist tracts, spends no time whatsoever on the details of how this hypothetical society might actually work in terms of avoiding corruption and crime, making good decisions, encouraging innovation and growth, etc. It boils down to breathless description of a list of new technologies, followed by a criticism of capitalism and neoliberalism combined with a few nice-to-have policy suggestions.

The Power of a Name

It's a wonderful book and delves into what economist lable 'club goods' in terms of information as they can be excludable (have paywalls or artifical scarcity) but are not consumable and thus have very little marginal costs besides electrons. These and public goods or natural monopolies are better left to some social framwork to avoid power abuses with democratic checks or mom an pop ownership or the co-ops mentioned... and there's the issue... technically a community ideology is not a bad thing nor a social one but words have emotional power and although this is pretty detailed (though there was a personal cringe at price caps after an interesting central bank idea in housing), the salesmanship of such ideas would be better left to a prescribtive basis of problem and solution rather than the evoking the old coldwar all or nothing top down authoritain style with no feedback loops or personal investment, responsiblity, or incentives... that said he does deal with these issues, but it's after the cover which will turn off a great deal of readers. Aside from that and overgeneralizing oligopolies and monopolies to smaller firms, there are some sound priniciples on tech tragectories and trying to front run them (thought the safty protacols on asteriod mining and taxes seem like a UN topic that should get lengthy review before feasablity to avoid an impact and work to fund some of the projects listed). Personally thier are a few areas where other tactics might work better but it's only opion and the trove of ideas is dense.