Aaron Bastani

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Aaron Bastani
Aaron Bastani
Bastani in 2021
Born
Aaron Peters

1983/1984 (age 37–38)[1]
Bournemouth, Dorset, England
Alma materRoyal Holloway, University of London (PhD)
Occupation
  • Journalist
  • activist
Known forCo-founding Novara Media
Notable work
Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019)

Aaron Bastani (born 1983/1984)[1] is a British journalist and writer. 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 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 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.

Early life and education[]

Bastani speaking at a student protest in 2010

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 took the name Bastani in 2014.[1]

At the Royal Holloway, University of London, Bastani completed a PhD titled Strike! Occupy! Retweet!: The Relationship Between Collective and Connective Action in Austerity Britain under the supervision of Andrew Chadwick.[2][3] At weekends, he sold tomatoes while working on Novara Media projects.[1][4] He held a significant role in the 2010 United Kingdom student protests against increased tuition fees as an activist and organiser.[1][5] During protest attendances as research for his PhD, Bastani was arrested twice, leading to a six-month extension.[4] 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.[1][6] He completed the PhD in 2015.[4]

Career[]

Bastani has written for publications including The Guardian,[3] London Review of Books,[7] openDemocracy[8] and Vice.[9] Jane Merrick called Bastani a "non-journalist", but Bastani argued in 2015 that he is a journalist.[10] The Quietus commented that he is known for "regularly engaging in Twitter jousts", and is regularly engaged in controversy over his views.[11] In 2017, he tweeted a false claim about Labour's membership figures increasing by 150,000 that was widely repeated; Sam Burgon of the BBC suggested that the information could have originated from a typo by Richard Burgon, who tweeted the same claim shortly after Bastani.[12] After speaking critically about the Remembrance poppy and Royal British Legion during 2018, Bastani was criticised in The Sun and by Labour MPs including Tom Watson, Nia Griffith and Kevan Jones.[13][14]

Andy Beckett of The Guardian described Bastani in 2019 as "an effective but slippery broadcaster and online presence: always fluent and flexible, able to switch from fierce defence of Corbynism to cheekier updates on the busy British left's latest preoccupations".[15] The Labour MP Jon Cruddas criticised Bastani, among other left-wing figures, in his 2021 book The Dignity of Labour, for prioritising an educated cosmopolitan youth over "workers". Prospect's Andrew Fisher found Cruddas's account of Bastani's "technological determinism" to be mistaken.[16] Bastani was criticised for sexism by Lucy Hall of HuffPost in 2019.[17]

Novara Media[]

Main article: Novara Media
Bastani speaking at The World Transformed in 2017

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.[1][11] 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.[1] In its early years, the organisation produced short-form media that Bastani compared to BuzzFeed, but it branched out into long-form content.[10] 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.[11][18] However, it was critical of the party under its following leader, Keir Starmer.[19] Bastani has run video and podcast series for Novara Media including IMO Bastani and The Bastani Factor.[18][20] Along with Michael Walker, Bastani has co-hosted The Fix and TyskySour.[21]

Fully automated luxury communism[]

Bastani has been credited with popularising the term "fully automated luxury communism" (FALC).[22][23] In the essay Socialist Imaginaries and Queer Futures, Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi said that it originated as a "tongue-in-cheek" phrase used by "London-based lefties". 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.[24] 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.[25] Universal basic income (UBI) can be a short-term step towards this goal.[23] The phrase, and variant "fully automated luxury gay space communism", circulated online as a meme after Bastani's usage.[22][26] Beckett said that the phrase was characteristic of Bastani, as it is "attention-grabbing" and "armoured against attack with a sparkly coating of irony".[15] Other leftist people and groups use similar phrases, such as the communist group Plan C's phrase "luxury for all".[25]

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.[27] 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.[24] 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".[28]

Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto[]

Main article: Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Bastani wrote a book named after the term, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, published in 2019 by Verso Books.[15] In it, he conceives of a Third Disruption that would see the overthrow of capitalism and effective use of solar power for energy and mineral-rich asteroids for resources. Bastani opposes capitalism for creating short-term incentives that lead to artificial shortages. With technological advancement, UBI and free public services could be achieved in an environmentally sustainable manner.[29]

Personal life[]

Bastani left the Labour Party in February 2021.[20]

Selected publications[]

Books[]

  • Bastani, Aaron (2019). Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Verso Books. ISBN 9781786632654.

News[]

Videos[]

References[]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Judah, Ben (27 April 2018). "Momentum: inside Labour's revolutionary movement". Financial Times. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  2. ^ "Professor Andrew Chadwick". Loughborough University. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  3. ^ a b "Aaron Bastani". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  4. ^ a b c Bastani, Aaron (26 April 2016). "How I Wrote a 100,000 Word PhD in Six Months". Medium. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  5. ^ Cadwalladr, Carole (18 September 2016). "The new left: don't call them Corbynistas". The Observer. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  6. ^ "The Londoner: Comey swayed by Trump sex dossier". Evening Standard. 22 June 2018. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  7. ^ "Aaron Bastani". London Review of Books. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  8. ^ "Aaron Bastani". openDemocracy. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  9. ^ "Aaron Bastani". Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  10. ^ a b Dolan, Andrew (26 October 2015). "Novara: new media for a different politics". Red Pepper. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  11. ^ a b c Brooks, Michael J. (4 August 2019). "Red Player One: Aaron Bastani's Socialist Futures". The Quietus. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  12. ^ Bright, Sam (12 June 2017). "False claim that Labour membership surged by 150,000". BBC. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  13. ^ Singleton, David (9 November 2018). "Labour MP gives colleagues a lesson in how to deal with Aaron Bastani". Total Politics. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  14. ^ "Watch: Nia Griffith slams Aaron Bastani poppy comments". LabourList. 11 November 2018. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  15. ^ a b c Beckett, Andy (29 May 2019). "Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani – a manifesto for the future". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  16. ^ Fisher, Andrew (30 March 2021). "Keir Starmer desperately needs a philosophy—can Jon Cruddas help?". Prospect. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  17. ^ Hall, Lucy (3 April 2019). "It's Time For The Britain's Left-Wing Brocialists To Embrace Feminism". HuffPost. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  18. ^ a b Gent, Craig; Walker, Michael (2018). "Alternative Media: A new factor in electoral politics?". Political Communication in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-00822-2_8.
  19. ^ McDowell-Naylor, Declan; Thomas, Richard; Cushion, Stephen (15 July 2020). "How left-wing media sites have changed their coverage of the Labour Party under Keir Starmer". The Conversation. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  20. ^ a b Harpin, Lee (5 February 2021). "Jeremy Corbyn's 'attack dog' quits Labour - allegedly ahead of an investigation into his conduct". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  21. ^ Chakelian, Anoosh (5 August 2021). "'Luxury communism now!' The rise of the pro-Corbyn media". New Statesman. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  22. ^ a b Lowrey, Annie (20 June 2019). "Give Us Fully Automated Luxury Communism". The Atlantic. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  23. ^ a b Benanav, Aaron (2020). Automation and the Future of Work. Verso Books. ISBN 9781839761317.
  24. ^ a b Hobson, Thomas; Modi, Kaajal (2019). "Socialist Imaginaries and Queer Futures: Memes as Sites of Collective Imagining". Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production. Punctum Books. doi:10.2307/j.ctv11hptdx.17.
  25. ^ a b Merchant, Brian (18 March 2015). "Fully automated luxury communism". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  26. ^ Syverson, Tom (7 June 2017). ""Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism": Has the Time For Universal Basic Income Finally Come?". Paste. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  27. ^ Matthews, Dylan (18 October 2019). "Basic income can't do enough to help workers displaced by technology". Vox. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  28. ^ Kessler, Andy (16 May 2021). "Automated Luxury Communism?". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 26 September 2021.
  29. ^ Jordan, Bill (2020). Automation and Human Solidarity. Springer Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-36959-0_1. ISBN 978-3-030-36959-0.
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