Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto is a book by Aaron Bastani first published by Verso Books in 2019. It argues that technology can be used to create a post-scarcity economy of widespread prosperity.[1]

To defend its argument about the future, the work—styled as a manifesto and described as such by some commentators—turns to the past.[2] It argues that human history can be divided into three broad periods, each characterized by substantial changes in technology: prehistory to the dawn of agriculture; agriculture to the Industrial Revolution; and the present period, characterised by the explosive spread of information technology.[3]

Bastani suggests that the prosperity ushered in by technology is inconsistent with contemporary models of capitalism. While capitalism is organised around a logic of scarcity, the technologically-mediated prosperity he predicts is characterised by the absence of scarcity.[4]

Kellokumpu argues that the work fails to account sufficiently for the impact of climate change and the dependence of contemporary industry on fossil fuels.[2] Barker echoes this assessment, noting that ecological destruction appears to be the consistent result of past technological transitions and that, in this respect, it is likely that the future will resemble the past.[5]