Aaron Bastani

Early life

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 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. On weekends, he sold tomatoes while working on Novara Media projects. 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 completed his PhD in 2015 after writing the doctoral thesis in six months; in a blog post he credited this in part to his high carbohydrate diet and his purchase of a MacBook Pro. 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. Bastani has run video and podcast series for Novara Media including IMO Bastani and The Bastani Facto r. Along with Michael Walker, Bastani has co-hosted The Fix and TyskySour. For his role in Novara Media, the New Statesman (for whom he has also written) named Bastani the 50th-most-influential British left-wing figure of 2023.

Fully automated luxury communism Political sticker in the Netherlands, with a variant of the term translated into Dutch (literally: "give us ... fully-automated intergalactic gay luxury communism") Bastani has been credited with popularising the term "fully automated luxury communism" (FALC). He later said that the concept is based on Karl Marx's and , 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. 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.

Thomas Hobson and Kaajal 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.

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, Hobson and Modi said that the phrase originated as a "tongue-in-cheek" phrase used by "London-based lefties". 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.

Columnist Bastani regularly writes articles for UnHerd.

Critical views The Quietus commented that he is known for "regularly engaging in Twitter jousts", and regularly attracts controversy over his views. After criticising the Remembrance poppy and Royal British Legion in 2018, saying the Poppy Appeal was "grotesque", "racist" and "white supremacist", Bastani was criticised in The Sun and by Labour MPs Tom Watson and Nia Griffith.

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".

Personal life

In August 2021, Bastani married Charlotte Gerada in Malta. Gerada is a Labour councillor on Portsmouth City Council who was first elected in May 2021. Bastani's daughter was born in November 2023.

Bastani's mother was Catholic and his father was a non-practising Muslim. As an adult, he was baptised, had his First Communion and was confirmed, before marrying his wife in a Catholic ceremony. He said in 2024 that he had realised over the past few years how Catholicism had influenced his political values.

In July 2023, Bastani reported being attacked by a man who shouted his name and assaulted him. Bastani, who described pacifying his aggressor, believed the violence was politically motivated.