Jobless Growth: where has Aaron Bastani been in the last 25 years?

Twenty-three years ago, in June 1996, "Il Castello Infranto" was successfully presented to the Italian press and the main Italian economic stakeholders, a book I wrote with Stefano Palumbo and K. Gotnich, under the supervision of Domenico De Masi and the production of Giancarlo Di Paola. The book, published by Editricesafra, presents the results of a long and complex investigation about the reorganization of Volkswagen AG in Germany and the socio-economic impact it had on the city of Wolfsburg, the company's headquarters.

The project was grounded on the paradigm of the postindustrial society, in which new technologies “destroy” more jobs than producing new ones, thus determining the so-called jobless growth . The answer VW gave was the reduction of working time. Our goal was also to determine how much this reorganisation could somehow be considered a liberation from work, because according to our approach automation could be a way to free worker from a life based on sacrifice, and create the conditions for achieving a better life standard, even happiness.

Funnily enough, after one fourth of a century, an Iranian writer called Aaron Bastani on 11 June 2019 (just few days ago) published the book “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, which claims to present a revolutionary concept of society, in which machines liberate humankind from the constrains of work, thus determining a new happier society, in which people work fewer hours than today, because technology and machines replace people.

Where has Aaron Bastani been in the last 25 years?

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