UKIP candidate Aidan Powlesland was the subject of derision following his 2017 election manifesto pledge to set aside £100 million for “an interstellar colony ship design” and £30 million for an “interstellar nano-probe fleet design.”

He appealed to the rural South Suffolk electorate for votes by promising an eye-watering £1 billion prize to any private company that could develop technology that would be able to mine the asteroid belt by 2026, less than a decade hence.

While he was widely dismissed as one of the many cranks that seem to be attracted to Ukip, Powlesland explained that he was inspired to campaign on the issue of asteroid mining to ensure Britain leads the way in a technological revolution.

But it seems that while he was roundly rejected by the electorate — he came last, polling just 2.7 per cent — Powlesland was ahead of the game, a visionary in a race to harness the bountiful fruits that space has to offer us. That's according to Novara media founder Aaron Bastani in his book Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto.

Without asteroid mining, Bastani regales the reader, “the limits of the earth would confine post-capitalism to conditions of abiding scarcity [and] the realm of freedom would remain out of reach.”

He has in mind the asteroid Psyche, which sits between Mars and Jupiter, and consists of numerous valuable minerals and metals. According to Bastani, if a spacecraft such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX were to mine its riches, it could provide every person on earth more than $100 billion each. I kid you not.

His much awaited tome promised to bring us the finer details of FALC (Fully Automated Luxury Communism), a phrase which started as a joke but has now been fleshed out into a kind of “hipster Marxism for millennials,” although minus the Marx, as it turns out.

It would be too easy to dismiss a book that contains the phrases “peak human” and “peak horse” while insisting that life under FALC would be like living in a music video. But it deserves closer attention.

Central to Bastani’s thesis is that we need to harness the positives of capitalism — namely, technological innovation — while negating the bad parts. He points to a number of crises facing humanity — climate change, an ageing society, scarcity of resources and a rise of the machines that will see the end of capitalism. So far, so conventional. Nothing original there.

According to Bastani, technological advances will lead to “extreme supply,” the end of GDP and a life of luxury for all in what’s less a manifesto and more a PR brochure for for the likes of Elon Musk. Light on politics, the book instead focuses on the virtues of capitalism and the post-scarcity possibilities that lie ahead with rapid technological development.

Bastani has read Marx’s Grundrisse — or at least the Fragment on Machines section of the great man’s manuscript. He tells the reader that they will probably never have heard of it, something highly unlikely to be true for any Marxist reading FALC.

But his use of Marx’s work to support his vision is selective and reduces it to technological determinism. In Bastani’s world, it seems FALC will simply come about as a result of accelerated capitalist production, coupled with a limited form of state power.

It negates the role of capitalist social relations and offers a superficial, utopian world view whereby capitalism remains in essence a progressive system with some admittedly bad bits that will innovate and reduce production costs through technological advances.

Bastani ignores what Marx and other economists describe as “externalities” — the hidden costs that are passed onto individuals and the environment. In FALC, however, technology will save the planet and more automation, the mantra of the capitalist drive for profit, is necessary as the motor of social progress that will deliver FALC.

His view seems to be that capitalism will develop the technology that will see the labour embodied in humans replaced with machines. Capitalism is “a force of potential liberation” that will free people, creating more time to spend on leisure and other activities.

In the FALC utopia, capital essentially becomes labour itself as the increased use of machines sees humans replaced as “a factor of production” and an end, or at least reduction, of surplus extracted by the capitalists for profit.

When Marx spoke about capitalism producing its own gravediggers, he was talking about the increased exploitation of workers under capitalism leading to the antagonism between the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who toil to produce the goods that are sold by the capitalist for profit.

Put very simply, Marx foresaw that the specialisation of labour, along with technological advances, would see the capitalist drive for profit accelerate. Competition between capitalists, according to Marx, will cause wages to fall and conditions for workers to deteriorate.

This would lead to the development of a growing class consciousness which, coupled with the periodical crisis inherent in the capitalist system, would lead to revolution.

Marx’s work should not be reduced to the crude determinism ascribed to him by Bastani and others. He spent his life not only analysing the inner workings of capitalism and exposing its inherent contradictions but called for “workers of the world” — those exploited by the system — to unite, rise up and overthrow it.

Attempts to update communism for the modern age are the tried and tested methods of liberals ever since Marx and Bastani falls over himself to tell us that FALC will not come about by “the storming of the Winter Palace.”

Under Bastani’s vision, the “anti-liberal coup” through which the Russian Revolution came about is to be avoided. This, he contends, along with “military invasion by every major power, further limited the possibility for social transformation.”

He thereby negates the many technological advances made under the Soviet system, which went from a backward economy, ploughing fields with outdated technology, to putting the first human in space in just a few decades.

That contention also ignores the gains of actually existing socialism, something Bastani denies has even existed, with the USSR, People’s Republic of China and Cuba reduced to “a number of political projects [that] labelled themselves as communist over the last century.”

He even goes as far as to say that FALC is not about “substituting one class for another,” begging the question: what kind of communism is Bastani proposing?

There appears to be little room for the working class in building FALC, with Bastani attesting that “the majority of people will only be politically active for short periods of time,” seeming to imply that the promised land is to be delivered to us from a reformist government.

While Bastani waxes lyrical about automation, mining in outer space, genetic manipulation and growing “meat without animals” in science labs, he denies the agency of the working class and the taking of power through the dictatorship of the proletariat, a necessity in the transition to communism.

FALC isn’t a radical system that needs to be fought for. There will be no need for class struggle. Instead the technological revolution will deliver communism with workers reduced to a passive role, seen merely as voters with barely any social agency.

The utopia set out in FALC is in reality reformism that does not go much further than the Labour Party manifesto which, while admittedly aimed at bringing about radical change and advancing the lives of the many, will not bring about the end of capitalism but merely tinker at its edges.

The central ideas of full automation and Universal Basic Services (UBS) run similarly to those developed in Srnicek’s Inventing the Future and the book sits comfortably alongside Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism and his latest work Clear Bright Future.

Rather than reading FALC, a much better and more productive use of time would be to read Marx, Lenin and actual communists.

We have to get on with the task of engaging in class struggle and shaping our future instead of waiting for Jerusalem tomorrow. We have a world to win.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism is published by Verso, price £13.59.