A World Beyond Work?

Labour, Money and the Capitalist State Between Crisis and Utopia

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Frederick Harry Pitts

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781787691452
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sensing a future beyond work lurking in an age of crisis, the 'post-capitalist' utopias of today spread the idea of a permanent escape from work aided by the automation of production, a universal basic income and the reduction of working hours to zero. By skilfully unpicking the political economy of contemporary work and its futures, this book mounts a forceful critique of the post-work society vision.
Dinerstein and Pitts reveal that transitional measures towards a world beyond work do not do enough to break away from the key features of capitalist society, and instead potentially stifle the capacity for transformative social change. Proposing an innovative alternative, the authors envision the construction of 'concrete utopias' that shape and anticipate non-capitalist futures.

1

POST-WORK, POST-CAPITALISM, POST-WHAT?

AN INTRODUCTION

This book brings together material written over the last five years on the emergence of a radical left agenda focused on the promise of a post-work society which, through the automation of production, the reduction of working hours, and the implementation of a universal basic income (UBI), potentiates the transition into postcapitalism. We concur, with the new post-work and post-capitalist thinking, that it is time to turn to Marx once again. However, we offer here an ‘open Marxist’ account that places categories like value, money and the state at the forefront of an analysis of the post-work agenda. Open Marxism, as Bonefeld suggests, enables us to reconsider ‘the open and contingent process of class struggle, its changing forms and conditions … and re-constitutes Marx's understanding of politics’ by undermining the certainty inherent in orthodox strands of Marxism’.¹

The context for the work presented in the chapters that follow was the rise to prominence of a new generation of post-work thinkers and activists associated in some way with the post-crisis UK left.² What this new literature lacked in comparison to earlier anti-work writing in the autonomist Marxist tradition – namely, a critical analysis of class society and the forms in which its antagonisms are temporarily suspended (state, money, etc.) – is made up for in its intellectual entrepreneurship and potential popular appeal. Such appeal is based on emancipatory ideas. Take, for instance, the aspiration for a universal basic income, which, its radical proponents argue, will not only be a palliative, but will generate free time, liberate unemployed and precarious workers from the compulsion to seek work, and reconfigure the position of women as the main carers in society. These specific proposals slot into a wider hegemonic project of the left that will, its adherents suggest, lead us to a post-work society as a springboard to postcapitalism.

Having emerged from the occupations, mobilisations and defeats of Occupy and other contemporaneous movements, the post-work assessment of the future, and the transitional measures it prescribed for the creation of a post-capitalist society, ascended over the course of the period in which the chapters that follow were written to a surprising level of political influence and popular press coverage, specifically with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party.³ The left’s electoral turn had the strange effect of rendering what was previously the preserve of the far-flung reaches of the radical left a set of increasingly plausible policy propositions taken seriously in seminars and broadsheet columns. This opened up conversations formerly unthinkable even within the social-democratic left and has undoubtedly broadened intellectual and political horizons just as some of ours were once broadened through encounter with the same ideas in earlier guises. But it also threw the observations and demands at the heart of the post-work imaginary – automation, basic income – into dramatic relief, not simply as radical thought experiments but operationalisable actions of the capitalist state.

Even if under social-democratic stewardship, this gave the agenda a different flavour at precisely the time that an interventionist state was back in fashion worldwide owing to the rapid rise of authoritarian national populism. Resonating in some respects with the rhetorical, critical and organisational character of an increasingly populist left, the ascendancy of a strongman nationalist international placed the prospect of a post-work or post-capitalist utopia against a backdrop of a world turning quickly sour. An optimistic politics might have seemed plausible in the wake of the financial crisis, but the events unfolding from 2016 onwards – including the election of Trump, the Brexit vote, and Assad and Putin's continued war crimes in Syria – made these utopias seem distant, if not anachronistic, especially when presupposed on the benevolence of a state-form flexing its muscles with dire effects on human dignity the world over. Now, the defeat of the Corbyn and Sanders movements either side of the Atlantic deprives the project of its imagined means for implementing its programme from the left. Whilst some advocates sense the possibility that increasingly interventionist post-liberal administrations could embrace certain reforms in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, the incapacity of left populism to captivate voters when put to the test electorally weakens the state-centred vision of social transformation inherent to post-work politics and leaves the project somewhat stuck. Other paths of social transformation aside from the seizure and wielding of state power are now needed to ‘unstick’ the genuinely emancipatory elements of the post-work imaginary. Whilst often highly critical and largely composed in a pre-pandemic past in which, prior to the defeat of left populism, the success of this agenda at the hands of a socialist government was just about discernible, one of the contributions of the previous writings collected in this volume is the constructive sorting through of the paths, viable and unviable, that lay before us then and lie before us now.

Meanwhile, in the same mid-2010s period in which post-work ideas gained renewed popularity, we were witnessing, in the social space between individuals and the state guaranteed by fraying liberal institutional life, the possible alternatives afforded in forms of cooperativism and municipalism at a grassroots level in cities like Bristol, UK, where we both live. The combination of a green politics of consumption, playing out in community agriculture for instance, and a ‘red’ politics of production, playing out in worker cooperatives, has been dismissed by some post-work scholars as ‘folk politics’, arguably lacking sufficient discrimination between potentially transformative social experiments and mere petit bourgeois lifestyle trends. But for us these projects symbolised another way to imagine the future better able to address some of the contradictions and antagonisms elided in the post-work and post-capitalist literature.⁴ Whether they alone are able to adequately operate under, or provide an alternative able to withstand, the looming prospect of a digitally enabled post-liberal interventionist state is uncertain, but they remain spaces of possibility (or ‘excess’) and autonomy eked out from beneath it. This resonates with the long-term research one of us in particular has done with new social movements, organisations and cooperatives in Argentina since the 2001 crisis, which brought about significant political lessons for the Latin American left which governed the region at the time.

It is in light of all the above-mentioned theoretical, political and empirical developments that a large part of this book's contents were written, and they colour our assessment of the potential for the state to effect the kind of demands that underpin what we call here ‘the post-work prospectus’ (PWP), producing a downbeat appraisal of the importance of this agenda at a time where the cautious defence of some aspects of the present state of things seemed as necessary as an offensive to sweep other aspects away.

Since then, it must be said, some of the key players in propagating this prospectus have softened their positions and themselves arrived at a more pessimistic, less determinist and radically humanist outlook on the viability and desirability of a technologically augmented programme for social transformation in a world where many of the latter's constitutive tendencies are recuperated by an emergent digital authoritarianism.⁵ Moreover, there has been a wider recognition that the alleged age of acceleration and innovation on which many of the post-work and post-capitalist dreams hinge is not all it is cracked up to be, with capitalism, in its liberal democratic guise at least, suffering from unprecedently low levels of productivity and technological advances when placed in historical context, a situation the current slowdown will do little to rectify without the widespread creative destruction lacking in the wake of the 2008 crisis. The fact that utopia cannot depend on capitalist development to bring it into being produces a return to the political question of how these futures must be fought for and organised, and by whom.⁶ This new pragmatism, perhaps, is a consequence of the proximity of the post-work prospectus to the electoral project of Corbynism, and the compromises this imposed on how change was envisioned. Now that the Corbyn project has come to an overdue close, and the coronavirus pandemic appears in the eyes of some as an epochal crisis for capitalism, the paragons of post-work and postcapitalism might recapture some of the extra-parliamentary revolutionary energy paved over at an earlier point in their development – however misplaced their abstract utopianism might be at a time where worlds even worse than this one lie in wait.

It will be interesting to see the directions taken in new entries on the post-work bookshelf, published between the time of writing of this book and the time of reading it.⁷ In the respects raised above and in others the world has changed since we wrote most of the words that follow, and with it the prospects for the post-work agenda. We write this Introduction as the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic tears through Europe and the United States. The basic income is on the agenda and the economic catastrophe sparked by the coronavirus may have propulsive consequences for the automation tendencies discussed – and largely dismissed – in the first few chapters of this book. Its unpredictable effects on economies and labour markets may well lay waste to the former and severely tighten the latter, in a way that might well precipitate moves towards a greater degree of automation in a range of different industries.

The crisis set in train by COVID-19 raises a number of questions about the future of work: will social isolation diminish the centrality of the human to service encounters, making possible previously unviable technologically enabled efficiencies in service work? Will tighter labour markets make it more feasible for firms to automate production without regard to the underlying cost of labour? And will the crisis spark a wave of creative destruction that clears the way for the fulfilment of the current potentials for productivity increases and technological dynamism that some see buried within the present? Moreover, how will it change the development and reception of the proposals for alternative futures of and beyond work covered in this book?

How these tendencies play out in what is likely to be a rocky period politically and economically remains to be seen. As well as emboldened calls for the implementation of an ‘emergency’ UBI, there is demand for a minimum guaranteed income and guaranteed services that could act as a more effective safety net during the COVID-19 crisis.⁸ The crisis is unprecedented and, whilst some appear to see the possibility of a new and better society emerging from it, it is more likely to present a real challenge for the left.⁹ In this context, presently in-motion developments do not, we feel, diminish our argument for a left keenly watchful for how projects of social transformation propagate the forms assumed by the abstract but nonetheless real social domination on which capitalism is based. The present crisis will likely strengthen the present reshaping of the capitalist state, or, worse, replace it with a more authoritarian version as neoliberalism wanes. Between crisis and capitalist renewal, what will the future hold for a left agenda that captures and translates the utopian content of grassroots struggles in order to shape a new world? The words that follow speak from a time before the one we find ourselves in now, but from within which indications of the unfolding future were already discernible.

∗∗∗∗

Following this introductory chapter, Chapter 2, ‘Futures Past and Present: On Automation’, places in historical, political, economic and geographical context the current popular and mainstream claims about automation that underpin a lot of radical thinking on the revolutionary possibilities inherent in contemporary capitalism. Evaluating the methodological and empirical debates raging between different models of the levels of automation anticipated to affect the labour market in the coming years, a combination of Marxist critique of political economy and critical organisation studies highlights the economic and practical reasons why imminent ‘full automation’ is far from likely, and therefore a very weak basis upon which to establish a left political programme for transformative social change. This does not stop it compelling the contemporary left however, and in the chapters that follow we use a series of key concepts within our ‘open’ Marxist theoretical approach to frame and illuminate what we perceive as key issues to address in the radical left ‘post-work prospectus’ of automation and the basic income.

In Chapter 3, ‘The Post-Work Prospectus: On Labour’, we examine claims about the impacts of automation upon the future of work, before considering how this has been taken up by the left in envisioning a post-work society, identifying a possible issue in the extent to which technology is granted an autonomous quality, accomplishing social transformation in and of itself. We trace the attraction of such a determinist reading of technological development back to Marx's Fragment on Machines, and specifically the way its insights were appropriated in Italian postoperaismo and subsequently in contemporary post-work and post-capitalist thinking. Marx's Fragment on Machines associates the decline of direct labour-time in production and the expansion of scientific knowledge attendant upon automation as the harbinger of a crisis in capitalism that constructs the foundations of a new society in the shell of the old. However, we suggest that this deploys an overly Ricardian understanding of value theory that Marx himself would later surpass, associating value with concrete labour rather than the category pivotal to our analysis, which is instead abstract labour, a social abstraction central to value that is mediated in money.

We then explain our approach to work and labour in capitalist society and how this differs from the way these categories are typically understood within Marxism and, by extension, much of the post-work and post-capitalist thinking. Ultimately, we argue, the association of the transcendence of capitalist social relations with the transcendence of work misses what is specific about capitalism, which is not the kind of productive activity it features but the social conditions that underpin a society where we must work to live in the first place and the specific social forms the results of production assume in the market and society as a whole. According to Marx, labour in capitalism exists in two forms: concrete and abstract. Concrete labour is defined as concrete activity. The other side of concrete labour, or the second form of existence of labour in capitalism, is abstract labour. Abstract labour attains an unpalpable form of existence in the exchange of commodities, regardless of the form of expenditure of the concrete labour that created them. What constitutes the substance of value is not, then, concrete labour, the expenditure of human energy, but abstract labour – a social form abstracted from the concrete experience of work. As we shall see, this means that ‘there is a real ground to labour, but the ground to labour is not material: the ground is a social relation. In such a situation, labour is not recognised, validated or rendered equivalent as a result of any intrinsic capacity or social need, but only to the extent that it forms a part of this social generality’.¹⁰ The significance of abstract labour is that

…the social synthesis by way of abstract labor constitutes the general frame of reference for all social relations in capitalism and determines its historical trajectory at the level of its basic dynamic. This does not mean that everything is determined by the logic of labor and commodities in the strict sense. Yet this reified mediation basically constitutes the form of social relations, creating hierarchies and relations of social domination.¹¹

Abstract labour thus amounts to the ‘weaving of capitalism’, an ongoing process of abstracting from human activity the form through which capitalism weaves its web of social cohesion.¹² As we shall see, by only addressing the escape from work and not the escape from the social relations and social forms that make the dual character of work in capitalist society – labour as a concrete human activity and labour as a form of abstract mediation assumed by such activity – the post-work prospectus leaves fixed in place what its transitional measures to a post-capitalist society purport to overcome. Considering the tendencies through which automated technologies are already impacting upon the practice and experience of work, we suggest that this incomplete revolution could actually create a less dignified and more impoverished mode of existence than the one we already have.

There follows three chapters that focus in particular on UBI as a vital part of the PWP and wider programme for postcapitalist transformation. We should specify that here we refer largely to the ‘liveable’ version of the UBI that represents its radical frontier, rather than the smaller ‘top-up’ payments some schemes envisage.¹³ Where the latter simply supplements the wage, the first gives more prominence to the aspiration to replace the wage and with it a society based on work. In particular, we consider the political context into which such demands for UBI are issued. Whilst there are circumstances we could envisage where the political lay-of-the-land would present safer conditions for experimentation with a measure like the basic income, we suggest that the left should be cognisant of the improprietous conditions we are confronted with today: the proliferation of a digitally-enabled, authoritarian national-populist mode of governance – epitomised in the project of post-liberal re-globalisation currently in motion under the stewardship of the Chinese Communist Party – all aided and abetted by the rise of Silicon Valley platform capitalism.¹⁴ In different ways, the UBI already recommends itself to, and receives support from, both those who administrate the architecture of authoritarian capitalism and the pseudo-intellectual gurus of the Californian Ideology.¹⁵ Placing UBI in the concrete context in which it is received, we raise the question of just what the measure looks like in the hands of those whose interests appear contrary to the cause of an emancipatory left project of social transformation.

In Chapter 4, ‘Productivist Mandates: On Value’, we consider the extent to which, in posing itself against production, the post-work literature unwittingly reproduces a productivist standpoint that, centring work in its understanding of capitalism, places demands upon capital to redistribute the wealth work creates and reward and recompense workers for the expanse of value they produce in new forms of immaterial and ‘free’ labour. Specifically, we address how postoperaist arguments for a basic income rest upon such ‘productivist mandates’, as Kathi Weeks puts it, that apportion value to specific kinds of productive activity for which the UBI is posed as the only viable means of payment. We place against this an alternative understanding of value as something related not to the direct expenditure of concrete labour but something summoned up in the exchange of commodities and services for money. Value is here not a positive category to be laid claim to or redistributed, but a negative category of social domination from which humans must be freed in order to break with capitalism – as hard as this might be to foresee occurring. The traditional Ricardian labour theory of value that postoperaismo, despite appearances otherwise, persists in holding to, meanwhile, bestows upon the workers the power to produce value and the rightful inheritance of it in another set of social relati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Endorsement
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• 1. Post-work, Post-capitalism, Post-what? An Introduction
• 2. Futures Past and Present: On Automation
• 3. The Post-work Prospectus: On Labour
• 4. Productivist Mandates: On Value
• 5. Pennies from Heaven: On Money
• 6. Basic Income in One Country: On the State
• 7. Liquidating Labour Struggles? On Social Reproduction
• 8. Hope and Prefigurative Translation: On Utopia
• Notes
• Index