POST-SCARCITY
Verso BooksNovember 2020Selected by Alexis Zavialoff & Maia Asshaq
In Automation and the Future of Work, Aaron Benanav asks how automation affects labour and the workforce. How has a global pandemic shifted the way workers think about health, safety, redundancy, and how they use their time? Increased unemployment over the past year has led to a great deal of reflection about the future of work in general and what can be sustained in a capitalist structure. The questions addressed in this book are so timely because, in this context, the future isn’t some abstract far-off time, it is later today – or the end of this sentence. — Alexis Zavialoff and Maia Asshaq
If neither technological advancement nor technocratic reform leads inevitably to a post-scarcity world, then it is only the pressure of social movements, pushing for a radical restructuring of social life, that can bring it about. One of the most disappointing aspects of the automation discourse is its tendency to underrate existing social struggles. In their 1985 article “A Capitalist Road to Communism?”, Robert van der Veen and Philippe Van Parijs supposed that as “rapid labour-saving technical change” combined with “constraints on economic growth”, rational human action could “be relied upon to generate, sooner or later” forces that demand and implement social change. Writing 30 years later, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams despair of the forces that have been generated, which they describe as mere “folk politics”: people are reacting to the increasing complexity of the modern world, they say, by demanding a return to the simplicity of local communities and engagement in face-to-face interactions.
To despair of the emancipatory potential of today’s social struggles is not unreasonable. It would take a massive and persistent mobilisation to turn the tide of a truculent neoliberalism, yet the only movement with the size and strength to undertake this task – the historic labour movement – has been thoroughly defeated. Today, strikes and labour demonstrations are mainly defensive: workers fight to slow the pace of capital’s juggernaut and its drive for more austerity, labour flexibility, and privatisation, in response to an economic slowdown that never ends, but does get worse. The labour movement has never figured out how to respond to technologically induced job loss under conditions of slowing economic growth. As economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck put it, “disorganised capitalism is disorganising not only itself but its opposition as well.” For this reason, the long descent into economic stagnation has not been accompanied by a renewal of mass working-class organisations.
Nevertheless, in the years since the 2008 crisis, this political stasis has shown signs of cracking. Social struggles have unfolded on a scale not seen for decades. There have been waves of strikes and social movements across six continents – from China and Hong Kong to Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon, from Argentina and Chile to France and Greece, and from Australia and Indonesia to the United States – with mass protests erupting again, worldwide, in 2019. Masses of people have once again joined work stoppages, occupations, blockades, riots, and demonstrations, protesting against the symptoms of a long-term decline in the demand for labour, including rising inequality, employment insecurity, government corruption, and austerity measures, as well as food, energy, and transportation price hikes. Protestors have come out en masse in response to murders at the hands of the police, which sparked the rage of racialised communities who would no longer stand for their lack of social recognition.
To be sure, these explosive movements have so far lacked the staying power to force recalcitrant governments into retreat, and they have suffered reversals and defeats. But they have nevertheless broadened political horizons and radicalised a new generation of militants. Perhaps our era is like the mid-19th century not only because it has produced utopian visionaries, but also because it has generated new constituencies for emancipatory social change. Objective features of the past decade support this hypothesis: ours has been the most broadly educated, most urban and most connected population in world history. As journalist Paul Mason notes, literate and mobile people “will not accept a future of high inequality and stagnant growth” on a planet with rising sea levels. Whether this will bring us closer to a freer future is an open question.
In early 2020, the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic temporarily halted the globalisation of social struggles, but, with the simultaneous onset of a deep global recession, they are now beginning to resurge. What is certain is that, if these social movements take hold as more permanent formations, they are unlikely to look like the labour movements of earlier centuries. Vast discontinuities separate our era from theirs. Those labour movements arose during a long period of industrialisation, whereas we live in the post-industrial doldrums: ours will be a struggle over the consequences of industrialisation’s end. This is not to deny the global economy’s continuing dependence on industrial production, or the ongoing existence of factory workers. But the declining share of manufacturing in total employment means that these workers no longer have the capacity to cast themselves as representatives of a more just and rational future order. Even countries like South Africa, South Korea, and Brazil – which industrialised only recently, and where manufacturing workers were pivotal in the struggles for democracy of the 1970s and 1980s – have long become majority service-sector economies.
This change in the composition of the labour force will reshape social movements today in essential respects. Though the automation discourse tends to overemphasise this trend, it is true that direct human labour plays a much smaller role in the core industries than it did before; as Marx predicted, it has largely been displaced as the primary productive force by scientific and technical knowledge, embodied in vast infrastructures that mobilise both natural forces and machines. Many workers have been cast aside, forced to give up much of their waking lives to dead-end service jobs in which labour productivity rises slowly. Therefore, the dynamic struggles that animated earlier generations of workers – those concerning who should benefit from continual productivity growth – fail to take place. For most workers today, capital’s compulsion to drive down production costs means only that labour intensifies, without corresponding increases in pay, which does not mean that workplace struggles are not occurring. It is only to say that their determining logics have evidently changed.
Some left commentators have argued that however disaffected insecure workers become, they lack the power at the point of production necessary to press their demands. Yet, as it turns out, in a world of lean, just-in-time production, organising to blockade circulation in and around major cities can prove an effective tactic. An early example is the piquetero movement in Argentina: beginning in the mid-1990s, unemployed workers blockaded highways around Buenos Aires to demand better benefits. Since 2011, this tactic has been adopted sporadically by workers in the United States, France, Egypt, and elsewhere.
In the autonomous spaces that open up in the course of major struggles, movement participants pose questions about the nature and future of society. Assemblies are generally open to all. If personal and intimate forms of coercion are not altogether absent, there is nevertheless a shared sense that everyone deserves a say in social affairs. Within occupations and on the frontlines of blockades, people do actually care for one another. They cook and clean and look after the children without expecting anything in return, although they have, of course, generally purchased the materials they use to perform these tasks within the ordinary course of the life they seek to disrupt by such actions. These efforts do not merely indicate a penchant for a simpler life – whether in folk or völkish terms. Instead they point, however fitfully, toward a world of generalised human dignity, one with fewer borders and boundaries.
No matter how large they become, these protests have so far been unable to escape the limits confronted by all struggles over the collective reproduction of the working class, whose deterioration, under the pressures of stagnating wages, employment insecurity, and welfare-state retreat, has been extreme. These movements fail to rise from the level of reproduction to that of production, even when they call forth and combine with strikes in what remains of the industrial core. However much hope they inspire amid the catastrophe of the present, the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic notwithstanding, disruptive protests in our era have so far lacked a vision of a wholly different world: in which the infrastructures of capitalist societies are brought under collective control, work is reorganised and redistributed, scarcity is overcome through the free giving of goods and services, and our human capacities are correspondingly enlarged as new vistas of existential security and freedom open up. ◉
Benanav describes a post-scarcity world as one in which “all individuals are guaranteed access to whatever they need to make a life, without exception”.
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams described the concept of “folk politics” in their influential book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015). Benanav’s book develops and critiques many of the ideas popularised by Inventing the Future, such as the demand for a universal basic income and the embrace of automation by the left.
In Capital (1867), Marx argued that the productivity gains of labour-replacing technologies would create an ever-growing “industrial reserve army” of redundant labourers.