A World Beyond Work?: Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia [2021 ed.]

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A WORLD BEYOND WORK?

SocietyNow SocietyNow: short, informed books, explaining why our world is the way it is, now. The SocietyNow series provides readers with a definitive snapshot of the events, phenomena and issues that are defining our twenty-first century world. Written leading experts in their fields, and publishing as each subject is being contemplated across the globe, titles in the series offer a thoughtful, concise and rapid response to the major political and economic events and social and cultural trends of our time. SocietyNow makes the best of academic expertise accessible to a wider audience, to help readers untangle the complexities of each topic and make sense of our world the way it is, now. Poverty in Britain: Causes, Consequences and Myths Tracy Shildrick The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016 Peter Kivisto Becoming Digital: Towards a Post-Internet Society Vincent Mosco Understanding Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union Graham Taylor Selfies: Why We Love (and Hate) Them Katrin Tiidenberg Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online Crystal Abidin

Corbynism: A Critical Approach Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts The Smart City in a Digital World Vincent Mosco Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century Ellis Cashmore Reality Television: The TV Phenomenon that Changed the World Ruth A. Deller Digital Detox: The Politics of Disconnecting Trine Syvertsen The Olympic Games: A Critical Approach Helen Jefferson Lenskyj

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Praise for A World Beyond Work?

A World Beyond Work? is one of the great books of our generation. The future of work and the notion of basic income are topics on which every active citizen must form a view. Too often, these topics are discussed by referring to money and the state in an untheorised and, ultimately, na¨ıve way. Dinerstein and Pitts avoid these pitfalls by drawing on the work of Marx. Political issues and issues in the social sciences compete for attention and, sometimes, have an ephemeral feel. A World Beyond Work? is different. It is a landmark. We shall be consulting Dinerstein and Pitts for years. –Richard Gunn, co-founder of open Marxism As we look towards building the economic order of the twenty-first century, postcapitalist and post-work visions capture the interest of many across the left and beyond. Dinerstein and Pitts undertake the necessary work of taking this stance seriously, offering a balanced, dense, thoughtful and enriching critique. –Alessandro Gandini, University of Milan This is a timely and important book. In it, Dinerstein and Pitts carefully dissect loose arguments that automation and basic income necessarily promise a better future. Their theoretical and empirical rigour offer a vital corrective to misplaced and uncritical hope and invite scholars and activists to

think carefully about the demands they are making, how, and why. –Neil Howard, University of Bath Ana Cecilia Dinerstein and Frederick Harry Pitts’ book is a fundamental contribution to the debate on post-capitalist utopias. The coronavirus crisis has accelerated the morbid symptoms of austerity-driven capitalism, and we must develop new strategies to escape the increasingly authoritarian trends of nationstates. A World Beyond Work offers a blueprint ready to develop a future against and beyond capitalism. This will be an essential read for the next decade. ` –Monica Clua Losada, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley With an insightful combination of theoretical debates on political economy, the State and social change, this book offers a perceptive debunking of political practice today for a new radical horizon, this book is a must read in these dire times. –Mariano F´eliz, National University of La Plata This book offers a scholarly contribution to studies of value, work, (un)employment, and social movements in the twenty-first Century. This is also a book about hope and creativity at a time of narrow horizons and bleak pessimism. It brings to us a world with new possibilities of freedom. Dinerstein and Pitts point to new pathways to this world – pathways broader than postwar social

democracy, more radical than the traditional communist parties, and carefully attuned to our own times of overlapping crises of profitability, living standards, health and the environment. A must! –Alfredo Saad-Filho, King’s College London This is a ground-breaking contribution to debates about the future of work, mechanisation and social reproduction. Anyone interested in these themes – and particularly the highly topical issue of universal basic income – should read Dinerstein’s and Pitts’ powerful critique. The authors offer a vital antidote to the technological utopianism widespread on the left today. ¨ –Adrian Wilding, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin The book provides a sustained critique of the notion that we are on the verge of a post-work society, where the travails of wage labour will be overcome by a fully automated production process, underpinned by a universal basic income. Grounded in Karl Marx’s value theory of labour, the authors argue human emancipation cannot be dependent on state handouts; but, rather, on the everyday prefigurative struggles of grassroots social movements. Study this book. –Mike Neary, Emeritus professor, University of Lincoln

Discussing the world to come is essential, but even more important is where we stand to enter this important debate. This book offers an open Marxist critique of the post-capitalist UBI and automation-based utopia by placing ‘uncomfortable’ categories (value, money, state, and class struggle) at the center of the analysis to comprehend the contradictory dynamics and emancipatory power of concrete struggles (utopias) against the world of money. –Luciana Ghiotto, University of San Martin A World Beyond Work? is a spirited and rigorous counter argument to the pro UBI Post-Work Prospectus school. The careful ways in which Dinerstein and Pitts have mobilised open Marxist theory, contemporary left politics and case studies of social movements within and outside the UK makes this book both intellectually and politically powerful. Written in pre COVID times, it will be a must read for Marxist and non-Marxist scholars of work in years to come. –Maud Perrier, University of Bristol

A WORLD BEYOND WORK? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia

BY

ANA CECILIA DINERSTEIN University of Bath AND

FREDERICK HARRY PITTS University of Bristol

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2021 Copyright © 2021 Ana Cecilia Dinerstein and Frederick Harry Pitts. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited. Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78769-146-9 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-78769-143-8 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-78769-145-2 (Epub)

For Elsie, Nico and Owain

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CONTENTS About the Authors

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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

1 17 47 69 87 101 117 139

Notes

171

Index

209

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein is Reader in Sociology at University of Bath. Her publications include The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope (Palgrave, 2015), Social Sciences for An-Other Politics: Women Theorising without Parachutes (Editor, Palgrave, 2016), and Open Marxism 4: Against a Closing World (Editor, Pluto Press, 2019). Frederick Harry Pitts is Lecturer in Work, Organisation & Public Policy at University of Bristol School of Management. He is author of Value (Polity, 2020), Corbynism: A Critical Approach (Emerald, 2018) and Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx (Palgrave, 2017), and co-edits Futures of Work (Bristol University Press).

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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 postwork 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

1

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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 socialdemocratic 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

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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

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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 postwork 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 postliberal 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

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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.

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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

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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. pppp 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

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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 labourtime 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

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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

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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 nationalpopulist 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

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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 relations. We refute the suggestion that capitalism faces such a crisis, and that basic income in any way enables the development of another society out of the ruins of the present one. We explore historical parallels between the populist ‘Share Our Wealth’ movement that confronted the Roosevelt administration in the United States in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and the alternative policy agenda represented in the New Deal, which, whilst as beholden to the state and to money as the basic income today,

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charted a different path through the contradictions of life and labour in capitalist society by keeping open the space for the working through of antagonisms that we go on to conceptualise in more detail in later chapters. In Chapter 5, ‘Pennies from Heaven: On Money’, we consider how an understanding of money as a form of social mediation in present society within which is implied and concealed the class antagonism. This complicates appeals to a basic income as a solution to poverty and inequality and as a transitional measure opening the path, via the post-work society, to a post-capitalist future. Outlining the centrality of the critique of money to the open Marxist approach we utilise in the book, we juxtapose how post-work and post-capitalist advocacy of a basic income presents money as a neutral category of account and exchange, rather than a social form within which capitalist social relations are mediated. The danger inherent in such an approach, we suggest, is that the power of money is expanded through its association with a premature universality and identification solely with the state’s capacity to regulate and police society, closing off the routes through which workers can struggle and bargain over a wage in which the antagonistic stakes between the buyer and seller of labour power enable room to move through the play of mediation. The role of the state here is explored in more detail in the next Chapter 6, ‘Basic Income in One Country: On the State’, where we interrogate in more depth the nation state’s character as a capitalist state, rather than simply as a neutral instrument wielded in capitalist society by different actors, interests and groups. We suggest that the state underpins many of the transitional measures proposed in the post-work prospectus without the latter sufficiently theorising the limitations this places upon the capacity to translate these measures into a viable post-capitalist alternative. However, recognising that it is necessary to work ‘in, against and beyond’ the state in pursuit of

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any realistic project of social transformation, we evaluate the strategic orientation struck by the post-work left in the development of the basic income as a ‘directional demand’ addressed to the possibilities opened by the realities of contemporary capitalist restructuring in the wake of recent crises. Whilst this is pragmatic, it runs the risk of reinforcing the character of the capitalist state at a time where the reproduction of capitalist social relations is increasingly best guaranteed by an authoritarian post-neoliberal mode of governance. Using the Modi government’s consideration of the implementation of the basic income in India as an example, we speculate over the possible directions measures such as the basic income might take in the context of authoritarian national populism and the interventionist way that it seeks to wield state power in support of projects of national renewal and identitarian exclusion. In Chapter 7, ‘Liquidating Labour Struggles? On Social Reproduction’, we draw upon Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory to illuminate the implications of the concept of labour power for how we understand life under capitalism and the struggles – by turns defensive and offensive – necessary to create an alternative. Where some advocates see the basic income offering workers greater capacity to bargain and barter for better wages and conditions, the world into which basic income steps as a measure suggests that such hopes will die hard. The measure effectively replaces conflict at the workplace and in wider society with an ‘illusional’ direct relationship of superintendence between citizens and the state, when in fact, citizens are bearers of abstract rights that mediate between them. But within these forms of mediation we suggest that it is important that left politics must keep open the space for ‘labour’ struggles – conceived here expansively to include both production and social reproduction – in and against the value form, to move freely to transform society from the bottom up.

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In Chapter 8, ‘Hope and Prefigurative Translation: On Utopia’, we use Ernst Bloch’s critical delineation of ‘concrete utopia’ to explore the Unemployed Workers Organisations in Argentina, an empirical example of where the meaning of work was fought over in a different set of institutional dynamics that translated social movement practices into state policy whilst keeping open a radical remainder in which antagonisms and contradictions played out. Generating an ‘excess’ or ‘utopian surplus’ that could not be translated into state policy and experimenting with new organisational forms and practices, they reopened the labour question to society as a whole. Whilst imperfect and unstable, we suggest that these experiments hold lessons for how we reimagine work and its futures through new mediations in other contexts too, such as in the UK and Europe, where nascent networks of cooperatives for unorganised, unrepresented groups like the precariously selfemployed have sprung up in recent years. The crucial question for interventions into the futures of work is how to maintain an autonomous space of society standing between workers and the capitalist state that governs them, navigating the terrain of social and political contestation, without succumbing to the easy answers offered by the transitional programme of post-work and post-capitalist thought, which runs the risk of reinforcing social domination at the hands of the abstract forms power assumes in capitalist society rather than providing grounds for emancipation from them. We discuss an alternative approach that involves the prefigurative translation of grassroots innovations into new mediations beyond the state, rendering ‘policy’ not a privilege of the state, but a result of struggles around the form of policy. We suggest that any alternative to the present state of things would need to move through real abstractions and capitalist mediations in order to establish new ones, rather than seek an immediacy

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whose impossibility makes its fruitless pursuit politically dangerous. pppp The germ of the writings brought together in this book was a one-day conference held at the University of Bath in January 2016, ‘Marx in the Key of Hope’, supported by Economic and Social Research Council’s South West Doctoral Training Partnership (SWDTP) Academic-Led Collaboration Funding. Thanks to the SWDTP and all participants in the event for their support and input. We have shared earlier versions of the work presented here in a series of talks and seminars over the previous few years: a seminar at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath in December 2017; the Latin American and European Organization Studies (LAEMOS) 2018 stream ‘Organizing Resilience In, Against and Beyond Capital’ at the Instituto Argentino de Enseñanza (IAE), Business School, Universidad Austral, Buenos Aires in April 2018; the workshop ’The Post-Wage Economy: Re-theorising “work” across the global North-South divide’, hosted by the School of Geography and the Centre on Labour and Global Production at Queen Mary University of London in June 2018; ‘Money, State and Crisis’, a symposium at the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, University of Leicester in April 2019; and the Alternatives to Capitalism stream at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Conference in at the New School, New York in June 2019. Thanks to organisers, participants and respondents for their invitations and comments. We would also like to thank Tonia Novitz and Will Stronge for comments on a working paper presenting some of the main themes of the book in an earlier iteration. Most of all, ` we are grateful to Greig Charnock, Monica Clua Losada, Mariano F´eliz, Alessandro Gandini, Luciana Ghiotto, Neil

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Howard, Mike Neary, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Richard Gunn, Maud Perrier, Paris Selinas and Adrian Wilding for reading and commenting on the final draft of the book: their generous comments and corrections have truly enriched the book. All the usual disclaimers apply. The book comprises material published in a previous form as the following: Dinerstein, A. C. (2014). The dream of dignified work: On good and bad utopias. Development and Change, 45(5), 1037–1058; Dinerstein, A. C. (2015). The politics of autonomy in Latin America. The art of organising hope. Palgrave Macmillan; Dinerstein, A. C., & Pitts, F. H. (2018). From post-work to postcapitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction. Journal of Labor and Society, 21(4), 471–491; Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017). Postcapitalism, basic income and the end of work: A critique and alternative. Bath Papers in International Development and Wellbeing (No. 55); Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017). Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction. Capital & Class, 41(3), 423–434; Pitts, F. H. (2020). Creative labour, metabolic rift and the crisis of social reproduction. In M. Banks & K. Oakley (Eds.), Cultural industries and the environmental crisis: New approaches for policy. Palgrave Macmillan; and Pitts, F. H. (2018). A crisis of measurability? Critiquing postoperaismo on labour, value and the basic income. Capital & Class, 42(1), 3–21. We would like to thank the editors, reviewers and publishers of these articles, working papers and chapters for their comments on the original publications and permissions to reuse and renew the content in this book where applicable. Bristol, May 2020 pppp

2 FUTURES PAST AND PRESENT ON AUTOMATION

The main question confronting analyses and debates about automation today is whether this time is different. There have been many predictions through time that automation will lay waste to the economy, displace jobs and tear apart the labour market, with all the social and political consequences that implies. In this chapter we will take a brief tour through the history of these claims in order to try to evaluate whether the time we are living in is in any sense different from the past. Evidently, automation on a mass scale has not happened yet, despite automation being a consistent part of the organisation and reorganisation of work in capitalist society, but is there anything about our own time that enables a different outcome? First, we will survey these claims from the Industrial Revolution onwards, up to the present time of ‘platform capitalism’. We will then consider the state of play today, and in particular the prognoses of those who see in the present the potential for a level of automation previously unattainable in earlier periods where some of the same tendencies were in motion. We will then consider those analyses that have sought to pour cold water on

17

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the claims of those who anticipate large-scale automation of production around the corner and the methodological and theoretical bones of contention that lead them to do so. We will follow these analyses by applying insights from political economy and organisation studies to the question of automation, looking at how labour relations, financialisation and the state impact upon the extent to which investment and implementation of new technology lives up to some of the visions disseminated in the growing literature around automation. Ultimately this places technology in its social, political and economic context rather than seeing it as a force unto itself. Labour-saving technological innovations can be divided between those that are labour-substituting, insofar as they replace human labour and abolish certain jobs entirely, or labour-augmenting, insofar as they render work and workers more productive in jobs that continue to exist.1 ‘Automation’ is generally taken to refer to the ‘labour-substituting’ end of the spectrum, although, as we will see, a lot of the empirical and methodological debate about the prospects for automation rests on whether new workplace technologies either destroy or augment existing jobs and tasks. This debate centres on what Aaron Benanav terms the ‘automation discourse’, a way of talking about and thinking about the future of work in capitalist society that periodically rears its head at times of crisis and uncertainty.2 However, it is not so easy as to merely dismiss this discourse as a kind of false consciousness uprooted from reality. The way that people talk about the future has a performative effect, discursively constructing a reality that takes flesh in the actions of governments and firms. The ‘fourth industrial revolution’ is summoned up by consultants and other bodies like the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Deloitte, its effects forecast through contested forms of

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statistical and anecdotal evidence and numerous airport bestsellers, and the expectations of an inevitable future used to structure how firms are advised to reorganise their workplaces and workforces, how investors are advised to allocate their wealth, and how governments create policies and incentives to regulate and promote the desired outcomes.3 This is not a conspiracy, cooked up by consultants to sell clients problems and the solutions that follow – rather, the question is why this discourse should lie so close at hand now, at this specific moment in time. What are the material bases for the fact that capitalist development should present itself as an accumulation of technological potentialities leading seemingly inexorably to an eradication of jobs? Specifically, it can be seen to relate to worries about a widespread low demand for labour manifested in unemployment and underemployment, and a decline in the share of income labour receives in the economy as a whole.4 But because these phenomena never quite disappear, and recur in different guises throughout time, so too does the automation discourse persist, assuming new forms every two decades or so. As we will see, this often has less to do with incipient technological possibilities as it does with contradictions in capitalist political economy, and in particular the longstanding pull of secular economic stagnation in the second part of the twentieth century and first part of the twenty-first century. Moreover, because automation is not a new or novel phenomenon, but rather a tendency present in capitalism since its inception, the automation discourse has always accompanied it. Here we will consider the ups and downs of the automation discourse with reference to waves of capitalist development and accumulation. Wave theory, according to leading post-capitalist thinker Paul Mason, suggests that, ‘beyond short-term business cycles, there is evidence of a longer, fifty-year pattern whose turning points coincide

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within capitalism and major conflicts’. Each ‘long cycle’ or wave has an upswing lasting about 25 years, ‘fuelled by the deployment of new technologies and high capital investment’, with capital flowing to productive industries, and a downswing of about the same length, usually ending with a depression preceded by frequent recessions fuelled by capital getting ‘trapped in the finance system’. Importantly, the seeds for the upswing are sown in the downswing. Slowdowns see a reduction of productive capital investment, an increase in savings and the hoarding of capital in financial streams of investment where no other profitable outlets exist. But this provides the basis for a new upswing by lowering interest rates and generating a source of cheap capital conveniently ‘accumulated, centralised and mobilised in the financial system’, sometimes with an increase in the flow of money through schemes like quantitative easing.5 This stimulates the rollout of new technologies and the rise of new business models and organisational paradigms, which, as we will see, attract their own iteration of the ‘automation discourse’. pppp The automation discourse has been around as long as industrial capitalism even began its first rumblings with the waning of feudal society. With this began what Brynjolfsson and McAfee call the ‘first machine age’, wherein work was typically organised around a strict division of labour with tasks fragmented and standardised, rendering it susceptible to automation.6 As we shall see, whilst this did occur in some sectors and industries, it seldom lived up to the worst fears or best hopes of techno-dystopians and techno-utopians. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century onward, the rise of the factory system induced concern and trepidation for the short- and long-run effects of

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introducing new technology into the workplace, including among classical political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo.7 Hours of work reached their peak in capitalist society in the early nineteenth century, with weekly working hours of as much as 70 hours a week, falling rapidly thereafter.8 This happened in a context of technological upheaval, as textile production was partially automated with new machines, drawing the apocalyptic vision of the Luddites who protested what they saw as impending technological unemployment by destroying machines.9 In a manner typical of subsequent moral panics about automation, the Luddites’ worst fears were confounded by political-economic circumstances. The kind of mechanisation current in the early nineteenth century was financially worthwhile to capitalists to the extent that it replaced only some labour, but not all. Meanwhile, the new technology made possible new forms of work to superintend it, such as mechanics to maintain machines, supervisors to oversee shopfloor life, and accountants to deal with the complex new bookkeeping necessary to measure production in rising industries. Moreover, the technology produced new and innovative commodities that in turn increased demand for new sectors of production, and the workers freed from labour in technologically superseded forms of work engaged in new activities and demanded new services that themselves created new job categories.10 Following the initial upswing of the Industrial Revolution, which witnessed high capital investment in productive industries, a downswing followed as capital clogged up elsewhere, resulting in a depression in 1820s which put paid to the more exuberant visions of automation and technological dynamism.11 The depression created the space for nascent industrial capitalism to renew itself around the advent of machinery and the introduction of ‘machinofacture’ as a new production

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system.12 By the mid-nineteenth century, the prospect of imminent automation of vast swathes of industry, with unmanned factories and attendant unemployment on a mass scale, once again entered the frame. The 1830s were awash with the equivalents of today’s airport bestsellers.13 A financial crisis and long depression followed, temporarily depriving such imaginaries of their material basis, but out of which the ground was set for new technologies to solve the social and economic problems that resulted from the turmoil.14 The aftermath of the crisis set in train the impressive gains in capitalist production identified with the Industrial Revolution and the long boom that followed it, propelled by heavy industry and electrical engineering. Out of this sprang a new production system through which work was organised and managed-Taylorist scientific management. In the wake of the recovery and the rise of this new paradigm, labour productivity skyrocketed from 1870 onwards without let up, increasing 15 times in the United States and 18 times in Europe in the century or so up to 1998. But, confounding attempts to see in this productive dynamism the potential for a reduction in human labour, the transformative technological impact on productivity did little to alter the underlying tendency of long work hours. Where shorter working hours were secured, this rested less on technology than on state policy spurred on by worker struggle through unions and new political organisations.15 Growing worker power was tied to capital’s dependence on human labour. Into the twentieth century, the employment-to-population ratio actually rose, and, cyclical fluctuations aside, there was and has been no longer-run increase in unemployment – although, as we shall go on to consider, underemployment is another issue. pppp

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Utopian and dystopian expectations of workerless automated factories once again reappeared in the 1930s.16 Work hours fell in capitalist economies and the Great Depression sparked high unemployment.17 The economist John Maynard Keynes saw in these conditions a future whereby machines would reduce work to a minimum – he predicted only a 15-hour week – by 2030.18 But such visions were reading into the present worklessness something that was not necessarily there. Economic conditions were dictating a reduction in employment due to the failure of the market to provide for the creation of new jobs amidst the wreckage of the Great Depression. This did not stop some from blaming technological development – just as, some might suggest, commentators have seen in the aftereffects of the Great Recession of 2007–2009 a wave of unemployment owing to digitalisation and mechanisation when macroeconomic factors and aggregate demand better fit the frame.19 But the damage wrought by the Great Depression in the wake of the Wall Street Crash was repaired by the mass state investment in industry in the Second World War, whereby the war machine paved the path for reconstruction once peace was won, taking advantage of new technological developments like transistors and synthetic materials and the advent of mass consumer goods underpinned by the ‘mass production’ model of Fordism.20 In response, the 1950s and 1960s saw anticipation of automated factories and so on percolate once again. Post-war worker power granted assertiveness in collective bargaining, producing a tendency in some unionised sectors towards shorter working hours.21 General Motors installed the first industrial robot in 1961.22 In the wake of such developments, fears of technological unemployment reached such a pitch that in 1964 President Johnson commissioned an inquiry into automation and the widely accepted prospect that productivity increases were at such a pace as to rapidly deplete the

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demand for labour.23 At the same time as the commission was appointed, another set of academics and public intellectuals issued the ‘Triple Revolution’ report, which predicted mass job loss in the years to come.24 However, as the presidential commission concluded, such fears were misplaced. In the 1960s, it was precisely in those enterprises where technological innovation was most rapid that employment grew the most – because, as successive predictions of imminent automated job loss have missed, productivity increases decreased prices creating more demand for the products.25 The shorter working hours that workers had bargained for did not stabilise in longer-run reductions because of the massive expansion of consumer desire stoked by investments in advertising and product development. Workers increasingly prioritised the capacity to consume, which led to longer working hours as unions bargained for better pay rather than shorter hours.26 These boom years busted with the Oil Shock of 1973. A long downturn followed, within which underlying profitability was so weak as to deter any substantial investment in new technology.27 Meanwhile, whereas in the post-war period a strong welfare state and trade union power granted workers high wages in support of expanded consumption, the 1970s instigated a retrenchment in the welfare state and the gradual decline of trade unionism, leading to a situation where workers turned to credit to sustain consumption and worked longer hours to service the debt. The rise of neoliberalism also witnessed the interweaving of the financialised infrastructure supporting this economy of debt and credit with an increasingly consumerist society, at the same time as workers were deprived of the means to weather the storm in their workplaces and seek out bargains around productivity, time and wages.28 The recovery from the downturn saw some signs of an upswing on the back of information and communication

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technologies and digital networks, in the wake of which the next iteration of the automation discourse arrived in the 1980s and ran into the 1990s.29 A mode of work organisation developed whereby the ‘deep and extensive use of ICT’ was ‘key to production flexibility’, with a trend towards information intensity as a key feature of production, rather than energy or material intensity.30 Labour came to incorporate multitasking, teamworking and individualised payment systems to a much greater degree. Worker bargaining power having declined with the rise of neoliberalism, and with it the infrastructure through which shorter working hours and higher wages had been achieved, the discourse was auspiciously driven by technological trends, namely advances in computerisation.31 Most notably, the discourse found favour in the work of Jeremy Rifkin, whose End of Work traded in the same anecdotal evidence base as many bestsellers today.32 In the mid1990s, the economy was booming around the eventually inflated promise of the internet and new information technologies. Whilst the effects of information technology may have switched some jobs between statistical categories, the accounting concealed that little changed, and if anything new technologies had served to intensify and extend the working day for many workers.33 In this context, it was not so much the technology itself that failed in bringing about the anticipated shock to the society of work, but rather economic conditions related to the contingencies of a model of production and consumption that rested not on standardised goods as in previous iterations of capitalism but a ‘diversified set of low-volume products’ for ‘segmented’ markets ‘tailored to specific local conditions’.34 Underlying contradictions in the character of contemporary capitalist accumulation manifested in the Dot.Com bubble bursting, and with it investment in new technology, sending the techno-utopian expectations of

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the age up in flames.35 But, whilst feeding the vast overinflation of tech stocks that led to the Dot.Com boom and eventual bust, the late-nineties/early-noughties overinvestment in servers and millions of miles of fibreoptics and submarine cables did lay the material and technological foundations for the next upswing, which saw the early rise of what later became known as ‘platform capitalism’. As Nick Srnicek describes, the financial foundations were also set in government and central bank responses to the crisis, with technological overcapacity accompanied by easy monetary policy – ‘asset-price Keynesianism’ – that sought to boost the economy on the back of stock market surges and thus provided cheap capital to new ventures. These favourable financial conditions continued even in spite of the Great Recession following the 2008 financial crash, with the low interest rate environment that trailed in its wake (and persists today) having a buoyant effect on the nascent digital economy by reducing yield on financial assets and driving investors, in the absence of viable options for investment in a sluggish manufacturing sector, into taking risks on often unprofitable platform businesses with few employees. Whereas the top firms in 1962, like AT&T, Exxon and General Motors (GM) employed hundreds of thousands of workers, Google and Facebook’s workforces number in the tens of thousands, and companies like WhatsApp and Instagram have been sold for billions whilst employing only tens of workers. In so doing, capital flowed into the production and circulation of a new kind of commodity – data, around which a spate of large monopolistic firms – platform giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook and so on – have sprung. The novel production system of this age of enterprise, the ‘platform’, represents a ‘digital infrastructure that enables two or more groups to interact’ by intermediating between different users – customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers. Firms then profit from these interactions by monopolising, extracting,

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analysing and using the data produced. This is not confined to the service sector, but increasingly shapes industrial production through the nascent ‘internet of things’, deployed through platforms by firms like GE and Siemens who build and own hardware and software to transform manufacturing and other industries into internet-connected processes into lower production costs and turn goods into services. This includes embedding servers and computer chips into the production process, linked together over the internet. Components can therefore communicate independently of workers and managers.36 Thus far, this incarnation of capitalism has not produced substantial displacement of work or workers through the implementation of new technology. Just as some saw, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, a technological cause to unemployment, some too saw the same in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but after 2008, just as in the 1930s, job losses owed more to macroeconomic pressures like aggregate demand than technological factors, and, in the case of those countries where unemployment was felt most acutely, such as Greece and Spain, was often the outcome of macroeconomic issues like sovereign debt crises and severe trade deficits.37 In this context, new technology has been as likely to reshape as replace jobs. From 1989 to 2017 there was an increase of 118 million jobs in the United States.38 In the world’s largest and most advanced economies, employment-to-population ratios are at a high.39 To the extent that working hours have fallen since 2000 – 75 hours a year in countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – the decline has been distributed unevenly among an increasingly ‘hourglass’ shaped labour market of vast disparities in work and worklessness.40 There has been particular growth in interactive and personal service roles, as well as higher-level IT and systems jobs and associated professional services, reflecting the new forms of work produced by technological

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change.41 Since the Great Recession, employment in the United Kingdom has increased, with hours remaining static and real wages plummeting, as a range of new precarious forms of employment have populated the labour market statistics, often owing to the new kinds of economic activity produced or facilitated by the rise of the platform.42 Specifically, we have seen a rise in warehousing and logistics employment, such as in Amazon’s ‘fulfillment centres’.43 Moreover, the platform economy is sustained by the proliferation of a range of physical jobs, including mining, mineral extraction and waste disposal, that create and recycle the hardware, and the sales and marketing jobs that help circulate them.44 Hence, technology and new forms of employment – often exploitative and of low quality – appear to go hand in hand in the platform economy, with technology creating new forms of labour supply and flexibly specialising or deskilling work, with a commensurate impact on the wages workers receive in return.45 Specifically, logistics and warehousing have witnessed a considerable boom not only due to the massive supply chains that connect the global economy today, but because of the facilitation of the buying and selling of goods by the platform firms.46 Predictions in the early 1990s suggested that warehouse labour would reduce by 25% in the United States due to automation, but it grew by 27% in the decade up to 2000 and after that took off even further, rising 83% by 2017 in spite of recessions and new technologies – the latter actually propelling employment by making possible the intensified and more efficient tracking and tracing of goods in what have become known as ‘logistics clusters’ servicing major cities. Indeed, transportation is one of the few sectors in which investment in information processing and industrial equipment has risen since the 1990s.47 The expansion of this sector and the labour

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it employs has perhaps been the most notable impact of the rise of the platform as an organisational form. pppp This bring us up to the present day. What would Keynes, who suggested in 1930 that a century on we would work only 15 hours a week in a state of automated luxury, have made of the way things panned out? Our brief detour through the history of the automation discourse in theory and practice shows us that, in spite of technological developments, work is a persistent part of everyday economic life. Technology has not replaced work, but created new forms of work and augmented others, often with negative consequences for those who perform it. Working hours around the world are often more than double the 15 per week Keynes foresaw. All the historical instances of anticipated automation above were confounded by factors Keynes seemed to miss, such as the impact of the relative strength and weakness of worker bargaining power on the pursuit of shorter working hours, or the expansion of a consumer society as a driving force behind an increase in the amount of work and working hours individuals performed to sustain their lifestyles.48 But what does the future hold? Whilst there has so far been no evidence that the current ‘wave’ has increased tendencies towards automation, this has not stopped the discourse developing once again. It is here that we enter what Brynjolfsson and McAfee call the ‘second machine age’, characterised by the rapidly unfolding development of digital, algorithmic and robotic technologies, including machine learning, natural language coding/programming, artificial intelligence, sensors, connectivity, cloud computing, nanotechnology, 3-D printing and the Internet of Things, which work alone and in tandem to reshape production.49 Specifically, advances in AI – formally

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defined as ‘the capability of a machine to imitate human behaviour’ – excite futurists, who see it as something akin to ‘the new electricity’. Some see in this new ‘wave’ of capitalism the potential for what did not happen in previous iterations to happen now – automation and the replacement of human labour on a mass scale. We should not, the argument goes, read off from past appearances of the automation discourse, such as those discussed above, any inevitability about how automation will reshape employment in the future.50 The coincidence of the new technologies listed previously is seen as the basis for a decisive break with the history of dreams and nightmares outdone by reality recounted earlier. The main difference is perceived to be AI and its application in automating production. ‘Moore’s law’ – the idea that digital processing power doubles every 18 months – is often cited to suggest that there is an inexorable upwards bend in the technological possibilities before us.51 Specifically, unlike the machines typically deployed in factories, it is proposed that robotics is now capable of replicating non-routine physical, cognitive and emotional labour.52 ‘Smart’ machines use a combination of software, sensors and robotics to emulate complex actions performed by humans, such as self-driving cars that are capable of perceiving and responding to live traffic situations. Moreover, such technology is capable of machine learning, so that it develops and betters itself autonomously. Meanwhile, the greater affordability of robots able to perform complex work tasks – rendered cheaper by the use of sensors rather than extensive pre-programming – is making the prospect more attractive to companies.53 The reason that this combination of AI and robotics is expected by some to automate away jobs to an extent previously unseen is that the ‘smart’ technologies to which companies have access today are capable of substituting not just routine unskilled labour – which is often low cost enough to

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not merit substitution with more expensive technology – but skilled professional work as well.54 Automation of the past, where it did have an effect, typically impacted routine, repetitive assembly and clerical work. These roles are still very much at risk.55 But advances in AI make possible the substitution of tasks that are mobile, discriminating, multifunctional, linguistic and even those that involve complex decision-making.56 On paper, the previously unavailable combination of new technologies afforded by the present moment enables the replacement of everyone from taxi drivers, truckers and warehouse operatives to doctors, translators and journalists.57 It is this expansive array of automatable jobs (or tasks, as we will go on to see) that differentiates the ‘second’ machine age from the first.58 So what fate do these technologies hold for work and workers today? The most apocalyptic predictions from economists Frey and Osborne portend that 47% of the employed population in the US work in occupations that could be replaced ‘by computers and algorithms within the next 10 to 20 years’.59 The occupations Frey and Osborne identify include retail workers and financial traders. Some countries, like Germany, are predicted to lose as many as 60% of jobs, a similar proportion in India, and up to three-quarters in China.60 In a particularly comprehensive study that goes further than Frey and Osborne in breaking down roles into capabilities, McKinsey projects that 51% of jobs in the US economy, routine and semi-routine, manual and cognitive, are susceptible to replacement by robots.61 Occupations identified are as diverse as accountants, lawyers, butchers and waiters, with ‘interfacing with stakeholders’ one of the capabilities most susceptible to automation. Closer to home, extreme estimates suggest that some 15 million jobs in the United Kingdom are at risk of automation.62

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Based on an algorithm detecting the liability of different occupations as a whole to automation, Frey and Osborne is the cornerstone evidence base for much of the contemporary automation discourse.63 But their study conflates tasks – some of which can be substituted for or reshaped by technology – with jobs, which, independent of whether certain tasks are automated, may still persist, and ‘occupations’, which is a more general category altogether. Frey and Osborne award waiters a 94% automatability rating, for instance, but this abstracts the routineness of the occupation from the context of the social interaction in which it takes place, without which the service encounter on which a lot of hospitality rests would be meaningless.64 Moreover, this work is often based on a business model resting on the extraction of maximum effort for minimum cost, which raises the question as to why employers would invest in labour-substituting technology – especially when the evidence shows that wage-raising measures like minimum wages make it more likely that low-skilled work will be automated.65 The leading counterpoint to Frey and Osborne is the OECD study by Arntz and his co-authors, which goes much further than McKinsey in bringing a task-based perspective to bear against the susceptibility of employment to replacement by automation.66 This approach shows that the heterogeneity and adaptability of tasks within individual occupations means that rather than half of occupations being vulnerable to automation, only 9% of total employment in the 21 OECD countries is at risk, measured by a prevalence of 70% of automatable tasks or more within a given occupation.67 Even the McKinsey study suggests that, whilst around half of jobs could on paper be automated, only 5% of occupations themselves could be automated in full, with the great amount of jobs devoted to people management, expertise, planning,

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creativity and personal interaction the most resistant to any automation whatsoever.68 Like Arntz et al., the McKinsey study is also distinguished by giving due consideration to wider factors than the technological possibilities alone. The study dwells on the broader context within which technology is implemented, such as costs of the technology, the existing cost and availability of labour, the impact of automation on productivity and quality, and regulatory, ethical and socio-political issues around implementation. Placed in this context, due to the lack of sophistication that robots still exhibit in performing even the most menial factory work and the costs of programming them, the McKinsey study anticipates that rather than wholesale replacement of human labour, the new technologies are more likely to result in the augmentation of human labour, with its flexibility and ‘soft’ skills, with robotics in pursuit of greater speed and precision.69 In this way, unautomatable tasks are typically complemented by automation.70 Indeed, even Brynjolfsson and McAfee acknowledge that irreducibly human qualities of ideation and creativity will resist automation and actually generate new job opportunities in the wake of widespread job wastage elsewhere.71 pppp Modelling of the future aside, what do we actually know about what is happening right now? Bureau of Labour Statistics figures for the United States suggest very little employment churn prior to the coronavirus crisis, and recent firm-level case studies in the United States and Asia-Pacific suggest that implementation of AI was ‘notably absent’ in most companies studied.72 This is supported by the World Economic Forum’s 2016 report on The Future of Jobs, which investigated what executives saw as the main drivers of change in the present time. Only 9%

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suggested advanced robotics and fewer still AI and machine learning, whilst some 44% saw ‘changing work environment and flexible working arrangements’ as a key issue for the future, from which we can infer that executives are focused more on raising productivity through management practices rather than labour-saving technologies.73 Looking out upon this slightly underwhelming scenario when measured against the claims of the automation discourse, the Roosevelt Institute even went so far as to state that ‘while it is challenging to know what the future holds, the data are clear. We are not in the middle of a labor displacing technological boom, nor are we on the verge of rapid technological change in the near future’.74 Indeed, the prevalence of hand car washes in the UK would appear to mark a step backwards from where technology was 20 years ago – regulatory grey areas supporting the exploitation of migrants and other precarious workers at low wages that disincentivise investment in productivity-raising or laboursaving technologies.75 The seeming clash between the expectations projected in the mainstream modelling and the actuality of work on the ground owes to the absence in the former – aside from notable exceptions like Arntz et al. and the McKinsey study – of any real engagement with the political economy of contemporary capitalism, or, in other words, how politics, the state, social relations, class and so on impact upon the functioning of the economy and the decisions made by actors within it.76 Placing automation in its political economic context shows that the introduction of AI and robotics is far from inevitable and will ultimately be determined by their value and cost to capital.77 By contrast, the mainstream modelling, by focusing on a narrow understanding of the susceptibility of different tasks and occupations to automation, places emphasis on technological opportunity rather than the profitability criterion which represents the decisive factor in whether firms find

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automation practical or not – and in an age of persistently low profitability, the prospects are not promising for those who perceive utopian potentials in the rollout of laboursubstituting technologies.78 As Peter Fleming argues, in this sense automation is ‘bounded’ by social, political, cultural and geographical factors that influence how it plays out. We have seen in our journey through the history of the automation discourse numerous examples of where these factors come into play. One factor that ‘binds’ automation is the pricing of labour.79 As previously noted, in low-margin business models presupposed on flexibilised and intensified forms of labour exploitation, outlay on labour-substituting technologies would be an unnecessary extravagance.80 The deployment of industrial robots is still extremely costly, with substantial programming needed to overcome what they lack in sophistication owing to what is called ‘Moravec’s paradox’, or, in other words, the difficulty of translating into the functioning of robots the full spectrum of impressive achievements in the spheres of computing and AI.81 Most companies thus confront costly but clumsy robots, making their existing workforce a safer bet to exploit. Another factor we have seen enter the frame is organisational power relations. If workers are more militant and unionised, employers might be more keen on labour-substituting technologies to deal with the issue – a notable case being Uber who declared the intention to invest in self-driving technology at the precise time its drivers were mobilising.82 This exposes the extent to which the implementation of new technology does not happen in a vacuum and is not propelled simply by the agency of individual executives or entrepreneurs. Rather, capitalist development takes place in response to the shifting stakes of the relationship of conflict between employers and employees, and the need of the former to exploit the latter to turn a profit. Workplace technology as we know it is not a result of

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engineering brilliance alone but also the need for capitalism to reproduce itself through expanded productivity and profit.83 The forms it assumes, the purposes to which it is put and the outcomes it achieves are all subordinated to the unequal power relations between labour and capital and the latter’s search for surplus value extracted from the former. Workplace technologies arise and are implemented only insofar as they contribute towards this aim, and capital will seek out other means of generating surplus value – low-cost labour, for instance – where a margin is not facilitated by technological means.84 Moreover, with infrastructures of collective bargaining hollowed out, workers have little basis to lay claim to some of the gains generated by technological impositions through productivity, wage and time agreements. There are wider macroeconomic features of the turbulent contemporary political economy that confound expectations of widespread automation. Those such as Brynjolfsson and McAfee present the proliferation of digital technologies as an inevitable fact of nature without considering the financialised character of business in the present age, and the fact that firms make decisions about investment less with productivity in mind than shareholder value.85 It is widely recognised in government at a national and international level that capitalism has been stricken by stagnant productivity growth for some time now – exacerbated by a financialised economy wherein firms allocate funds to a range of goals and purposes other than productive investment.86 Whilst dedicating not insubstantial sums to investment in and acquisitions of risky start-ups, tech firms themselves, like Apple, as well as the platform giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon, have otherwise amassed vast financial reserves sequestered away in tax havens.87 Most leading firms now redistribute profits upwards to shareholders in the form of dividends rather than downwards to productive investment in the firm itself.88

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Indeed, in the aforementioned 2016 WEF report The Future of Jobs the executives surveyed pinpointed ‘pressure from shareholders’ as a key barrier to investment in new technology.89 Whilst some evidence points to increasing sales of robots, reporting a 16% increase in sales in 2016 and a tripling of units sold since 2006, placed in wider economic context, other evidence from the United States suggests a notable decline in both investment in information processing and industrial equipment as a proportion of new private investment as a whole, and the ratio of capital stock to GDP.90 Driven by the need for quick profits to service rising corporate debt, what little gains in productivity capital has gleaned have been achieved largely on the back of intensified or flexibilised labour regimes rather than technical investment. The ease with which firms can exploit workers combines with the shorttermism of shareholder value to disincentivise the kind of investment and R&D expenditure necessary to the scenarios of mass worklessness painted in the automation discourse.91 Indeed, in the first decade of the millennium, productivity growth declined and ‘pure technological innovation drove global growth by precisely minus 0.2%’.92 The evidence suggests that, contrary to utopian and dystopian visions of the unfolding future, the degree of automation in the UK economy has actually slowed in recent decades due to plummeting real wages deterring employers from investing.93 Profitability determines investment, and the requisite conditions of profitability on which productive investment could be justified are lacking even in the latest technologies, with investment in new computer capacity stalling as the superfast chips that represent the current state-of-the-art far exceed the needs and purposes of an economy based on other means of raising surplusvalue.94 As companies seek other means to accumulate reserves and satisfy shareholders in the absence of viable routes to invest otherwise, these hardly seem favourable

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conditions for the kind of technologically-augmented reduction of labour some foresee. All in all, this adds up to picture of unprecedentedly low innovation and opportunities for growth, rather than the age of technological dynamism portrayed by advocates of the automation discourse. The one thing that might serve to change the course of events is a sharp uptick in investment in automation as the result of a period of stable economic growth following a vast and catastrophic depression, taking advantage of the creative destruction that trails in its wake putting less productive firms out of business.95 Whether this is a price worth paying for a techno-determined future is another question. pppp National differences in the institutions that govern and organise industry also play a part in how automation pans out, with ‘technological change … a socially and institutionally embedded process’ that expresses something about the character and agenda of the capitalist state at given points in time.96 At various stages in the potted history of the automation discourse given previously, the state stepped in to steward underlying economic and technological tendencies, not always successfully or with a free hand. Nation-states and their institutions seek competitive advantage through investment in new technologies. But different political cultures can also establish different ethical and moral understandings of what is right and wrong in the implementation of labour-saving technologies in the workplace that impact upon the decisions made by managers and employers.97 As we have seen, there is national variation in the degree of automation forecast in studies like that of McKinsey.98 The McKinsey study estimated the time spent on different working activities in different countries and their feasibility within that

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specific national context, finding that Japan, India and China have the highest susceptibility, followed by many of the leading European states. The study also evaluated the share of the national wage bill automation was forecast to affect. In Latin American countries like Mexico, Colombia and Peru, as well as Asian countries like South Korea and Thailand, some 50% of the wage bill could be at risk of substitution by machines. Some countries, however, stand to benefit from robotisation. In conditions of widespread manufacturing overcapacity – which we will go on to discuss in more detail below – those countries that have invested most in industrial robotics – such as Germany, Japan and South Korea – are also those with the greatest trade surpluses and thus the greatest job security and quality for workers in the manufacturing sector.99 The mediation at the national level in a world market means that the relationship between automation and employment is much different than many prognoses project. Stealing a march on competitors in this context of overcapacity and intensified competition for constrained markets for manufacturing goods, China, in particular, is investing heavily in fields like AI and robotics, with the aim of becoming world leader in the provision and use of these technologies. China has the world’s largest manufacturing workforce of 100 million workers, who produce a quarter of all global manufacturing output.100 Since 2013, China has been the largest market for industrial robots, buying up to a 30% share of the total supply of industrial robots in 2016.101 Its robot density – the number of robots per 10,000 employees – rocketed by more than 270% from 2013 to 2016. This drive is underpinned by the provision of government capital for R&D and investment. This being said, the low wages paid to Chinese manufacturing workers, at around 10% of US wages, make robotisation hard to justify economically unless and until the technology becomes cheaper – possibly by being produced in China itself. Until then, China will witness a similar – but in

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important respects different – balance of technological augmentation and intense exploitation of low-cost human labour, as in evidence elsewhere in the world. Whilst it is still very much a developing situation, the Chinese example testifies to the impact states can make on the unfolding of automation, and the fact that whether firms automate is not simply a technological question but a political one. The character of China’s authoritarian state capitalism, where the state is the de facto capitalist and the boundaries between business and the central party regime are blurred, if not non-existent, makes possible a level of intervention out of reach elsewhere. That being said, the generalisation of a more interventionist ‘postliberal’ mode of governance worldwide means that national institutional arrangements will come to have a significant impact on the susceptibility to automation and how investment is allocated to new workplace technologies. What prospects for such a spirit of intervention in the United Kingdom? We have seen already that employment stands at record levels in the United Kingdom – notwithstanding events since writing – in spite of technological shifts. Average hours of work are high in comparison with other European countries, and there is evidence that UK workers are working harder and faster than in the recent past. A low-skill, low-pay work culture persists. But this all has little to do with automation, especially seeing as successive squeezes on public spending have constrained investment and growth, with knock-on impacts on productivity. Long-term structural barriers to investment expose the UK as especially ill-placed to take advantage of many of the technological trends towards greater automation discussed previously, with low uptake of industrial robots in the manufacturing sector, for instance.102 In this context, technology has actually added to the volume of work whilst eroding its quality – a situation that the automation discourse distracts from by focusing on quantity

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of jobs over quality. This increase in work through technology is not a temporary condition but something intrinsic to the capitalist organisation of work, which is based not on technological advancement for its own sake but on the exploitation of human labour-time.103 Some of the automation dreamers see the potential for technological advances to replace some jobs whilst creating other more fulfilling jobs instead of boring, repetitive tasks, guaranteeing a labour market populated by creative, scientific and entrepreneurial activities that ‘race with machines, instead of against them’.104 But any promise of a future of work where investment in higher-productivity workplaces coincides with more opportunities for quality, skilled, enjoyable work with less intense and expansive work time schedules would be subject to ‘deep structural reforms’ and ‘significant change in prevailing institutions’ within the United Kingdom.105 Otherwise, the experience of autonomous systems in the workplace is going to continue reproducing the conditions of inequality, disruption and dissatisfaction that even mainstream scholarship has identified as among the emergent effects of the application of new technology in today’s digital workplace.106 Indeed, the evidence shows that the more aware employees are of the impending introduction of smart technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and algorithms in their workplaces, the lower their organisational commitment and career satisfaction, and the higher their turnover intentions, tendency to depression and cynicism about the job.107 This does not make for the happy, harmonious, productive workplaces of the future that some envisage – and it has a lot to do with the underlying political-economic foundations not only of capitalism in its contemporary guise, but capitalism as a historically-specific mode of production more broadly. pppp

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Exploring these dynamics, Benanav gives a very different way of viewing automation that demonstrates the usefulness of the political-economic approach developed above, relating current labour market trends to the contrasting fortunes of manufacturing and services in the last decades.108 In common with the automation theorists, Benanav accepts that there is low labour demand in the economy but uncovers other reasons for it. According to Benanav, it is not productivity advances that are displacing labour but rather secular stagnation linked to low growth and manufacturing overcapacity due to the expanded market for manufacturing goods sparked by the rise of China as an industrial power. Overcapacity in manufacturing and agriculture forces workers into services, which, as William Baumol suggests, translate demand into jobs more directly than does manufacturing, due to the latter bearing productivity gains unattainable in the service sector. Margins are gained in services through cost-cutting by means of depleted wages and conditions, creating what is effectively a state of precarious underemployment for many, which is not synonymous with the unemployment some see as inherent in the contemporary economy due to technological change. Rather than technological unemployment, what we see here, according to Benanav, is the fall in labour’s share of income making possible a massive expansion in superexploited service and socially reproductive labour at comparatively low cost to businesses and private individuals. The decline in the manufacturing workforce therefore tells a tale of wider political economic pressures than technological change alone. The figures back this up, in that, whilst many forecasts of job loss due to automation overegg the pudding in the ways we have seen above, they do express a replacement of more secure, permanent work in fields like manufacturing with a more precarious workforce populating insecure service sector jobs.109 The share of workers employed in manufacturing has

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fallen across the high-income world, in the United States for instance falling from 22% in 1970 to 8% in 2017, and in the United Kingdom from 30% to 8%.110 Whilst offshoring to developing countries is often cited as the reason for these declines, manufacturing output has not declined to the same degree as employment, doubling in the United States between 1970 and 2017 and increasing 25% in the United Kingdom over the same period. This would appear at first glance to vindicate the automation theorists insofar as more commodities are being produced by fewer workers, suggesting productivity gains. But for Benanav, the combination of declining employment and maintained output does not owe to productivity at all, which, as we have already seen, has been in sluggish form for decades, realising the so-called ‘Solow paradox’ whereby the computer age appears everywhere but in the productivity statistics. Whilst some massaging of the official statistics – for instance, by counting the production of computers with higher processing speeds as tantamount to the production of more computer units – gives the impression that productivity in electronics rose 10% year on year between 1987 and 2011, trends across manufacturing collapsed over the same period, and have carried on plummeting since then. As Benanav points out, this was precisely at the time that productivity should have been surging in the glorious new age of innovation and automation. So what accounts for the low labour demand, if not greater productivity? Benanav suggests that falling output due to underlying economic stagnation is to blame. Output has declined far more sharply than productivity, leaving productivity rates, whilst slow in historical context, much faster than output. It is this that has forced the manufacturing sector to leak employment over the last decades, leaving productivity growth rapid enough to expel labour from production only insofar as the yardstick of

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output, against which productivity is evaluated, has been diminishing. The reason that output has fallen is global overcapacity in manufacturing, where the market for goods cannot sustain sufficient demand to realise the amount of goods the sector is able to produce – this has been a persistent feature of the ‘long downturn’ inaugurated by the 1973 Oil Shock.111 As such, the expulsion of workers from manufacturing owes not to technological capacities but conversely their redundancy in difficult and competitive market conditions that have forced companies to engage in other means of sustaining productivity as best they can.112 In this way, the job losses in manufacturing thus stem not from productivity increases through new technological dynamism – rather, the apparent rise in productivity specific to our time is actually an effect of low output, read incorrectly as a spell of innovation.113 Nor does job loss owe to the changing structure of imports and exports in a globalising economy. It owes instead to the turbulent economic picture bookended by the Oil Shock in 1973 and today’s manifold crises, pockmarked along the way by recessions in the early 1980s, early 1990s, late 1990s/early noughties and the late noughties. As we have also seen already, any productivity gains eked out by capital in between these dips were achieved on the back of flexibilised and intensified methods for organising work rather than productivity-raising technologies per se.114 The emptying out of trade union infrastructures has also had the effect of decreasing labour’s share of income and demand for labour by weakening the capacity of workers to lay claim to higher pay and maintain the security and standards of their work.115 Hence, through a political economic lens that places technology in the context of wider macroeconomic pressures, the present time looks much different than the automation discourse suggests.

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High-income countries have not been able to find another sector capable of granting the same benefits as manufacturing – amenable to productivity-raising measures, standardisable across multiple assembly lines, expandable to include the full gamut of goods in different combinations and economies of scale.116 The service sector, whilst growing in significance, does not have productivity rates of its own capable of accounting for low labour demand at a systemic level – exhibiting productivity lower even than manufacturing – and has not enjoyed the substantial shift in demand from manufacturing that some might associate it with in Western economies. Whereas the rise of manufacturing in successive national contexts has witnessed vast swathes of workers move from low-productivity agricultural work to high-productivity production, the services boom has witnessed workers make the reverse transition, accumulating in low-skill, low-productivity, high-exploitation jobs with little security or opportunities to progress. As we have already seen, the low-cost character of this work, and its dependence on the exploitation of human aspects essential to the service relationship, make it an unworthwhile recipient of significant investment in labour-saving or labour-substituting technology. All in all, the prospects for widespread automation seem scant. Placing the current hype around automation in historical context, in this chapter we have combined insights from Marx’s critique of political economy and organisation studies to recontextualise new technologies in the social, political and cultural relationships that not only mediate their effects, but constitute what they are in the first place and the particular purposes and outcomes to which they are committed. What this goes to show is the importance of factors like organisational power relations, pricing structure, market conditions, competition and the nature of the task in determining whether investment in and implementation of new technology will be

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productive or profitable for a given firm, not to mention the ability of the technology itself to live up to the promise of what firms expect it to achieve. The current evidence suggests that ‘full automation’ does not constitute a sound empirical basis on which to build a left imaginary of the future. As we see in the next chapter, this has not stopped some constructing a political programme around it.

3 THE POST-WORK PROSPECTUS ON LABOUR As we saw in Chapter 2, the future of work today is a focus of dystopian fears and utopian fancies.1 Apocalyptic projections issue from economists, suggesting a 47% decline in jobs due to technological unemployment.2 Yet, some question whether automation will result in technological employment on the scale foreseen by some of the most dystopian narratives, with other economists suggesting a less dramatic 9% decline across OECD economies.3 Around these prognoses, a positive and sometimes radical imaginary about automation has taken hold, from the World Economic Forum in Davos to Labour Party policy seminars.4 Chapter 2 surveyed the key features and impasses of how the former, more mainstream reception understands the technological future supposedly unfolding before us. We contested claims of imminent automation with evidence suggesting the current configuration of capitalist political economy makes this prospect most unlikely. But this evidence does not seem to dissuade a radical left version of the automation discourse in the UK.

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This chapter considers how the labour movement, and the left more widely, assesses the situation and its opportunities. There are a set of shared emphases underpinning the diverse scholarship and activism ongoing under the banner of ‘post-work’. First, the development of information technology is seen as accelerating, allied with crisis tendencies in the current phase of capital accumulation. Second, dynamics of automation and new cooperative commons are viewed as enabling a post-work society of abundance and leisure. Third, the implementation of a Universal Basic Income is perceived as the means by which the link between money and subsistence can be maintained in a world where the relationship with the wage weakens. Together, these express a renewed interest in a utopia that was also present in the period following the deep economic crisis of the 1970s: the dream that the dynamics of automation released by capitalist crisis create the potential to progressively liberate society from capitalist work. Bestselling books have brought these debates to prominence beyond academia.5 They have successfully translated postwork thinking into an agenda for UK policymakers and the media. Although more astute advocates of this imaginary avoid the technological determinism sometimes associated with post-work thinking, devoting serious thought to the political program by which their stated aims can be achieved, a crude technological determinism can underpin mainstream accounts of automation and informationalisation.6 Information technology appears to be the harbinger of a new social structure. Informationalised, dematerialised new technologies are cast as autonomous processes with sociological effects.7 But these technological developments cannot be understood without reference to broader material dynamics centred on the restructuring of labour markets and the labour process.8

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Eternally recurring at intervals of around twenty years, moral panics about automation or widespread technological unemployment always find a radical theoretical carrier to complement mainstream electoral and popular uptake. Thus, what we term here the ‘post-work prospectus’ (PWP) assumes varied guises through time.9 Beginning here, we explore how the PWP runs the risk of reifying work and the value it creates as something apart from the social relations of subsistence and social reproduction in which it is imbricated, as well as the social forms it assumes. pppp The true origins of the contemporary post-work prospectus on the left rest in a few formerly obscure pages from Marx’s Grundrisse – the Fragment on Machines.10 Later surpassed by the development of his value theory to address abstract labour rather than simply concrete labour alone, in the Fragment on Machines, Marx forecasts a future wherein machines come to replace direct human labour in the process of production, rendering the law of value obsolete.11 The scenario that Marx presents in the Fragment pictures a world where the production of goods and services revolves more around knowledge than physical effort, machines liberate humans from labour and the role of direct labour time in life shrinks to a minimum. After the translation of Marx’s Grundrisse into Italian and English in the midtwentieth century, early PWP advocates like Antonio Negri were central in its dissemination, and despite its insignificant theoretical and textual stature, its reception caught fire through promotion by postoperaists like Hardt and Negri who associated it with changes afoot in contemporary capitalism.12

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During the 1990s, postoperaists sought to analyse capitalism in the context of the New Economy and the liberatory potential of the ‘immaterial labour’ it saw emerge.13 This wielded tremendous influence on the alter-globalisation struggles of the early 1990s.14 Since then, its influence has filtered through to, first, the horizontalist movements around Occupy, and, subsequently, the transition of the Occupy generation to a more state-oriented populist politics of postcapitalism, ‘accelerationism’ and so-called ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’.15 Today, its scenario of post-capitalist worklessness finds itself popularised in the pages of broadsheet newspapers, its ideas informing public debate.16 Formerly the preserve of the left’s outer limits, Marx’s Fragment on Machines now lurks in commonplaces of the centreleft too, influencing a halfway coherent political programme. Initially central to this was the work of Paul Mason and its Marxist portrayal of how technological progress clashes with social structures, leading to a point at which ‘we take control’.17 The notion that contemporary capitalism is stricken by a crisis in its capacity to value or set a price upon the things it produces and the labour through which they are produced is a key theoretical foundation stone of post-capitalist thinking. This tends to focus on new technology and the specific problems this poses for capitalist measure and valuation. And, just as in postoperaists like Hardt and Negri, this has both a basis in the kinds of labour hegemonic in contemporary capitalism and the character of the products it generates. Mason, for instance, follows Hardt and Negri in claiming that ‘knowledge-based production’, the expansion of free time and the reduction of necessary labour to a minimum through automation, creates the conditions for a crisis in the law of value. In this context, it is implied, labour-time and the value it produces become both beyond and outside measure.18

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For the crisis described in the Fragment on Machines to make sense, certain underpinning notions of the relationship between labour and value must be in place. The post-work/ post-capitalist literature tends to assume that, for Marx, what gives a commodity value is the amount of labour directly embodied in it – a Ricardian understanding of value that Marx would discard by the time he wrote Capital. For instance, in Postcapitalism Mason writes that ‘a commodity’s value is determined by the average amount of labour hours needed to produce it … Two things contribute to the value of a commodity: (1) the work done in the production process (which includes marketing, research, design etc.) and (2) everything else (machinery, plant, raw materials, etc.). Both can be measured in terms of the amount of labour time they contain.19 The prescription of such a crisis hinges upon what we might term a ‘substantialist’ or ‘productivist’ labour theory of value positing a direct relationship between value and expended labour-time ‘embodied’ in the product. As Mason writes, There is only one economic framework that can account for what is happening, and that is the labour theory of value as outlined by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx. They divided the quality of all commodities into ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’, rigorously separating the usefulness of a product from the price the consumer pays. Mainstream economics says the price ‘contains’ the usefulness – because a price reflects what every specific user is prepared to pay at a given time. The labour theory of value says the price reflects only the amount of labour used to make the product, to feed and clothe the worker who made it,

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to produce the raw materials and to bring it to market.20 In Clear Bright Future, Mason uses this underpinning labour theory of value to consider not so much the specific kinds of productive activity and their impact upon capitalist valorisation but the social character of its outputs – namely technology – and the challenge it poses to the capacity of capital to accurately value and price goods. But, as contemporary new readings of Marx like open Marxism suggest, whereas conventional understandings of Marx’s value theory associate value with expended concrete labour, what Marx was really getting to grips with was the social validation of abstract labour in exchange. Thus, labour in and of itself is not productive of value but anticipates it. It becomes so only upon the successful exchange of its products as commodities in the sphere of exchange. Value is thus associated with abstract labour, which has no concrete existence save the coins in one’s pocket. It appears fully only through its monetary expression in exchange, although some anticipation of this expression may be developed within or before production. pppp In this chapter and the next, we explain this understanding of the relationship between labour and value further. We establish Marxian value-form theory as a theoretical foundation to explore the roots of the popular imaginary around automation by considering the meaning of capitalist work and how it mediates the social metabolism between humans and nature. This underpins our critique of the imaginary that we term here the ‘post-work prospectus’. We problematise the claim that if we are freed from work, we will liberate ourselves from capitalism.

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Marxian value-form theory such as we deploy here comprehends the ‘social forms’ that render capitalism a historically specific social formation.21 This suggests capitalism’s specificity pertains not to work alone but to the forms taken by its results: commodities, value, money. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the world is a product of work. Our societies would not exist without work. Work is what makes us human and what makes us social. With the concept of work, we describe in general the labouring that people do in society. Work is of course not exclusively human. Spiders and bees also work. Furthermore, as David Harvey suggests, many species like bees possess basic senses entirely outside the human repertoire.22 But there is a significant difference between the work of the spider and the bee, on the one hand, and the work of the worker: the capacity to imagine, plan and execute an idea that exists in her imagination only exists in the latter and by focusing on the task, she can transform her idea into a reality. It is only the human ‘architect’, as Harvey puts it, who can be an ‘insurgent’ who ‘struggles to open spaces for new possibilities, for future forms of social life’.23 While humans produce in all societies, what then is specific about capitalism? The specific feature of capitalism is the social relations that undergird the productive activity and the forms it subsequently takes. To understand this specificity, in the Marxist tradition, a distinction has typically been drawn between ‘work’ and ‘labour’. This distinction has as its textual basis Marx’s elaboration of a ‘labour process’ and a footnote added by Engels to a passage in Capital outlining that process.24 The footnote that Engels added to this passage contends that ‘work’ should be taken to mean ‘labour in general’ and ‘labour’ to mean ‘work’ under capitalism. The thread that runs through these representations and earlier such versions found in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts is a clear delineation is drawn

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between generic labour and the social form it takes under capitalism. The question of form, argues Holloway, is a fundamental question: ‘[t]he fact that labour is represented by value, and that social relations between producers take the form of value relations between commodities, is in itself unfreedom, the inability of people to control their own lives’.25 In Marx’s earlier work, this is phrased as the distinction between forms of non-alienated and alienated labour.26 However, to some extent all human productive activity is alienated because it rests upon a distance between humankind and nature that demands the former dominate and transform the latter. Materially estranged from the ‘natural conditions of their existence’, humans must nonetheless dominate and objectify these conditions in order to live, even as their transformation to serve human needs and purposes erodes and degrades these conditions.27 For Marx, the metabolism is a fixed feature of the human labour process not only under capital but in general, insofar as production always formally mediates what Marx calls the ‘separation’ of humankind from nature.28 Thus, the ‘social metabolism’ or ‘social-ecological metabolism’, mediated in capitalist society by the expenditure of labour power and exchange of commodities, is a particular appearance of the ‘universal metabolism of nature’ that governs the transformation of nature into objects of human need more broadly.29 The separation from nature with which this universal metabolism reckons necessarily implies that human life is never immediate and always-already mediated, insofar as no aspect of the world around it arrives ready to hand. It must first be apprehended by human subjects who, stood astride nature, objectify their subjectivity in the products into which they transform the natural world. For Marx, what distinguishes ‘the worst of architects from the best of bees’ is a separateness of humankind from nature, encapsulated in the capacity of the former to conceive of designs and enact them

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in products in which external nature is transformed into something useful and humans realise their subjectivity.30 These products, in the shape of commodities, money, the state and so on, then take on a life of their own, standing astride their producers, whose lives and subsistence they mediate in turn. This is to say that humans transform nature but under social and historical conditions not of their choosing and with different and sometimes unintended consequences. To this extent, the social metabolism under capitalism represents only the current ‘particular, alienated form’, the metabolic relationship between humans and nature assumes in practice.31 This ‘alienation’, however, stems from something intrinsic to the human condition and cannot be easily wished away. The conceptualisation of the metabolism rests upon the continuity constructed between Marx’s early work on the separation of human subjects from nature and its culmination in Capital as a theory of, on the one hand, metabolism, and the other, fetishism.32 The development of this idea through an account of capitalist production and exchange in capital depends upon the separation from nature outlined in the early work as its logical basis. What first appears as self-estrangement and alienation in the labour process is later expressed in the account of social and monetary abstraction under capitalism and the historically-specific forms of mediation that serve to bridge the gap between subject and object characteristic of the human relationship with nature. The mediated character of the human metabolism in the context of this separation takes on different guises in different times and places. Labour is the form of mediation assumed by the ‘metabolism between man and nature’.33 The incommensurability of its products are mediated in the social form of money.34 The antagonisms and contradictions that arise

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around the capital-labour relationship in capitalist society and the constrained capacity of workers to consume the products they produce are mediated in the social form of the state.35 We encounter these real abstractions in later chapters, but we will say a few words on them here. Political economy works with formal abstractions, that is, ‘abstractions of reality’, abstracted from the social relations which produce them, and therefore naturalised as eternal concepts. Marx’s critique of political economy entails a critique of formal abstractions. Unlike formal abstractions, real abstractions are abstractions in reality that do not simply describe reality but account for the fact that reality and the concepts that explain reality are each objectively subjects of class struggle.36 The formal abstractions of political economy ‘deny the social character of its fundamental categories and therefore make these categories into eternal truths that can be distorted by unwise political intervention, but can never be suppressed’, in turn helping shape society in conformity with these apparently ‘eternal’ truths.37 As Clarke highlights, ‘the mystification of political economy does not simply represent an ideological inversion of reality, but the ideological expression of that inversion. This is why the critique of political economy is not simply a critique of a mystificatory ideology, but one of the alienated forms of social life which political economy describes but cannot explain’ – in other words, its real abstractions.38 Unlike formal abstractions, real abstractions refer to the form of existence of social relations and their mediations. Each successive really abstract form of mediation assumes institutionalised appearances and concretisations in time and space dependent on their specific historical context in which they operate. The metabolism between humans and nature, then, is the basic process these forms of mediation express and to which they reduce, constituting ‘the basis on which life is sustained and growth and reproduction becomes possible’.39 The

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‘reciprocal relationship between man and nature’ is the ‘insuperable precondition’ of social reproduction itself in, against and beyond capitalism as a historically specific mode of production and exchange.40 In this last respect, the social metabolism relates not only to the ‘actual metabolic interaction between nature and society through human labour’, but more broadly to ‘the complex, dynamic, interdependent set of needs and relations brought into being and constantly reproduced in alienated form under capitalism’.41 In this way, the concept captures not a static or essentialist notion of nature and society but a ‘highly dynamic relationship reflecting changes in the ways human beings mediate between nature and society through production’.42 In capitalist society, the historically specific character of labour relates less to its concrete form than the abstract quality it attains in the exchange of its products as commodities in the market.43 Here, our account of Marx’s theory of value tends to stress exchange as the key moment in an abstract unfolding of value. But we follow Harvie in suggesting that this abstraction develops initially within production itself.44 Abstract labour as a social rule may not have a concrete existence, but it does have a tangible impact that is concretely experienced by workers. It structures work, life and social relations in capitalist society. It standardises, rationalises and homogenises. It suppresses spontaneity, crushes desire and denies human dignity.45 As such, an account which recognises the role of monetary exchange in the abstraction of labour does not restrict this understanding to the sphere of circulation, but relates this to how productive activity itself is shaped by expectations emanating in a society based on the exchange of commodities for money. As such, even though abstract labour is for us the historically-specific form of existence assumed by human practice in capitalist society, concrete labour maintains its central metabolic role, increasingly inseparable from abstract labour. This

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is because concrete labour has no longer any autonomous existence separated from abstract labour. As value selfexpands, it creates a gap between concrete experience and what makes ‘the economy’ flourish. The transformation of concrete labour into abstract labour implies both the recognition and denial of the concrete experience of labouring, insofar as it is de-sensualised into abstract labour.46 Abstract labour does not only mean ‘as opposed to concrete labour’, but also that the existence of abstract labour redefines concrete labour. In other words, the two are inseparable.47 Abstract labour ‘is the central principle of organization and domination of capitalist society. This is confirmed for us not only by the fact that the realisation of capital depends on the application of living labour power in the process of production, but also for a much more basic reason: abstract labour constitutes and confers the synthesis of capitalist society’.48 The process of abstraction is ongoing and is underpinned by the contradiction between concrete and abstract labour, for we seek to live our lives constantly trying to affirm our capacity to do in a world dominated by ghostlike things like value and money.49 We strive to enable the re-embodiment and sensualisation of our doing in a world that is dominated by these real abstractions. This struggle against the selfexpansion of a ‘blind subject’ is always mediated, and might itself foster other social forms of the social existence of labour.50 pppp If this account of abstract labour is the case, then the crisis described in the Fragment on Machines cannot have the impacts post-work and post-capitalist thinkers ascribe to it. As we will explore further in the next chapter, this is because expended labour is not what is measured in value. Capital

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cares little for necessary labour time. What matters is labour that produces value and profit. The criterion of this is whether the product of labour exchanges as a commodity, and whether the capitalist can glean from the worker more eventual value than they have paid them for the ‘necessary’ component of their labour time. Both of these hinge on the exchange of commodities and the social validation of abstract labour in its expression as money. Nothing is given in the expenditure of the labour itself. An understanding of value centred upon the social validation of abstract labour in exchange also fundamentally challenges the emphasis upon the reduction of necessary labour-time and the expansion of free time as an affront to capitalism’s ability to measure value. The actual amount of labour expended relates only residually to the abstract labour that takes real form in monetary exchange. It is doubtful whether capitalist valorisation would be thrown into crisis by a reduction in necessary labour i.e. the amount needed only to reproduce the conditions of continued production – or, for that matter, an expansion in free time which itself forms part of the social totality of human activity, of care, consumption etc. that expands the real abstraction of value. As we will go on to explore in more detail in this book, the post-work prospectus appears to suggest that the problem with capitalism is that it makes us dependent upon ‘work’, and the solution is to have less of the latter. This takes ‘work’ as the basis of capitalism as an exploitative system, rather than its mediation in the form of labour and the moneywage. As we will see, the implementation of the UBI appears progressive for it frees us from exploitation. But this is a limited understanding of capitalism that lends too much weight to concrete work itself and not enough to what makes work necessary in its determination as wage labour and the specific kinds of results it assumes: value, commodities and

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historically-specific antagonistic social relations based not around the human performance of labour, but the reproduction of human life as labour power and its mediation through real economic, political, legal, social abstractions, i.e. social forms in which the antagonisms and contradictions of the capital relation are sublated in another intermediate thing that assumes the status of their ‘mode of existence’.51 We are compelled to work for a wage, but the current ‘postwork’ imaginary misses why we have to work in the first place, and what keeps us working. In our view, it is not possible to do away with capitalist work without posing the question of why it exists in the form it does to begin with. Work itself is undergirded at one end in a set of antagonistic social relations of separation from, and dispossession of, the means of production and reproduction of labour power, and, at the other end, in the form its results assume as value-bearing commodities exchanged in the market by means of money. We would argue that by re-evaluating what we understand by ‘capitalist work’, we might therefore also say that the association between a post-work array of transitional demands and the attainment of a post-capitalist society is not nearly so strong as popular accounts suggest. The distinction between concrete and abstract labour developed in this chapter underpins in subsequent chapters the exploration of the nature of money in capitalist society and the capitalist state, in order to understand the political impact of burying Marx’s ‘value theory of labour’ alive in favour of the narrower Ricardian ‘labour theory of value’ offered by the PWP. pppp The PWP rests on the idea that we exist on the precipice of a technological future, the seeds of which are already in evidence.

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But, as we saw in Chapter 2, policymakers in developed economies today confront the problem not of accelerating technological development and an increasingly productive economy but rather persistently low productivity and underinvestment in productivity-raising technologies and research and development. Policymakers are interested in this because it is a major barrier to growth. The vistas of full automation do not appear to appreciate how wider trends impress themselves negatively upon productivity at this level. Many employers raise value by exploiting workers not through productivity increases but over the terrain of an extended working day and weakened terms and conditions. Non-enforcement of employment regulation aids them, as the state steps to one side and trade unions defend contractual rights in only a slender few sectors. This easy means of turning a fast buck on the backs of low-paid, precarious labour disincentivises business investment in productivity-raising measures. As we saw in Chapter 2, why spend money on new technology when you can exploit a worker for very little expense? This is a major barrier to the implementation of the kind of technological advances necessary to achieve the vista of ‘full automation’ – admittedly something that, typically with reference to the UK experience, some of its adherents openly concede.52 Whilst post-work dreamers envision productivity-raising investments by business and the state carrying humanity through to a state of technological leisure, the only productivity that counts – that established on the balance sheet of firms as an ex-post validation of a given labour process based on the successful exchange of its results – is a factor of wider pressures that stem from the uneven hand employers have over their employees in a society riven by class division. As we touched upon in the previous chapter, it is the control and power employers wield over low-paid, precarious labour that stymies the kind of business investment necessary for greater

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productivity in a society that knows no other kind. Class struggle, as President Roosevelt realised with his spur to organised labour in the New Deal years, is an effective promoter of productivity gains.53 The more workers struggle for higher wages and a better work-life balance, the cheaper and more necessary seems the implementation of new technology. The irony is that the post-capitalist prospectus presumes to accomplish full automation without this conflictual prehistory. Interestingly, it is this paradox that confronts the sunny optimism of the post-capitalist literature, its dreams carried atop a wave of automation that the social basis of contemporary capitalism stifles at source. It is supposed in most post-work imaginaries that robots will replace those for whom work is most menial and unfulfilling, eliminating unskilled repetitive work with scant reward or status accrued to it. However, the latter is precisely that which makes it less worthwhile to automate. Why shell out on new technology to extract marginal productivity gains from workers who could not be paid any less? Owing to their higher cost, it is just as likely that we will see more professional, technical and intellectual labours liberated from the wage relationship. Some aspects of legal work are already being automated and, as Nicole Cohen describes, there now exists software that automates the writing process so as to ‘mimic the writing style of a sports or business reporter’ with a reasonable degree of success.54 A standardisation of products at the commodity end can have a knock-on effect on the complexity of the labour performed in their creation. For instance, part of the reason that journalism risks automation is the simplification of commodified media content being reduced to pure clickbait in an age where publications are dependent on – or, indeed, established in pursuit of – advertising income. This indicates the difficulty of wagering assumptions over

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the development of capitalism from labour alone. Rather, the social form assumed by labour in the commodity can sometimes arbitrate technological tendencies. Confronted with work that is highly paid but automatable, whether owing to a change in the commodity form it is expressed in or otherwise, capitalists will be more motivated to explore the cost-effectiveness of technological replacements than they would when confronted by service workers easily exploitable in jobs with an irreducible human element twinned with race-to-the-bottom wages. Thus, those with jobs bearing prestige and decent terms and conditions are presented with the prospect that it is they who will be automated first, whilst the workers unlucky enough to be stuck with the unabolished dirty, menial and physically exhausting jobs find themselves locked in a state-supported competitive struggle with robots, the basic income acting as a handout to stay in the game and survive, in work or on standby, only so long as capital needs you, much like the handloom weavers who were embalmed in competition with the powerloom by the apparently generous provision of parish relief in the late eighteenth-century Speenhamland reforms.55 In this sense, the basic income protects against the possibility that workers are expelled finally into the abyss of a systemic collapse. But, as we will discuss in due course, it also promises to preserve the social forms and purposes that govern work in the first place. In this regard, the combination of automation and state handouts may carry untoward consequences and contradictory outcomes. By buttressing the capacity of workers to subsist in an age of automation, whilst simultaneously displacing class struggle for state superintendence and the wage for a guaranteed income – a possibility we consider in greater detail later in this book – the combination of full automation and basic income could produce a situation akin to what Marcuse characterised as a

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‘form of drudgery […] expressive of arrested, partial automation, of the coexistence of automated, semi-automated, and non-automated sections’, an unhappy compromise directly facilitated by the support of the state.56 This would preserve the situation whereby Within the technological ensemble, mechanised work in which automatic and semi-automatic reactions fill the larger part (if not the whole) of labour-time remains, as a life-long occupation, exhausting, stupefying, inhuman slavery- even more exhausting because of increased speed-up, control of the machine operators (rather than of the product), and isolation of the workers from each other.57 Elsewhere, Marcuse notes, automation can have the equally unhappy consequence not of remaining contained within the contradictory social conditions of capitalist society, but of seeking their liquidation in false forms of social unity in which relations are cleansed of all contradictory or antagonistic intent. Whereas ‘[i]n the present situation, the negative features of automation are predominant: speed-up, technological unemployment, strengthening of the position of management, increasing impotence and resignation on the part of the workers’, there are ‘other trends’ in what appears at first glance a more favourable direction, namely ‘a larger interdependence which integrates the worker with the plant’, driven by the increased technical oversight and decision-making ability afforded by the superintendence of machines.58 By encouraging this participation- akin to that described in Marx’s account of technological liberation in the Fragment on Machines – …[t]he new technological work-world thus enforces a weakening of the negative position of the working

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class: the latter no longer appears to be the living contradiction to the established society. But, as much as it may seem to close the contradiction for the time being, the fact of class society remains. In the sense that it appears to elide how different groups will bear the consequences of automation and its associated transitional measures like the basic income, the post-work narrative typically tells a story less about the wider experience of work and its future than about the actual and potential career trajectories of the person telling it. As Angela McRobbie notes, both mainstream and radical accounts of the new economy tend to talk about a specific kind of male experience in seeking the liberation from useless labour.59 Workers already accustomed to a blurred distinction between work and life inhabit a future which, for others, will represent a much less seamless transition. There is the utopian expectation that the world will change whilst leaving intact the creative and informational character of the labour already performed by the professional strata who make up the main part of those who proselytise for a post-work society: Silicon Valley visionaries and flexible but often precarious intellectual workers like academics and journalists. As Judy Wajcman points out, that the basic income …has once again become popular across the entire political spectrum makes me a little wary. It immediately conjures up a vision in which the Silicon Valley tech crowd continue to thrive on 24/7 working hours, while those left behind are paid to watch TV and sleep.60 Here Wajcman correctly identifies the persistence and normalisation of a certain kind of working culture which is

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taken to continue in an otherwise post-work future, whilst another is eliminated. In most utopian visions of the current potential for technology to reshape our relationship with work, automation frees, from the bottom up, the lowest paid, most precarious workers, their wages replaced by a basic income. But this basic income, one presumes, would be paid from the taxes of the benevolent class of intellectuals and technicians who remain in work, in which will surely sit the Silicon Valley set and the self-same academics and journalists who currently sell this scenario. They would function something like the philanthropists the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk places at the centre of his controversial reimagining of the welfare state, in which the majority exist in a state of supported worklessness whilst a rich minority produce and profit for the better good.61 Indeed, the basic income rests on precisely such a social basis surviving the transition to a post-work society, with slender other means to finance the provision of free money short of a radical restructuring of property relations or the establishment of sovereign wealth funds, for instance. We are led to assume the persistence of the traditional system of tax and spend on which welfare states have typically depended. Sloterdijk somewhat sarcastically suggests that the enslavement, through a combination of philanthropy and taxation, of a small core group of wealthy workers would be one possible solution to the crisis of social democracy in an age of declining resources and consent with which to enact progressive policies for social change. A reliance on the well-wishing, hard-working rich is, on this count, the logical conclusion of social democracy’s search for a new social basis in the absence of any of the certainties of life and labour on which it once rested. This coalition of the productive would slave in favour of the masses newly liberated from their ‘bullshit’ jobs, and as Sloterdijk suggests, gain pleasure not through profit alone but from the

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space missions, vertical gardens and driverless highways established in their name, a twenty-first-century update on the libraries and institutes erected in the name of Victorian industrialists. Perhaps it is precisely this sense of imminent saviourhood that so attracts this vista’s proponents, their professions dusted with an irreducible human creativity resistant to the automation awaiting the menial masses whose lives will be transformed forever, with all the upheaval that implies. pppp There is one important component of the PWP worth further consideration and struggle – the demand for a reduction in working hours. Modelling and promotion of the idea of a four-day week in the United Kingdom has recently gained uptake beyond the Labour Party and wider labour movement. Based on the critical reading of social reproduction and ‘labour’ struggles given in this book, managed properly through workers themselves, the demand for a reduction in working hours is one element of the PWP that stands up to greater scrutiny and resists sublimation under what we will go on to define as an abstract utopia of state-driven automated worklessness. This demand, we feel, resonates with its rich history in workers’ movements and labour politics in Western democracies, by retaining the space within which class struggles can move and themselves create concrete utopias without over-determination by abstract utopian programs for state-populist hegemony. Indeed, the parts of the post-work prospectus on which our critique here focuses – UBI and automation – ‘are not nearly as historically aligned with workers’ struggles and can potentially sound like technocratic fixes’.62 If the platform is to continue its persuasive push to the centre of public debate, it is to such a reduction in working hours that proponents might best direct their

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efforts, as it works from and expands the demands and desires inherent in existent struggles in the North, and opens out rather than squeezes the space in which yet new struggles can arise. This can proceed independently of what we identify in this book as the more problematic proposals of full automation and the payment of a universal basic income. There is, however, a caveat. While the demand for the reduction of working hours can be the focus of labour struggles in the Global North, the superexploitation of labour power in the Global South, which is increasing at a staggering pace, might require alternative strategies. Following Immanuel Ness, the differences between working classes in the North and South cannot be overemphasised for they result from the differentiated forms of capital accumulation and investment in both regions, including the formation of a new international working class in the South – such as precarious and informal workers in China, India and South Africa – the likes of which is inexistent in the North.63 These developments have not changed the political question of how to remain attuned and ‘historially aligned’ with diverse forms of workers’ struggles within and outside the workplace. pppp

4 PRODUCTIVIST MANDATES ON VALUE

At one point during Capital, Marx writes that ‘[t]o be a productive worker is … not a piece of luck, but a misfortune’.1 Today, popularisers of a postmodern Marx revolt against this misfortune with an assault on work in the name of a post-work society. At first glance, the post-work prospectus (PWP) professes anti-productivism. A state-led automation will simultaneously increase productivity and facilitate the freeing of labour from production, creating the fiscal resources to support the transition via UBI. But, where Marx wrote of the ‘misfortune’ of being a ‘productive worker’, the contemporary critical imaginary of a world without work focuses on only one part of Marx’s formulation, seeking an escape from the status of ‘worker’ without a strategy for addressing the criteria of productiveness to which the worker’s status as such is subject. In perceiving Marx’s misfortune as that of work rather than that of being productive – i.e. having one’s work organised in line with rule of value – they leave the capitalist logic to which work is bent intact, and thus the state of things they

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seek to overturn untouched. Work is open to question, but at the expense of questioning the wider circumstances that make it what it is in capitalist society: the rule of value whereby productive activity is structured by certain concrete social relations and produces certain abstract social forms in commodities exchanged by means of money. It is our contention that by avoiding the discussion of value, the PWP offers a misleading interpretation of capitalist work and its relation with money – which we go on to discuss in more detail in Chapter 5. In Chapter 3, we examined how the post-work literature is counterintuitively productivist insofar as it sees ‘work’ as the central relation of capitalist society and not as the antagonistic relations of property, ownership and subsistence that logically and historically precede a society in which most people are compelled to sell their labour power to live, nor the specific kind of results assumed by the products of that labour in the market. In so doing, it remains locked within a capitalist understanding of what is productive and what is not, despite its auspicious assault on the productivist logics of capitalist work. This plays out in the way that the basic income is conceptualised, and its impact upon capitalism and the potential of an alternative to the latter. This is typified in the case for a basic income put forward by autonomist Marxists in the postoperaist tradition like Antonio Negri, Carlo Vercellone and Andrea Fumagalli, for whom the appeal of the guaranteed basic income lies in the forms of reward, recompense and redistribution it grants commensurate with the character of contemporary labour and the value it produces.2 pppp Postoperaists contend that the cognitive, communicative and affective character of contemporary labour catalyses a crisis in

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capitalist valorisation, which cannot adequately contain the overflowing productiveness of these social forms of economic activity within its frameworks of measure. Thus, the relational and symbolic work that for the postoperaists symbolises the new economy is characterised by an immanently selforganised cooperativity uniting labourers themselves without orchestration by capitalist command and control.3 For these theorists, this takes place outside the confines of the capitalist working day and workplace, but not necessarily outside the employment relationship. It happens spontaneously, without the need for capitalist imposition or control. Owing to this, the value it creates is beyond both capture and measure. This, postoperaists contend, creates a ‘crisis of measurability’ for capital. These claims have been picked up, in various guises, by empirical scholarship about work and organisation in the twenty-first century. Adam Arvidsson describes …an important structural transformation within the information society: the growth of a number of strategically central, productive practices: all working according to a logic where value is related to the quality of social relations, and not to the quantity of productive time, or as Marxists would say, socially necessary labour time.4 For this strand of postoperaist thinking, the contemporary workplace is increasingly characterised by immaterial labour. As Arvidsson argues, in this ‘immaterial labour’, …what really creates value is the ability on the part of workers to create and maintain social relations, whether this be the temporary relations that enable the project team to function, or the affective

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relations that make possible a positive service experience.5 And what is important about this particular kind of production is that it results in an immeasurable plenitude of spontaneously and cooperatively produced value that cannot be captured within capital’s present forms of subsumption and quantification. This is exhibited in the tendencies towards free labour, free goods and free software in the internet community, a fixation of critical scholars working on this area of organisational life, in which ‘people are active and creative in their symbolic consumption’ at all times and in all places, and, ¨ as Bohm and Land observe, ‘this active, symbolic consumption is itself creative of value’, creating the possibility of great benefits for capital at the same time as it erodes its capacity to measure and value them.6 An alternative perspective on the relationship between labour, measure and value has been articulated by David Harvie and Keir Milburn.7 Drawing on the work of Diane Elson, for them ‘value is the form that labour takes within the capitalist mode of production’, rather than something produced, inserted into and embodied in commodities as in more traditional readings of Marx’s value theory.8 Elson’s is a ‘value theory of labour’ that moves from the social form of value to the manner in which it imposes itself upon, conditions and organises from outside productive activity under capitalism. As Harvie and Milburn write, ‘our creative activity as human beings – work – takes the form of value, of abstract labour’. This approach deploys the same radical re-reading of Marx found in open Marxism to suggest that the measurements to which labour is subject in its abstraction as value are market-mediated and expressed in price, whilst keeping in view the critical and antagonistic moment associated with Marx’s labour theory of value.9 As such it stays true to the

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original purpose of Marx’s theory of value to understand abstract but apparently objective economic categories with reference to their constitution in a wider social terrain. There is a challenge posed in taking value as an abstraction ultimately arbitrated in the market. Against those scholars who assert that production now exists outside all measure, it sheds light on how ‘capitalist organizations, aided by the heirs of Frederick Winslow Taylor’, keep alive continuing forms of capitalist measure based upon the persistence of the valueform as an organising principle of labour itself.10 pppp The immaterial labour postoperaists see as hegemonic in contemporary capitalism is that based around the manipulation of meaning, of affect, of symbols, of emotion, and dependent upon creativity, cognition, communication.11 This type of labour breaks down the boundaries between work and life, and occupies all times of life itself. From this follows a political demand for the implementation of a UBI along three lines: reward, recompense and redistribution. A notion of reward suggests that a basic income rewards that which is not presently rewarded within the realm of production. This argument takes two forms. First, it conceives basic income as a compensation for the unpaid labour upon which the production of capitalist value depends. Take the account of Vercellone. He views productive labour as ‘labor that generates profit and/or participates in the creation of value’. He uses this conceptualisation to advance an argument for a basic income. Profit accrues via the capitalist paying the productive worker less than the full ‘worth’ of his or her labour. The capitalist extracts an amount of labour-time from them that remains effectively ‘unpaid’ in terms of the overall hourly output of a given duration of work. The basic income can in some way help reward this

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unpaid effort by means other than the capitalist wage relation. ‘Productive’ activity has been dispersed outside the workplace into society at large, via mobile ICT and online social networks. This has increased the expanse of unpaid labour, Vercellone contends. This makes even more necessary compensation by a source external to the formal structure of capitalist production.12 Second, basic income is presented as reward for the novel collective nature of contemporary labour. This sits alongside the individualised instrument of the wage. The latter obscures the collective status of contemporary work. It casts an illusion of individuality. But the basic income would directly compensate the collective bonds that sustain value production today. Hardt and Negri posit that labour has attained a collectiveness that renders impossible attempts to treat it on an individual basis. Individuality, one might infer, characterised to a greater degree earlier forms of work organisation. Today, it is impossible to measure labour in such a way that maintains the artifice of individual reward. Thus, calls for an equal income within the traditional wage relationship do not take account of this present-day reality. Hence, it is only a newly social form of recompense that realises such an equalising project.13 The conceptions of basic income as reward are predicated on the idea that labour is immediately cooperative and abstract. This is due to the novel immaterial quality production assumes in contemporary capitalism. But from the theoretical approach advanced in this book, the abstraction that validates labour as productive and cooperative comes after the process of production in exchange. This abstract, immaterial rendering of immeasurable value is not novel, as the postoperaists claim, and is quite capable of being captured and recompensed through traditional forms of capitalist exploitation and valorisation. Where contemporary conditions of labour pose a difficulty to the smooth proceedings of

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the latter, they expose a tension that is not new but has always been present. The boundary between paid and unpaid work has always bordered on the non-existent, at least within production. But the ultimate arbitration of value is in the exchange abstraction rather than production. Thus, the idea that labour is unpaid in anything other than an imaginary and principally retrospective sense is untenable. As Arthur tells us, Marx himself warned ‘that the expression “unpaid labour” is scientifically worthless. This is in spite of its attractiveness as a “popular expression”’. It is a ‘fraudulent notion’ because labour in and of itself has no value without social validation. Thus, the question of its being ‘paid’ or ‘unpaid’ cannot plausibly be asked on a purely theoretical basis.14 However, it has been politically important in the Feminist struggle against gender oppression, from which some of the historical and present-day demands for a basic income have arisen. In Chapter 7 we address this point and advocate a social reproduction approach to the crisis of work inspired by Marxist-Feminist inquiries into the importance of the conditions for the reproduction of labour power, i.e. life, and how ‘labour struggles’ today are expanding into the sphere of social reproduction. The second form of the argument that basic income compensates productive activity turns itself outside the workplace into the social realm. It suggests that the unpaid labour that capitalists turn to profit seeps into the non-working life of those participating. A basic income is thus seen in a similar way as in the previous argument, as remuneration for unpaid labour-time. The difference is that this unpaid labour-time is not extracted by cutting away at breaks and mealtimes and extending the length of the working day. Rather, it is performed away from the watchful eye of the capitalist, in the home and elsewhere. This is distinct from a third form of

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argument that privileges the collective and social wealth generated from productive activity. This third conception covers that which is not necessarily subject to the private dominion of capitalists and businesses. Vercellone gives an argument for the basic income as recompense for unpaid non-work activity outside the sphere of production. He combines this with the previous justification for basic income as a reward for unpaid in-work activity. He differentiates between the two. Unpaid in-work activity is productive of capital and wealth. But unpaid non-work may be unproductive of the former whilst still generating wealth for capitalists. In response to the latter situation, Vercellone suggests …the creation of a universal Guaranteed Basic Income independently of employment and conceived as a remuneration for the totality of social times that contribute to the creation of wealth and value.15 Conceived as remuneration for something which is already productive of value, the basic income here secures the payment of labour which was formerly unremunerated. But all the basic income would achieve in this way is to compensate for that productive activity for which the capitalist wage does not. This simply saves capitalists the bother of having to do so themselves. The value relation that renders time spent in productive activity outside work part of the valorisation process of capital as a whole would remain intact. Indeed, it may grow stronger for the provision of a presumably statefunded social support. The latter would undergird the formally off-balance-sheet efforts of the social world outside the formal workplace. The final justification makes a similar appeal to the first two. The difference is that the third sees basic income as a redistribution of collectively communicatively produced wealth. This

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wealth issues from the intense and immediate abstract cooperativeness of contemporary activity in its work and non-work forms. But what the case for redistribution misses is that this abstractness and cooperativeness issue from the social validation of labour in exchange, and not from anything specific to the performance of the work itself. Hardt and Negri see cooperation as ‘completely immanent’ to the nature of contemporary labour. This ‘cooperative interactivity’ does not arise through the coordination of the capitalist. It arises autonomously, through ‘linguistic, communicational and affective networks’.16 These networks are situated not in the workplace but in society at large. Vercellone, too, sees value as arising external to the ‘company grounds’, outside the jurisdiction of the capitalist.17 He suggests that the ‘creativity and knowledge’ upon which present-day value and wealth depend are not mobilised by owners or overseers. Rather, workers spontaneously mobilise these capacities themselves. The limits of these productive networks are unclear. The nature of the network is such that it extends into every sphere of life. It engenders limitless cooperation. For autonomist thinkers in this tradition, the roots of contemporary value lie in the spheres of knowledge and creativity. Both are dependent on communication for their verification and inspiration. This intense social and communicative context entails that everyone has a part in this production. As Hardt and Negri write, ‘the entire multitude produces’.18 This is the basis upon which they make the argument that a ‘social wage’ is due to all who produce – i.e. everyone. This social wage is the basic income. It appears in the context of this argument as something different from a wage. It bears little trace of its traditional form as a direct payment for a specific labouring activity. It instead carries the connotation of a redistribution of wealth to which we have all, everywhere and at all times, contributed.

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This rests on the argument that some component of social production is not factored into the appearances of value and the wage-form. But what the concept of abstract labour enables us to see is that it is, in fact, factored into both. The ‘unrewarded’ social production that makes possible the creation of commodities falls within the value relation. Its retrospective framework of abstraction is incredulous to the specific performance of labour. It rather expresses in the form of value an ideal amount of labour for the purposes of commensuration. There is nothing to say that social production is not already remunerated in the redistributive way suggested by Hardt and Negri, by means of the value relation. The problem then becomes one of the unequal and discriminatory distribution of this payment. There is no immeasurable contribution of value that has fallen off the balance sheet and needs to be restored to its rightful place. The work of life is a contribution already taken into account, however imperfectly, by the abstractive frameworks at capital’s disposal. Finance is perhaps the exemplary modern attempt at the commensuration of life’s complexity. Through such forms of valuation, the allegedly ‘immeasurable’ productivity of networks is already priced in. This is because that which has resulted in value is certified as having done so in the moment of value’s determination in exchange. No value is produced anywhere until value arrives and says it has been. Thus, there is no way to say that that which is paid through the redistribution of the ‘wealth of networks’ is not already paid within the circuit of capital. On this line of reasoning, any claim to a basic income should distance itself entirely from notions of value or its production. Other conceptualisations of basic income must be developed that achieve this distance. Hardt and Negri and their intellectual milieu maintain an attachment to an orthodox labour theory of value even as

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they simultaneously set out to refute it. The ease with which they go about the latter, of course, depends upon the former. This refutation relies upon certain conservative and traditionalist notions of what value is and from where it issues. Postoperaist rhetoric on the basic income expresses this theoretical orthodoxy. The most vulgar twentieth-century interpretations of Marx took from his oeuvre a Lockean lesson, one should be rewarded for the value one ‘creates’, and that one should be rewarded only in so far as one creates value. This often carried over from revolutionary demand to state policy, with unfortunate implications. Postoperaist arguments for a basic income draw upon their own implicit theoretical orthodoxy to communicate a similar sentiment. The difference is that it is now updated for the new class subjectivities and political struggles of the twenty-first century. Like earlier notions of reward, autonomist justifications of a basic income express in distorted form the logic that capital already follows. This is the surface illusion of a day’s work for a day’s pay, of exchange, equality, and equilibrium between what is given and what is received. Needless to say, this standpoint also reinforces the compulsion to work in order to live. It is around this that the social relations that ensure the continued survival of capitalism are structured. pppp The arguments of Hardt and Negri, Vercellone et al. serve a rhetorical and politically expedient support to the aim of a basic income in much the same way as the simplified orthodox interpretation of Marx’s value theory – which it in some respects follows – was itself a matter of political expedience for workers struggles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It availed the working classes of the time with a starring role in valorisation far beyond what

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was or is the case. Hardt and Negri grant precarious workers a capacity for immeasurable value-creation. As with past applications of value theory to serve a similar end, it serves to strengthen workers collective hand. It also helps bring into existence and give shape to an otherwise ideal class-less social actor, the ‘multitude’. But the theoretical support the postoperiast theory of value offers to the campaign for a basic income is flawed. It misrecognises aspects of valorisation vital to capitalist power and subordination. Resistance depends on the understanding of the value relation. Whilst Hardt and Negri et al. have virtuous aspirations for a life outside and beyond capital, their understanding of how the latter operates limits their imagination. Productivist orthodoxy prevents them from seeing how little their suggested reforms have to say or to change with regards to the value relation. Any approach consistent with the understanding of capitalism presented here would project a possible way out of capitalist social relations, rather than a recipe for remaining bound within them. This way out is against the value form, rather than through it. In other words, if capital is ‘value in motion’ then anticapitalism is anti-value-in-motion: ‘capital…constitutes an impossible human society. Therefore, the…only critique is a critique not of capitalism but in, against [and beyond] capital: anti-value-in-motion’.19 As we have seen, the main problem with postoperaist claims for a basic income relate to their theoretical basis. This leads its proponents to deal in notions of reward, recompense and redistribution that would leave the regime of capitalist value untouched. What other bases for a basic income exist? One possibility relates to something that Hardt and Negri themselves touch upon. This alternative is the basic income not as reward, recompense or redistribution, but as a right. This may help escape the productivist avenues down which

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appeals to the ‘value creation’ of workers and non-workers inevitably lead. Hardt and Negri write that a basic income could be paid on the basis of ‘citizenship’, through one’s being a ‘member of society’.20 It is clear that they do not think this possible at present. Citizenship is instead seen as something attained at a future point. This implies that, for now, our demands reduce to the realities of capitalism as they face us, and must remain internal to the logic of that system. These ‘realities’ dictate essentially productivist demands. These exist in a reflective rather than radical relationship with the current state of affairs. As we have seen, the perspective that defines the contemporary ‘realities’ to which such appeals must respond is problematic. There are alternative approaches to the basic income that do not promote productivism in both its Marxist and capitalist appearances. One such possible standpoint is that of Kathi Weeks. Rather than a reward, recompense or redistributive measure based upon the creation of value, Weeks takes forward Hardt and Negri’s insight that basic income and the lifestyle of greater freedom that it engenders should be viewed as a right. Weeks evaluates typical autonomist appeals to the idea of a basic income. She does so against the benchmark set by her wider commitment to an anti- and post-work project that rejects productivism. The autonomist demand for a basic income involves ‘payment for our participation in the production of value above and beyond what wages can measure and reward’. She notes that this may offer a politically expedient argument from a strategic perspective. But, moreover, it serves to draw upon and reinforce ‘productivist mandates’ that gauge entitlement based on contribution.21 Against such ‘productivist mandates’, Weeks poses an alternative. Here, what is supported (rather than remunerated) is life instead of work. The principle of ‘life’ at the heart of this approach may include productive activity but, importantly, is

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not reducible to it. This principle invites a wealth of possibilities for the use of one’s time as desired. It is not predicated on the use of one’s time to generate some great immeasurable plenitude of cooperatively produced value. It is upon this implicit expectation that Hardt and Negri et al. offer their projections of a possible basic income. Basing the provision of a basic income on the remuneration of production establishes an ongoing conditionality that offers no break with the status quo. Weeks’s presentation of the basic income as a right indicates a potential way out. It is not up to the workers, the proletarian, to responsibly contribute ‘productively’ towards ‘the community’ but rather enabling the condition of participation that basic income can provide to the citizen. This shift implies a new understanding both of ‘agency’ and the ‘structure’ in which a new dynamics and form of politics is inserted. The channelling of activities into new forms of work – a redirection of supply – resonates with the perspective of basic income as a ‘directional demand’ towards a new world in which the tasks of social reproduction can be more equally shared, which we will look at in more detail in later chapters.22 As Toscano notes, the basic income ‘is in no way a straightforwardly revolutionary or even transparently anticapitalist demand’.23 He points to Milton Friedman as a prominent supporter of the measure. The basic income is a realisable goal only because it may be necessary to implement such a scheme to save capitalism for those who stand to profit most from its survival. This says a lot. We have shown how the basic income, on the faulty theoretical basis of postoperaist proponents, remains immanent to the system as it stands. This is why the enlightened quarters of capital can see it as a stabilising force, rather than as a threat. Aside from the antiproductivist possibilities suggested in Weeks’s conception of

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basic income as a right, there is little to present such a threat. The basic income fully retains the structure, if not the precise content, of the individual income. As we shall see in the next chapter, this individualised relationship to monetary means is a vital part of the capitalist wage system. The basic income could serve to mask social exploitation in just as fetishistic a way as the wage does at present. That is, as the provision of a ‘fair share’. This idea of the ‘fair share’, as we have seen, is inherent in the notions of reward, recompense and redistribution upon which autonomist appeals to the basic income draw. But it is precisely the same logic as that to which we are currently subject: plus ça change! pppp In a way, productivist arguments for a basic income based on a ‘fair share’ of wealth are reminiscent of similar debates around the ‘Share Our Wealth’ demand with which the Roosevelt administration in the US was confronted in the wake of the Great Recession in the 1930s. ‘Share Our Wealth’ was a populist funny-money scheme that soaked up some of the surplus energy from the proto-Trump ‘America First’ appeasement movement.24 Demagogic senator Huey Long and rabble-rousing clergyman Father Charles Coughlin advocated against the New Deal taking wealth directly from the rich to distribute among the entire population. Long regularly sought to filibuster Roosevelt reforms like the Agricultural Adjustment Act and Glass banking bill with hare-brained solutions of his own devising, like the remonetisation of silver to ‘expand the currency’.25 The Share Our Wealth scheme had millions of registered supporters.26 Aspirant spokesmen of ‘radicals’ left and right, Long and Coughlin were quasi-fascist conspiracists, pro-appeasement and anti-cosmopolitan.27 Railing against

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Jewish bankers, their money system myopia promised the world.28 Echoes of the populist political milieu in which they mixed in the dangerous thirties have carried left and right in the United States and elsewhere in recent years.29 ‘Share Our Wealth’ suggested, as populists of the right and left do today, that we create the world and it belongs to us. As Long stated, ‘Every Man is a King’ but for some outside force leeching us of our rightful inheritance. Today, the idea we lay some natural claim to this world of misery induces a kind of Panglossian optimism bordering on political paralysis rather than class analysis. The demand to ‘Share Our Wealth’ reappears in the ‘“99%-1%’ argument against the power of finance and ‘Wall Street’ that unites figures as opposed as Corbyn, Sanders and Trump.30 At worst it takes the form of a conspiracy theory that capitalist society revolves around the expertly executed theft of what others produce and the best way to make that fairer is to give more of what is produced to those who ‘really’ produce it. But this creates hierarchies of who deserves what, and fundamentally misunderstands what wealth is in capitalist society.31 It is value: not a neutral category to be corralled by and distributed among this or that social faction, but a social relation that contains within it the historical and continuously reproduced condition whereby some have less than others.32 The Roosevelt administration, meanwhile, actively encouraged class struggle as the motor of the economy, rather than liquidating the legal and political means through which class struggle proceeds in capitalist society.33 President Roosevelt would have been familiar with the nexus of demands and desires undergirding UBI, for he fought them throughout his tenure in the shape of the New Deal. Then and now, basic income-style schemes lack a class analysis capable of comprehending the kinds of actions by which, through the New Deal,

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FDR addressed directly, if imperfectly, class inequality and the sphere of social reproduction.34 In other words, the New Deal addressed to a much greater extent how and through what means we put food on the table, however constrained by circumstances and the limitations of bourgeois ideology. Although hemmed in by the limits of what was possible, the plans put forth in the New Deal were rooted in practical responses to real concrete conditions, and did not try to think themselves out of the world as it is. As Hofstadter evocatively details, the New Deal saw reformers take the reins of a realism addressed to urgent practical issues and not ‘exalted faith’ in intangible moral sentiments.35 In so doing, it ‘fed the jobless or found them jobs, saved the banks, humanised industry, built houses and schools and public buildings, rescued farmers from bankruptcy, and restored hope’. Seeking to transpose the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps to the present day, social democrats on both sides of the Atlantic have suggested a job guarantee propelled by investment in public goods like the environment, education and the arts; elsewhere, such a principle resonates in something like a minimum income guarantee as an alternative to the UBI.36 Although thin ideological gruel against the utopian and dystopian forms of free money right and left alike come bearing, such proposals, in staving off the threat of unemployment and, in the case of a job guarantee, strengthening workers’ hands in wage bargaining, may confront class contradictions much more concretely than a UBI geared towards the redistribution of value as a positive category founded in the wealth-creation of supposedly productive actors. pppp

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5 PENNIES FROM HEAVEN ON MONEY

In this book we argue that the automation of production and the provision of a universal basic income do not enable the transition from a work to a post-work society and then, from there, to a post-capitalist society.1 We have suggested that capitalist work is not simply about working, but that work depends on preconditions set around the reproduction of workers, their families and wider society. We focus on how work itself is undergirded at one end in a set of antagonistic social relations of separation from, and dispossession of, the means of production and the reproduction of labour power, and, at the other end, in the form its results assume as valuebearing commodities exchanged in the market. In this chapter, we explore how this state of affairs in mediated in, and by, money. Money here is not simply a neutral means of exchange or account, making possible daily life in a market economy. It is, rather, the expression of a form of production and reproduction of society that implies the wage relationship. In a nutshell, in capitalist society life is reproduced through money. Given this, we interrogate whether the

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transitional demand for a basic income would contribute to creating the conditions to end capitalist work and, eventually, capitalism itself, or simply reinforce the status quo ante. It is easy to understand why the UBI recommends itself to radicals today. The argument for UBI’s potential to ‘end the threat of economic destitution’ is certainly persuasive and cannot be easily dismissed.2 In the face of a crisis of social reproduction on a global scale, the policies proposed by the likes of the World Bank’s Development Policy have contributed to ‘the destruction of communal solidarity’. Debt is playing new roles distinct ‘from previous forms of proletarian debt’. Today ‘“reproduction” is presented as “self-investment”’, with millions of micro-entrepreneurs ‘investing in their reproduction, even if in possession of only a few hundred dollars, presumably “free” to prosper or fail as their labouriosity and sagacity allows’.3 UBI presents itself as a radical but plausible alternative to the World Bank’s supposedly people-centred policies like microcredit and so on. UBI pilots and modelling exercises proliferate in the world of centre-left think-tanks and research institutes.4 In the post-work worldview, meanwhile, the UBI pays the vital role of connecting cash transfers organised by the capitalist state with the possibility of a luxury communism at the end of the road. As a specific instance of a wider uptake in the wake of these precarious and often wageless conditions, the post-work prospectus contends that UBI – an unconditional sum of money provided by the government regardless of whether you are getting a salary – will solve the problem of social reproduction in a world without work. Hypothetically, UBI gives everyone a base wage and it then replaces the social security system if you are unemployed or unable to work. For example, in Utopia for Realists, a popular post-work text, Rutger Bregman advocates a ‘massive redistribution’ of

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money, as well as of time, taxation and robots, pitching it as a slogan, ‘free money for everyone’.5 Guy Standing also offers an appealing post-work slogan: ‘Less labour, more self-chosen work and more real leisure! Basic income would help achieve this’.6 In a recent piece, he makes the emancipatory capacity of UBI to enable freedom its most important selling point.7 In Four Futures, Peter Frase portrays cash transfers as an ‘utopian way to a utopian destination: the “capitalist road to communism”, in which the UBI “lubricates the slide into full communism”.8 In this sense, post-work promoters of the UBI see it as a route to a future utopia, in the short-term guaranteeing the survival of capitalism by dealing with technological unemployment, while in the long-term paving the way towards a post-capitalist world. With the waning of work in an age of intelligent machines, we are told, technological unemployment renders the wage insufficient to secure workers’ subsistence. Their labour power – the pure potential to labour – must be reproduced through other means. The UBI, rather than a silver bullet on its own, works in tandem with foregoing technological trends to accomplish the outcome of a post-capitalist society of automated worklessness. The UBI, however, implies the retention and appreciation of money and the social relations it expresses, which renders the claim that it enables a break with capitalist society highly questionable. Whilst the UBI pays people ‘just to exist’, it is not an end state so much as ‘a transitional measure for the first stage of the post-capitalist project’. The ‘socialisation’ of the wage through ‘collectively provided services’ or its abolition follow.9 Payment ‘to exist’, coupled with automation, allows networked, autonomous experimentation in place of labour. Srnicek and Williams, meanwhile, argue that in a postwork society ‘the labour that remains will no longer be

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imposed upon us by an external force – by an employer or by the imperatives of survival, work will be driven by our own desires …, instead of by demands from outside’.10 They argue that the UBI would overcome the wage relation and the stigmatisation that accompanies welfare in countries like the United Kingdom by abolishing means testing in favour of universal, undifferentiated support.11 In this, the authors correctly identify some of the issues around the separation from the independent individual and collective means to reproduce the means of living capacity. They recognise the antagonistic constitution of class society in a certain set of relations centring on social reproduction and propose to ‘loosen the practical grip of the wage relation’ as a way to foreshorten it.12 However, others have noted that it is an individual response to collective problems.13 In this chapter, we use the perspective developed so far to argue that visions of a post-work future underpinned by the UBI are based on a misconstrual of the nature and determination of the ‘wage’ and, more widely, of money itself. As we saw in the previous chapter, by leaving the value relation untouched, the basic income maintains the rule of abstract labour and thus the rule of money. While the abolition of wage labour is a radical demand, in the UBI proposal the substantial problem of the subordination of human life to the logic of money, sustained by the separation between the producers and the means of production as the precondition for its existence, is swept under the carpet. The post-work account of the basic income affirms the concreteness of labour and ignores its form of existence in capitalism (abstract labour). It implies that the UBI will maintain the rule of abstract labour by facilitating the monetarised social reproduction of labour. Money is not a neutral unit of exchange and account, but something that carries these

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antagonistic relations of exploitation, production, consumption and social reproduction. Our contention is that the present crisis of social reproduction is not about a lack of money but about a world whereby our access to the things we need to live is mediated by money in the first place. We cannot live except through money, received in the form of a wage pitched at the level we need to survive as productive labour. Thus, we enquire into the extent to which the crisis of the wage can genuinely be solved by distributing more money. In fact, we suggest that the problem lies in sustaining life under and beyond the abstract form of domination represented in the rule of money. pppp As we saw in Chapter 3, human activity exists in the perverted form of capital.14 Traditional readings of Marx, argues Holloway, have historically neglected this, missing the importance of the antagonism between doing (as he names concrete labour) and abstract labour, which he regards as especially poignant to the appreciation of today’s forms of insubordination.15 Our struggles, highlights Holloway, are not struggles between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ (the orthodox Marxist view), but ‘the struggle of doing against labour’ (and therefore against capital).16 Holloway argues that we do not struggle against capital but against abstract labour so that our struggle is a struggle to defend our doing (power to do) against being transformed into an abstract substance that self-expands.17 Capital wages drive an endless struggle to negate human doing and convert it into abstract labour. This is what we struggle against: the de-sensualisation of our doing and its validation strictly as part of an abstraction made palpable only in money. However, it is important to note that ‘doing’ is not a

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‘productive activity in a trans-historical sense, but …the specific form of productive activity under the regime of capitalist production’.18 In this way, the contradictory existence of labour in capital (concrete and abstract) cannot be solved by ‘rescuing’ doing from the process of its abstraction, but by navigating contradictions towards the creation of a new form of activity. We return to this point at the close of this book. Money and, as we shall see, the state are thus not neutral entities to be appropriated at will but economic and political forms of capitalist social relations, which are …forms assumed by the basic relation of class conflict in capitalist society, the capitalist relation, forms whose separate existence springs, both logically and historically, from the nature of that relation.19 In this way, the relationship between capitalist forms of mediation and social reproduction we deploy in this book differs from how Marx has traditionally been conceived because, following Clarke: The distinctiveness of Marx’s theory lay not so much in the idea of labour as the source of value and surplus value as in the idea of money as the most abstract form of capitalist property and so as the supreme social power through which social reproduction is subordinated to the power of capital.20 Marx’s critique of political economy pointed to the naivety of political economists, specifically Adam Smith, in believing that money ‘is simply an instrument of accounting and exchange that has no substantive economic significance’.21 If

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money is only regarded as a means of exchange, it becomes disconnected from its historical specificity in capitalist society. How is money different in capitalist society? Where does money come from and how is accumulated? Clearly money as means of exchange existed before capitalism. But what does money mean in capitalism? It is only in capitalism that money becomes a form of existence of human practice. Bonefeld highlights that …[t]he social individual, then, subsists as such an individual not in an “immediate” sense: it is mediated and so subsists through the commodity form. This form represents the social relationships between people as attributes that belong to things.22 Marx revealed that in capitalist societies, money is not simply the means of exchange but the concretised expression of value, the substance of which is abstract labour.23 In so doing, he showed that money represents materially a mediation, a relation of subordination and a mode of being. It is proof of the exploitation of labour power. The wage is not a reward for expended labour but a payment to keep workers in the condition that they can and must labour.24 The wage thus is the means by which capital subordinates human life and its reproduction to ‘money as command’.25 We acquire what we need only as commodities bearing a price, and we must work to earn the money to do so. In this, despite its apparent insubstantiality, value dominates and expands across the whole social and existential condition with money only making value ‘real’ in practice and lived human experience.26 Moreover, as Bonefeld highlights, Marx regarded money as ‘capital par excellence’ because it assumes an independent form ‘from which “the relation to labour” is seemingly eliminated … Seemingly it accumulates wealth in

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the “undifferentiated homogeneous form of independent value – money” … as the source of its own self-expansion, [money] posits wealth “without content” … and conceives of it as a “pure fetish form”. He uses the word “bewitching” to characterise its ability to lay golden eggs’.27 But despite its ‘bewitching’ quality, the social power of money, in which is contained the imperative to work, is not ‘externally imposed’ on us. Money is the expression of our own alienation, the expression of our own dispossession, the proof that we are compelled to work. As Neary highlights, ‘the contradiction in capitalist society is not based on the relation between labour and some other extraneous social reality, but through the forms in which human social practice is forced to exist: as concrete and abstract labour. This contradictory inner-connection between this dual existence of labour provides the dynamic tension through which labour moves’.28 Nor is money just a veneer or thinly abstract layer cloaking concrete reality, but is itself expressed in and sustained by material relationships. In this way, in La Violence ´ suggest that the dialectic of de la Monaie, Aglietta and Orlean forms of value can be identified with the dialectic of forms of violence.29 In this context, in a world dominated by the command of money over the human and where human reproduction depends on money, how could social justice be possible? As we have seen, the distinctiveness of capitalist society is that money has freed itself from the state and constitutes the most abstract form of capitalist property.30 It is the ‘supreme social power through which social reproduction is subordinated to the reproduction of capital’.31 Seeking monetary responses to capitalism’s ills runs the risk of reproducing the fetishising effect wielded by money by reconnecting it with the state form. pppp

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Our central contention in this book is that the capitalist relations of social reproduction do not fade away with the diminution of ‘paid work’ via automation and the supplement of a UBI. In our understanding of value, not only those ‘working’ and ‘producing’ but capitalist society itself is subsumed under the money-form. As the earlier reading of Marxian value theory given in Chapters 3 and 4 implies, in capitalist societies money is not simply the means of exchange or an innocent mediation. In this sense, it is also not something that can be distributed to free people from socio-economic destitution and even dignify them as argued by some UBI advocates – even though, as the form in which social reproduction is mediated, its provision may indeed make life temporarily more bearable for most.32 In line with such arguments, radical left proponents of the UBI present money precisely as Marx did not: as the means of exchange, or as resources, or a form of wealth that everyone has the ‘right’ to possess in a democratic society, and therefore something to be distributed in order to overturn capitalism. Paul Mason rightly recognises that the …basic income, as a policy, is not that radical. Various pilot projects and designs have been touted, often by the right, sometimes by the centre left, as a replacement for the dole with cheaper administration costs.33 But our concern is that he believes that ‘in the postcapitalist project’ this would not be the case because with the latter, ‘the purpose of the basic income is radical: it is (1) to formalise the separation of work from wages and (2) to subsidise the transition to a shorter working week, or day, or life. The effect will be to socialise the costs of automation’.

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When robots replace us in the workplace, it is suggested, the basic income will step in to pay us a set amount every week, month or year. This begs the question as to what the difference is between the basic income and the wage? UBI as a transitional step toward the abolition of the wage does not tackle the social conditions undergirding the wage, which would continue with or without the wage itself. It might seem counterintuitive to contend that the UBI marks a continuation of the wage relation. But the idea that the UBI facilitates an escape from the wage mistakes the wage as a payment for the reproduction of the potential to labour for a payment for labour performed. The wage – whether in the form of earnings or benefits, accrued as an individual or as a household – guarantees that our labour power is reproduced and, in a world where humans exist as labour power, the reproduction of life itself. Without the abolition of money, which, as mentioned at the outset, is ‘the most abstract form of capitalist property’ and ‘the supreme social power through which social reproduction is subordinated to the power of capital’, the UBI merely secures the reproduction of humans on this same basis.34 Whether we work or not is irrelevant to the status of the UBI as a continuation of the wage-form, because our potential to do so in a world where the means of production are beyond our control would be carried over regardless – possibly pending the reintroduction of labour at some future point necessitated by war or crisis sparked by the retention of a state and economy left largely intact by the absence in the PWP of any intent to significantly restructure the ownership of property on which capitalist society rests. In most renditions, the UBI as a transitional measure retains the separation of people from independent, non-commodified means of living. The social conditions the wage presupposes would continue, with or without the wage itself. The social conditions for the sale of labour power would remain, with or

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without a buyer. The question is whether it does what it says in the PWP and opens, rather than closes, the path to postcapitalist alternatives. The imperative of money for human survival creates all sorts of problems and misery in this world. Our view is that the ‘universal’ distribution of money will reinforce these problems and limit the capacity to prefigure alternative futures of work. The real problem that we confront is neither the lack of money nor a good way to distribute it, of which UBI is an example. The problem is the human dependence on money for existence. As we will go on to explore in more detail in the next chapter, with the UBI the state directly superintends the rule of money. While UBI may apparently free us from (un)employment and the wage relation, it makes us more dependent on the command of money and the state. Even if a basic income is not the final resting point of postwork thinking, the demand is effectively for the monetisation of class struggle, something usually promoted by the state to control labour conflict. In this case the scale of the state’s superintendence of money as a peculiar social thing portends the liquidation of labour conflict – something we will discuss more in Chapters 6 and 7. pppp If we steer away from a narrowly productivist focus on work alone and turn our attention instead to the totality formed by production and social reproduction, we can see that the obstinacy of the money form, and, as we will go on to discuss, the persistence of the state form, mean that no ‘postcapitalism’ need attend UBI’s post-work idyll, as is proposed in the various programmatic statements of transitional demands that characterise the literature on the latter. Indeed, by bolstering their power, the transitional route to postcapitalism through a

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post-work society may well foreclose the very thing it sets out to achieve. As it is proposed, then, UBI will not ‘lubricate the slide into full communism’, but may enable the slide into the ‘communism of capital’.35 This ‘awkward turn of phrase’ helps us in ‘identifying some of the many conspicuous contexts in which elements of communism and capital meet today’.36 Despite apparent appeals to a post-capitalist human liberation from work, automation will not free us from this world but push us into a different form of subordination where the reproduction of human life will still depend on money even as the means by which it is attained is outsourced to machines. Such scenarios necessitate plans for other futures driven by alternative demands developed in a way to support struggles for decommodified, non-monetary forms of social interaction, which, in Holloway’s words, can ‘crack’ capitalism.37 Why non-monetary? Because it is money that ‘frames’ reality in such a way as to make the social abstraction on which capital centres possible.38 Only through money is social existence possible or knowable under capitalism. Sociality owes itself to the abstract monetary relation by which everything is exchangeable with everything else. As a monetary measure, the basic income stands no threat to the monetary order through which the rule of abstract labour structures existence. The radical efficacy of a basic income is neutered by its grounding in the same nexus of money and abstract labour to which we are already subject. Non-monetary solutions to the impasse must therefore be sought.39 But, equally, doing away with money alone touches only the surface conditions of our subjection. A lopsidedly monetary and abstract focus, as Bonefeld suggests, has a tendency to present value as an ‘abstractly self-moving essence of wealth’. It pays little heed to the coercive, violent conditions of its continued social constitution. Presupposing abstract labour, money, value and commodity exchange are

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a whole host of other factors: the antagonistic relations of property and distribution in capitalist society, the continuously reinforced separation from the individual and collective means to reproduce life independently of the capitalist wage. As we will explore further in the next chapter, this has led to the formulation of ‘directional demands’ around the UBI that seek to address this antagonistic undertow.40 But the basic income is already a real prospect. It is, as previously noted, proposed in the esteemed pages of the Financial Times. Its possible foundations lurk, in however twisted a guise, in the UK government’s Universal Credit reforms. It is no longer a distant horizon. We need not wait to think beyond it. Questions unanswered by a basic income can already be asked. Such questions concern less the source or amount of the money in our pocket, as why it is there at all. What do we need it for? Why are those things not available otherwise? How do we get it? Why do we have to do what we have to do to get it? And why do we have it and need it in the first place? These critical, future-facing questions may help ‘frame’ basic income in ways that pose it against and beyond the present state of things. pppp

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6 BASIC INCOME IN ONE COUNTRY ON THE STATE

As we saw in the previous chapter, the PWP’s vista of automated worklessness supported by a basic income rests on a continuation of the money wage in all but name.1 In this chapter, we examine the continuing presence in this imaginary of a strong state that becomes the wage-payer of both first and last resort, with attendant consequences on the capacity of people or workers to resist and contest the conditions or pay to which they are subject. This foreshortening of the capacity of workers to struggle in turn truncates the capacity of the range of transitional measures post-work thinkers cite to lead us into a post-capitalist future. Here, we will use the current uptake of the basic income among authoritarian populists as an example of where this might travel politically, with specific reference to the mooted adoption of the measure by the Modi government in India. This example highlights the potential consequence inherent

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in the universal basic income (UBI) of quashing class struggles in, against and beyond the state. Whilst for the PWP the ‘acceleration’ of automation by information technology is generating the potential for a society of autonomy, abundance and leisure, it recognises that these conditions will only be realised should the politics of work be shifted to a ‘post-work’ agenda. As such, the post-capitalist future the PWP promises is driven not only by automation eliminating jobs, but rather complemented with policy proposals, for instance for the implementation of a UBI. While the technological potentials would address the problem of production, the latter would speak to the issue of social reproduction in a new workless world. In this way, the PWP assays the strategic opportunities opened by the current phase of capitalist restructuring in a historical context of the crisis of the relationship between employment and broader social reproduction. It tends not to state in simple terms that the escape from work is synonymous with, or a catalyst of, the escape from capitalism, tending to focus on the goals through which the latter is achieved rather than the ‘horizon of postcapitalism’ itself.2 As such, here we focus on how these transitional demands, shared in common with other post-work thinkers, relate to the end goal of a post-capitalist society, rather than imputing to them any directly post-capitalist content of their own. Specifically, we focus on how this transitional programme sees the state, and, possibly, how the state might itself appropriate some of the policies at the heart of this imaginary. Whilst advocates like Srnicek and Williams forewarn that the demands that emblazon the cover of their book, centred on automation, a UBI and, the reduction of working hours, ‘will not break us out of capitalism’, only ‘neoliberalism’, they do suggest that their implementation

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could ‘establish a new equilibrium of political, economic and social forces’ that would create ‘even more potential to launch to greater goals’.3 Through such demands, it is suggested, the left can surpass limited, reactive and parochial ‘folk politics’, reconfiguring itself around a populisthegemonic post-work agenda.4 In this sense, Gramsci hangs heavy over schemes for how to achieve a post-work society – most notably in Srnicek and Williams’s interesting suggestion of a Mont Pelerin Society of the left – in other words, a radical version of the cabal of neoliberal ideologues that sit at the centre of the more conspiratoriallyminded sociologies of the rise of neoliberalism. For us, this exposes the weakness of contemporary appropriations of Gramsci by non-Marxist Gramscians, in so far as it rests in turn on an analysis of neoliberalism as an elite project reshaping common sense, rather than an imperative driven by the abstract economic compulsions of capitalist reproduction. The state and the political conditions it sets are seen as something neutral and malleable through the development and deployment of efficient strategies for hegemony and, eventually, power. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that existing conditions and the electoral turn of the radical left may make basic income a useful demand. For some mainstream voices, the basic income is a means to limit the social fall-out of impending automation, a reasonable prospect owing to its potential to contain the contradictions of capitalism. Whilst for radical post-work advocates, ‘a re-orientation of welfare distribution would not only mitigate the effects of these tectonic changes to the nature of labour, but it might in fact facilitate a break away from neoliberal capitalism and towards a post-work condition’, free-market sponsors back a UBI because capitalism can no longer provide jobs for all and the measure

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may constitute the saviour of the capitalist system.5 This alone suggests the existence of favourable conditions for the measure’s future roll-out. Basic income as a ‘directional demand’ addresses itself to these favourable conditions. In an intervention for the UK left group Plan C, Keir Milburn argues for a strategy of ‘directional demands’.6 Basic income here is thus not an ‘infinite demand’.7 This would be insatiable within the current system and thus explosive of its limitations. Rather, it is a ‘strategically well-selected, precise, finite’ demand.8 UBI here would be a ‘non-reformist reform’.9 This concept, coined by Andre Gorz in the late 1960s, describes a reform that imposes ‘anti-capitalist solutions’ ‘from within’ capitalism itself.10 For Gorz, a reformist reform ‘subordinates its objectives to the criteria of rationality and practicability of a given system’. A non-reformist reform, however, …is conceived not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands. If satisfied, their fulfilment will leave the subjects involved stronger for future struggles. Basic income is one such demand. At its best, it can be thought of as providing the space and support for the autonomous and bottom-up development of practical alternatives. Indeed, ‘if framed correctly’, as Milburn puts it, the basic income could open valuable breathing space in which to begin developing such demands. It could, as Milburn projects, constitute new subjectivities in a ‘stronger position’ to articulate desires and wield power in their pursuit. Framed as such, the basic income gives an opportunity to potentially ‘subvert th[e]

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statist horizon’ by ‘producing concrete political projects that supply and care even where the state does not’, as Zechner and Hansen put it.11 But critics point out that, due to the growing importance of digital ‘free labour’ today, rather than a vehicle to an utopian future UBI might be ‘a handmaid for capitalism as its mode of production evolves’.12 In other words, the UBI could act as a stabilising force rather than a transformative one. In this chapter, we explore the extent to which a misunderstanding of the state foreshortens the capacity of the PWP to effect the post-capitalist transition it sees contemporary conditions potentiating. UBI provides a state-sponsored supplement to ensure the reproduction of labour within a capitalism on the wane, so as to open the way to a postcapitalist society beyond it. In the scenario Mason projects, the UBI necessary to sustain a working population would have to be socialised in the hands of the state.13 This is because, due to the rise of free machines that enable production at zero marginal cost and render impossible attempts to impose scarcity on goods, data and services, the conditions for capitalist profit are eroded and ‘the tax base in the market sector of the economy would be too small to pay for the basic income’. The basic political economy aside – which appears to elide that production would always have costs even with robots and even if no wages are paid – what is clear here is that the payment of a UBI clearly implies a certain kind of state and a certain kind of relationship to it. Embracing, as a transitional measure, the horizon of state planning, Mason claims that the political horizon of postcapitalism implies the development of a ‘wiki-state’ that will ‘nurture new economic forms’ such as digital co-ops, peer-to-peer transactions and so on.14

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The state here, in common with Srnicek and Williams and others, is portrayed as a neutral instrument that can be seized in the name of new hegemonies and popular subjects. The perspective advanced in this chapter, however, argues that the state is a capitalist state rather than a state in a capitalist society. We explore how state constitutes a historically specific capitalist social form, and the implications this holds for how we understand radical policy proposals.15 Through this theoretical lens we explore how the UBI has been appropriated by national populist authoritarian regimes and what would it take for the left to create a proposal that cannot be easily appropriated by those who want to stabilise capitalism within domestic boundaries. pppp The notion of the state that underpins the UBI proposal shares a misconception central to the work of Gorz, a leading and early proponent of post-work thinking. He defines the state as the ‘sphere of necessity’, i.e. as the heteronomous space where we can locate the management of necessities in order to become autonomous and free – a neutral institution.16 This interpretation of the capitalist state is not reformist but inadequate. The capitalist state is not just an ‘institution’ and it is not ‘the sphere of necessity’ or a tool to act collectively. It is the most important political mediation that shapes social relations, including the filtering and moulding of the struggles of the working class and the unemployed via politics, policy and the law. The government can, of course, mobilise state resources and legislation to act on behalf of the working class. For instance, the UBI may well serve the purpose of poverty alleviation in the short and medium term, even while, in the long run, it perpetuates the capitalist state as the political mediation of class struggle.

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In what capacity, then, is the state a capitalist state rather than a state in a capitalist society? It is not simply, as Bonefeld highlights, that the state is an ‘agent’ of capital or guarantees the general conditions for accumulation. Rather, ‘what makes the state a capitalist state is the way in which it is built into the whole structure of capitalist social relations’.17 This epitomises the critique of the state as something possessing a ‘relative autonomy’, developed by the Conference of Socialist Economists in the 1970s and 1980s. This theorised the state as the political form of the social relation of capital.18 More precisely, the distinctive character of the state does not lie in its disciplining powers but in the fact that it appears above society as a deux ex machina, i.e. as an autonomous institution, when in fact it is the national political form of global capital. 19 For example, members of the Conference of Socialist Economists criticised the Labour Party’s Fabian ideology in the late 1970s as follows: The expansion of the welfare state is identified with the onward march towards socialism. Often people make a distinction between two different sides of the state. They think of the state as having a “good” (i.e. socialist) side, which would include social services, health, education and nationalised industries; and a “bad” (i.e. capitalist) side, involving such functions as defence, law and order, and aid to private industry. In this view the struggle for socialism involves trying to expand the good side and restrict the bad side.20 But against socialist reformism, which seeks to expand the good side of the state at the expense of the bad, ‘the

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apparent neutrality [of the state] is not an essential feature of the state, it is rather a feature of the fetishised form in which the rule of capital is effected through the state. It is therefore something that should emerge at the end of the analysis and not something that should be inscribed in the analysis from the beginning’.21 For Holloway and Picciotto, such fetishised forms that conceal the reality of antagonistic “relations of class domination” constitute “an essential part of the reproduction of that domination”.22 The state itself – and the autonomy that accrues to it – is therefore itself a fetishisation that converts the classed inequality of capitalist society into the political form of ‘equality before the state’.23 In so doing, the capitalist state – which is always ‘fundamentally a liberal state’ – acts not to resolve the contradictions of class society but to manage them.24 The liberal capitalist state, highlights Clarke, ‘can contain the political impact of those contradictions to the extent that is able to secure the integration of the accumulation of domestic productive capital into the accumulation of capital on a world scale, and so provide a basis on which to secure the political integration of the working class’.25 It is this integration under the auspices of formal equality that makes possible the mediation of the class antagonism in guises more favourable to workers themselves, even while the state simultaneously ‘conceals the reality’ of those relations.26 This contradictory, but ultimately characteristic, state of affairs suggest that there is no easy way out of capitalism without at once being in, against and beyond the state. But the programmatic policy platform of the PWP achieves only the first of these, and risks expanding the power of the state in such a way as to narrow the space of excess within

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which struggles in line with the second and third can proceed. In particular, within post-work thinking there is a tendency to ignore the role of the state in the struggles for the prefiguration of alternative forms of social relations. As suggested earlier, this is not a case of simply getting rid of the ‘bad’ state. The problem for autonomous struggles is how to navigate the contradictions of being ‘in and against the state’. This notion, offered by the London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group of the Conference of the Socialist Economists in 1980, expressed the contradictory form of both the state and the experience of the state as both a form of social relations and an institution: ‘The two senses are closely intertwined, but the distinction is important. The problem of working in and against the state is precisely the problem of turning our routine contact with the state apparatus against the form of social relations which the apparatus is trying to impose upon our actions’.27 UBI, meanwhile, and the postwork utopia it supports, promise to increase rather than decrease dependence on a state that exists to at least temporarily guarantee capitalism’s survival. But the left’s dream of seizing power of a state capable of ushering in a new post-capitalist age is likely to be severely disappointed. In line with Gorz’s appreciation of the state discussed above, the contemporary PWP does not reflect on the capitalist character of the state, thus misconceiving it as a political arena for power struggles over resources distributed by the main political organisation: the nation state. In our view, such distribution will mean only a different form through which wealth is shared for our social reproduction. The suite of policy options the PWP proposes purports to free people from the burden of work sponsored by a better distribution of financial resources as a means by which a post-capitalist

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society can be accessed. But it continues humanity’s subordination to the social forms of capitalist domination, namely money and the state. There is pragmatism in working within the state to secure limited gains within capitalism, but the problem comes where the state is seen as a means to deliver a ‘post’-capitalist society. The idea of the ‘transitional demand’ operative in the PWP relies on the capitalist state to deliver it, and presumes that the state can help pave the way to a kind of communism. Difficult as it might be for many, it is important to imagine the obstacles and dangers surrounding a project of the Left relying on the capitalist state’s capacity to pay for the UBI. Accepting such a realistic accommodation with the state, Milburn’s suggestion of basic income as a directional demand is part of a wider re-evaluation of left strategy. It seeks to echo ‘existing conditions’ and work within the ‘electoral turn’. On both counts, this project is commendable. Basic income inevitably features as an achievable and practical component. It is apparently widely accepted that, in line with Gorz’s distinction between reformist and non-reformist reforms, the UBI is a limited directional demand constrained by the ‘rationality and predictability’ of the system, no matter what the measure’s merits. This is because its status as a directional demand is presupposed upon what is presently achievable within the capitalist system. This bears dividends only on the logic of the specific demand itself, rather than from the standpoint of any wider escape from capitalist social relations. We have seen the range of rhetorical and ideological purposes to which the UBI is presently subverted. But where else might its purchase travel politically? As the proposal is mobilised politically, what kind of state (or nation state) does the UBI imply? The logic of ‘directional demands’ is that the transitional measures must chime with the parameters of political possibility, and, as we will see in

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the final section of this chapter, this can lead to the presentation of the UBI as a practical policy proposal resonating in all the wrong ways with the world as presently constituted, resting on an imaginary of the people, the nation and the state that can be easily repurposed by political programmes quite contrary to those apparently espoused by the postcapitalist left. pppp Against leftist aims, one possible destination of the UBI is in the policy agendas of the constituent parties of the contemporary ‘nationalist international’ of authoritarian populists.28 Despite analyses emphasising their appeal to localised grievances, transnational commonalities include ascendant strongman leadership, pro-Putinism, isolationism, anti-cosmopolitanism and persecution of ethnic and religious groups. Common intellectual networks, international alliances, funding streams, news sites and hacking networks constitute a material infrastructure. And the UBI is increasingly on their agenda. It has already been adopted by the politically unpindownable Five Star Movement in Italy ‘as a substitute for all existing social safety provisions linked to work and unemployment’ whereby ‘[b]eneficiaries must declare immediate availability for work, attend training courses, participate in job interviews, and perform activities that are useful to the community in their municipality of residence’.29 In 2017, it was announced that the government of authoritarian nationalist Nerendra Modi in India was considering its implementation.30 The Indian UBI proposals followed hot on the heels of the so-called ‘note ban’, or ‘demonetisation’ whereby, on November 8 the day of Donald Trump’s election, the Indian government imposed a sudden and enforced devaluation of all paper money.31 The auspicious aim of the measure was to root out corruption in the

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cash-driven informal sector.32 Some saw the UBI as a means by which the accumulated scrap cash generated by demonetisation could be recirculated. A possible tool to combat poverty, the proposals for UBI in India differ in scope from those in, say, France or the United Kingdom. But there are still implications for how we understand the UBI in an age of authoritarianism ascendant. Following a pilot run in India by Guy Standing, the idea was floated in the annual economic survey accompanying the government’s budget declaration.33 Although small – no more than the average month’s wage over the whole year – it would make a substantial impact, reducing absolute poverty some 20 per cent. It would be partly funded by a bonfire of existing welfare payments. The cuts to welfare would specifically target stratified systems for subsidised water, food and agricultural resources. As the Economist notes, this runs the risk of ‘telling an illiterate farmer that a food-in-kind scheme he has used for decades is being scrapped to finance a program that will put him on par with […] a tycoon who lives in a 27 storey house’.34 Adopting the ‘authoritarian playbook’ from which the nationalist international draws, Modi set a strongman, strongarm prototype for President Trump.35 Indeed, commentators drew parallels between Modi’s ‘note ban’ and Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’.36 In this sense, the UBI measure contained a potential overlap with Modi’s undeclared state of emergency, pro-Hindu migrant policy and vows to disenfranchise Muslims.37 For the sums to add up, only 75% of the country would have received the payment. Payment via compulsory biometric identification cards would strengthen the government’s hand in deciding who does and who does not get paid. A potential exclusionary effect thus teams with the capacity of the government to wield the wand of who gets what. And this, perhaps not coincidentally, relates to an outcome of the

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‘note ban’ implemented by Modi around the same time as considerations.38 The note ban was an exclusionary measure not so much targeted at but specifically impacting upon Dalits, Muslims and other ethnic groups subject to high levels of poverty and joblessness, who tend to subsist more closely from the cash-led economy. Demonetisation impacted forcefully upon poor farmers who relied on savings to subsist by rendering those savings both useless and worthless. In this way, it replaced an individualised currency with some degree of autonomy from the state with digital state-directed money ripe for adaptation in the UBI, in the process encouraging the spending of saved cash as a means to raise effective demand. Placed in the hands of national populists, the UBI holds the potential to mobilise, on the guarantee of imminent riches, the masses as a national citizenry whilst allowing the eventual exclusion of those who fall foul of birth between other borders or beliefs. Its power consisting in the totalitarian relationship it establishes between the state and the capacity to subsist, the UBI, paid on basis of membership of a nationally-defined people, is a policy that aims to cohere such a people in a class society where one cannot in practice exist, and excludes those who cannot or will not conform. UBI in one country, therefore, has the potential to be not revolutionary, as the left imagine, but deeply reactionary. With the best of intentions in a world gone bad, leftish conceptualisations of the UBI sometimes give succour to its possible implementation in the arsenal of authoritarianism, comingling with the right in a wider turn to populism, nationalism and ‘sovereignism’.39 In a time of national retrenchment, the UBI cannot but imply an exclusionary approach, its ‘universality’ recoded as

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the universality of a national people. Such arguments for a historically premature universality mask, as Bonefeld suggests: …the global character of exploitative relations… The specific character of the state’s integration requires an analysis of the peculiarities of a particular state and its national economy so as to understand the interrelation of the international movements of capital and the national formulation of policies.40 More work must be done to inoculate the directional demand of the UBI against its weaknesses, and its potential uptake among the members of the nationalist international and those that would wish to stabilise a steady-state capitalism. Critical advocates of the UBI among the wider UK and international left have contributed positive steps in the direction of alternatives that build on the enthusiasm for the UBI whilst seeking to counteract some of the excessive hopes pinned upon it. Ursula Huws has responded to some of the same criticisms highlighted here.41 Huws recommends, for example, the granting of the UBI on residence and not citizenship. But the dangers inherent in the vision of a benevolent neutral state require that advocates consider alternative ways in which the UBI could be organised. One of these is the idea of a ‘Social Wealth Fund’ that would see ‘profits from national assets […] consolidated into a reserve of funds that could be managed by a separate, publicly elected governance body and then distributed as the UBI or a “social dividend”, partially circumventing the possibility of a direct relationship between the state and discrete individuals.42 Advocates might also consider universalising alternatives to the UBI that address some, if not all, of its deficiencies. Although not without issues of their own, these include Universal Basic Services and Universal Basic Infrastructure, which both enable, halfway

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plausibly, non-monetary routes past the impasses of the UBI.43 However, these are as speculative in content as proposals for the UBI, and more work needs to be done to fully flesh out what they offer and the extent to which they differ from the latter. These alternatives, like any, place ‘new claims’ on the very institutions that guarantee both our reproduction and our subordination, so that these projects can secure the legal and structural foundations needed to endure and replicate. It can be argued that every alternative, every radical project for autonomously meeting our needs, runs the risk of institutionalisation– and indeed may rely on institutionalisation for its reproducibility and sustainability. The state is a contradictory political form of the capital relation which is criss-crossed by class struggle. Reforms that benefit the working class emerge from it. But this does not mean that the state policy can resolve contradiction: the contestation is rather encapsulated in the new policy or piece of legislation insofar as the state attempts to incorporate resistance into the institutions of capitalist order. The UBI sits astride the process of ‘contested institutionalisation’ all radical social practice finds itself subject to.44 Institutionalisation of alternatives can always have unintended consequences. We argue that it is this contradiction that the UBI fails to negotiate, even whilst it promises to resolve the antagonisms on which it centres. This is because the UBI implies a certain kind of state – a certain kind of specifically national state – and this impacts upon the range of rhetorical and ideological purposes to which the UBI is presently subverted. By taking the realistic position of a UBI that does not explode the system but works from within it, the measure is made even more susceptible to certain negative elements of capitalism present composition. The products of human thought and practice have a habit of taking on a life of their own. The UBI may conceal capitalist society’s

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contradictions in the dark cellar of autarky. This way, by withdrawing from the world and excluding the outsider, utopia may be the last thing UBI leads to. It is our contention that these tendencies are always there within conceptualisations of the UBI, right and left. pppp

7 LIQUIDATING LABOUR STRUGGLES? ON SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

Within its fevered present-day reception, current debates around the universal basic income (UBI) on the left can be roughly divided among those who think basic income itself delivers the just society and those who simply see it as a historically expedient way of moving every-more-closely towards it.1 The former is more easily dismissed on its own logic, containing, for reasons discussed in the last chapter, an inbuilt tendency toward something potentially totalitarian and historically premature without the abolition of capitalist social relations tout court. As regards the latter, in their appeals to a future of automated worklessness, popularisers of the post-work prospectus (PWP) present a virtuous circle. The introduction and expansion of new technology towards automation, encouraged and supported by the state, results in an increase in productivity which provides an opportunity to free labour from production. The ‘freed’ labourers are then supported from a UBI paid out of the fiscal resources created by automation in

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order to build towards a new and better kind of society. This virtuous circle forces us to think about the ramifications of the kind of institutionalised alternative such appeals propose, and measure the veracity of the claim that the UBI is paving a path towards postcapitalism against the possibility that it might actually close such a path off. Some advocates contend that the UBI, by affording time and freedom to workers to choose how they use their time, would create more opportunities for class and labour struggles to ensue.2 In this respect, the need for the UBI is often associated with foregoing labour market trends, specifically the greater flexibility generating insecurity for workers and their families. In this context, Standing argues, a new global subject has emerged: ‘a global “precariat”, consisting of many millions around the world without an anchor of stability’. He suggests that in contrast to the traditional industrial working class, the precariat lack ‘collective pride, dignity and identity’.3 Advocates of the UBI like Standing suggest that the measure ‘offers workers, especially precarious workers, radically increased freedom by strengthening their “power to say no”’ to precarious and/or dangerous jobs. Partly out of such reasoning, the proposal of the UBI in the United Kingdom has become increasingly popular within the Labour Party and labour movement, with leadership figures both publicly praising the idea and the party announcing an inquiry into the implementation of the measure.4 Whilst the post-capitalist left is the principle proselytiser for the demand in the Labour Party, it has tentative support and serious policymaker interest from other quarters of the party too.5 Perhaps most surprisingly of all, the trade union movement, traditionally opposed to the policy, have passed a series of conference motions – often orchestrated through union youth wings sympathetic to Corbynism – backing the UBI.6 As we have seen already, the spread of the idea has been aided by the

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feasibility and increasing likelihood of the UBI, represented in the recognition among the most enlightened quarters of global capitalism that something of the sort may be necessary to contain the fallout from a generalised crisis of social reproduction.7 This has only given succour to those on the left for whom the measure is a means to access a quite different kind of economy. However, others claim that the assertion that the UBI promises greater bargaining power to workers is frequently ‘overblown’.8 The motivation for the implementation of the UBI may be noble, but it is disturbing when it seems to emanate from the fear of a so-called ‘dangerous class’ entering an irreversible process of chaotic mobilisation, and falling for the call of the far right. This view has been challenged. For example, with an eye on the Global South, Munck argues that …the politics of a “dangerous class” discourse is quite simply incompatible with a progressive social transformation politics. It is a politics of social pathology which has no place in a progressive view of history and human potential.9 Other perspectives within the wider post-work imaginary arguably place too much faith in history and the capacity of human potential to burst though limits imposed upon it. Specifically, as we have seen in earlier chapters, by endowing the relationship between work and technology with a set of eschatological and Promethean associations, the post-work hypothesis steals work from its antagonistic context in capitalist social relations that both pre-exist and continue to underpin the compulsion to labour in the first place, through money. This is nowhere more transparent, as we saw in the previous chapter, than in the appeal to a benevolent state as the effective payer of the wage qua the UBI.

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The UBI purports to change the social relations under which we get paid for the better, but runs the risk of making things worse. As we argue in this chapter, this is due to its elision of the class struggle contained and concealed in the formal legal relationship between the buyer and seller of labour. Addressing demands to a state newly invested in the reproduction of the capacity to labour – in however “liberated” a way – is less easy than fighting for their recognition in the workplace. While the workplace comes with its own everyday forms of domination, individual employers have no monopoly on the means of violence such as the state wields. In this world, placing the power of deciding who will be paid and for what in the hands of the government, however benevolent, jumps the gun, pre-empting the overhaul of the wider social relations and social forms of capitalist society that a truly ‘post-capitalist’ transition would represent. In so doing, it dangerously forgets that the state is subordinated to the law of value and it holds, as Max Weber argues, the monopoly of ‘legitimate’ violence to maintain order. This is not to say that the state is the only site of violence. State violence is combined or sometimes replaced by more ‘efficient’ forms of social and economic violence, particularly in the Global South, that the state oversees to facilitate order. This includes, for example, the disciplining power of landowners or drug cartels over rural workers. As we have seen, by retaining money under the rule of the nation-state, the proposed transition between post-work and post-capitalist society not only breaks insufficiently with the present, but in some ways makes it worse. In this chapter, we will explore how the UBI replaces a wage over which workers can lawfully bargain with a state-administered monetary payment that has the potential to establish a significantly different mediation of the relationship between ‘citizen’ and state. In so doing, we suggest the state removes

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the capacity of workers to struggle for alternatives that go beyond the transitionary measures at the heart of the PWP, threatening to reduce the legal and political room within which conflict over work and the wage plays out. To demonstrate why this is the case, we will first set out a theory of social reproduction, the centrality of labour power to human life under capitalism and the mediation of the struggle over the wage as the means of that reproduction at the level of the employment relationship and the institutions that express and regulate it. pppp Social reproduction is ‘a broad term for the domain where lives are sustained and reproduced’.10 As Nancy Fraser writes, while Marx ‘looked behind the sphere of exchange, into the “hidden abode” of production, in order to discover capitalism’s secrets’, it is also necessary to ‘seek production’s conditions of possibility behind that sphere’.11 Namely: why do we have to work, and what keeps us working? The PWP wants to do away with work, without posing the question of why it exists in the form it does. In asking this, the social reproduction perspective on the crisis of work that we advocate here takes inspiration from Marxist-feminist inquiries into the ‘conditions of possibility of labour power’ and the ‘manner in which labour power is biologically, socially and generationally reproduced’.12 Marx writes that ‘the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself (sic) to the capitalist’.13 This relationship begins ‘not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living’.14 This relates to an ongoing process of primitive accumulation whereby workers are dispossessed continually of the common means of meeting their needs and new enclosures spring up daily.15 This is reproduced constantly to

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keep workers in a situation whereby they must sell their labour power to live. More importantly, ‘human reproduction is built on an unsustainable sacrifice by women, as part of a conception and structure of life which is nothing but labour time within an intolerable sexual hierarchy’.16 The social reproduction perspective sees these conditions as key to capitalist society. As Ferguson and McNally contend, the very definition of the latter is workers’ separation ‘from the means of their subsistence (or social reproduction)’.17 Workplace exploitation, then, is not the singular moment of domination.18 The violent denial of the human need to subsist here precedes the compulsion to labour. This standpoint suggests that capitalism is characterised as much by what supports a society of work as work itself, and that the work relationship is not the only relationship that needs to be undone for capitalism to be abolished. It is labour power and its reproduction by a range of actors and activities that counts, rather than labour and its performance by workers alone. The separation between production and social reproduction has been historically created.19 Marx understood the valorisation of capital as comprising ‘moment[s] of a totality’ such that ‘each social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction’. Indeed, Marx suggests that …[t]he capitalist process of production … seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other hand the wage labourer.20 This approach – which links production and social reproduction as two sides of the same coin – allows us to move on

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from a productivist framing to a broader way of understanding work. As we have seen already, humans produce in all societies. What is specific about capitalism are the social relations that undergird this productive activity and the forms it subsequently takes. Capitalist work produces and is produced by economic forms that mediate relations with the means of life. Money, commodities and value, under the constrained social basis of consumption implied in the conditions of social reproduction specific to capitalism, arbitrate our access to the means of living. Rather than selling the specific results of their productive activity for consumption, the majority of members of capitalist societies instead sell a very different commodity, of which their efforts are no less nourishing and the reproduction of which no less organised than the familiar objects of mass consumption. This is labourpower, the potential to work, which is offered to employers at its market price, which is the wage. It is this transaction which creates the monetary conditions whereby a market in commodities – consumer goods and services – is possible in the first instance. It is by means of the selling of a commodity – labour power – that the overwhelming proportion of members of society who do not own businesses and employ workers themselves are placed in a financial position to consume the various outputs of the collaborative labour processes of other such workers employed in other parts of the capitalist mode of production. This sale of the commodity labour power for the wage establishes the basis upon which the production and consumption of different goods and services can be mediated without the direct exchange of these goods and services by independent producers. The situation whereby we cannot live except through selling our labour power characterises capitalist society. Under the real illusion of legal equivalence circumscribed by the impersonal power of the state, buyer and seller of labour

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power meet in the market as equal parties. The class struggle then moves through, and is contained within, the practices and processes assumed by these legal real appearances. Class struggle is always a struggle over the form of these legal, economic and political forms that mediate class struggle.21 These are, in turn, modified, or dramatically transformed, as in the case of the authoritarian demagoguery we examined in the last chapter. Wage bargaining sees struggles ensue for a higher price of labour power, engaged in by associations of its sellers. This is driven by the collective struggle to live and enjoy life. As Marx suggests the buying, selling and using of labour power in the labour process are governed by a system of ‘equal rights’. But ‘between equal rights’, he suggests, ‘force decides’. In this way, the frameworks of law and order that govern workplace relationships, whilst providing for the capacity of the employer to exploit the worker, also provide means for workers to organise in order to redress grievances and stem the tendency of rapacious capitalist production to exhaust and debilitate the labour power on which it depends. Trade union activity in Western contemporary capitalist societies is protected as well as limited by the law. In the postwar social settlement, trade union power was fundamental to a performing economy and helped organise, manage and channel the desires and demands of workers individually and collectively, whilst also ensuring that standards were maintained to ensure a healthy and productive workforce. However, since then and mainly as a result of the recomposition of capital accumulation since the oil crisis in the late 1970s and the emergence of monetarism, trade union laws have become more restrictive. Yet, in many large organisations collective bargaining still plays a major part in structuring the relationship between employers and employees and determining what is and is not possible in the workplace

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by way of wages, time and productivity. Usually, this proceeds through negotiation within the terms of the employment contract. Where these negotiations break down employees have the formal right to withhold their labour by taking strike action. Adopting a wider frame of reference than the employment relationship alone however, a ‘social reproduction’ perspective on the relationship between work and everyday life exposes a multiplicity of forms of subordination and resistance beyond the traditionally conceived ‘class relation’. This suggests that the production and social reproduction of labour power do not take place in the economic and the social spheres respectively but are both, in equal respect, fields of labour conflict and struggle.22 In a world where the reproduction of life is mediated by money and where the social production of wealth is privately appropriated, human needs and the reproduction of life cannot be anything other than a political ‘problem’ that transcends the workplace alone. The struggles for the reproduction of life address the ‘conditions of possibility of labour power’.23 In other words, the reproduction of life in capitalist society, individually and collectively. What the social reproduction approach suggests, by foregrounding the constitutive social relations that undergird work to begin with, is that struggles for social reproduction are instances of class struggle. Struggles addressed to state solutions and state recognition are themselves struggles for the means to live and subsist. As Anna Curcio points out in an interview with Kathi Weeks, the same struggles ‘brought together by the same possibility of survival’, are also struggles for the ‘survival and the autonomous reproduction of the human being and a struggle for the survival and the reproduction of capital’.24 In fights to protect the welfare system, for instance, this dual identity is clear. The social reproduction standpoint suggests that capital and state

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sustain us, and in fighting for the welfare system, we both ensure our reproduction as humans as well as workers, and in turn the reproduction of capitalist society. The two sides, in their contradictory unity, are the same. Our survival hinges on the survival of capital, for now, from which we seek strength to fight on for an alternative to it. But rather than a functionalist perspective, it endows the situation with a thoroughly contradictory status. That our survival hinges on the survival – and the prosperity – of capital, for now at least, creates tensions, struggles, conflicts. They centre on consumption, the commons, commodification: outside production, in the sphere of realisation. The survival of society hinges on the ability of people to subsist and reproduce the means of both living and labouring. Covering everything that reproduces both life and capitalist society, these struggles highlight how social reproduction is inevitably crisscrossed by contradictions, wherein lies room for resistance and rupture, and for the creation of alternative forms of social reproduction. Contradictorily, the reproduction of each – life and capital – is the reproduction of the other. Capitalist society depends upon the commodification of the labour power we sell in order to live. Social reproduction is a sphere of conflict as long as labour power implies this twin intent. The capitalist desires its reproduction to exploit, the worker its reproduction to eat. Any analysis of work and economic life must tune in to these contradictions and their possibilities. When we reproduce labour power, we also reproduce life itself. The wage pays for labour power, and it is through the wage that we live. There is no other way. As such, the …contradiction between the needs of the workers and the needs of capital that lives at the core of the problem of social reproduction cannot be

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more vivid. This is not a political, economic or social issue but it is about the reproduction of human “life”.25 To intervene in the politics of work, whilst keeping these contradictions open, one must first intervene in the politics of the social relations that support it. We argue that struggles over social reproduction are ‘labour’ struggles. Concurrently, ‘labour’ struggles are mainly struggles over social reproduction. We struggle to live, not to work. Wage labour mediates life, but this struggle for money takes place in, against and beyond capital. In struggling to avail ourselves of what we need to eat, we gesture from this world to others. That is, we produce surplus possibilities. The question is whether the post-work prospectus is capable of both creating space for and capturing the reality of these possibilities. pppp Recently, scholars have suggested that capitalism is undergoing a severe and protracted crisis of social reproduction. Employment increasingly fails to support subsistence. This, according to Zechner and Hansen, is …a crisis and widespread vulnerability … that has opened an incredible number of struggles around social, economic, resource and survival, which have put the struggle for life in the centre of politics.26 Crises are a recurrent and inherent feature of capitalism, a necessary evil to enable the expansion of capital. But the 2008 economic and financial collapse resulted in the crisis of formal waged employment and associated forms of welfare as the means for individual and urban communities to

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reproduce themselves, with an acute impact on peri-urban and rural communities, i.e., dependent settings and peripheral economies. This is a concrete and historically situated starting point for the discussion of the futures of work. The financial crisis of 2008 was a breakpoint in the way capitalist society reproduces itself through money as a form of wealth. The bursting of the bubble reduced the room for recovery from the long-lasting capitalist crisis sparked in the late 1970s, and the neoliberal transformation that followed as an attempted solution. The resulting ‘crisis of social reproduction’ is manifested in a situation in which employment is (and will be) unable to support subsistence across wide sections of the developed and developing world.27 In 2008, the crisis of wage relations and of the institutional forms of regulating class struggles deepened. The result was a reduction in the ability to control class struggles and mobilised societies. States had little recourse to respond except through direct repression, which today is becoming the norm. Today, an authoritarian mode of governance manifests as the most effective and dynamic means of managing and reproducing capitalist social relations at the level of the state. Neoliberalism, in the variant that proposed itself as the most effective and dynamic means of managing capitalist social reproduction in the wake of the crisis of Keynesianism, is long gone. Under the shadow of this political and economic shift, the crisis of social reproduction takes root where the rupture between employment and social reproduction has been most intense, and especially where the temporal and spatial organisation of ‘work’ has escaped the limits of formal working time and space. This forces back upon urban communities themselves the issue of how to organise productive and reproductive activities to ensure survival. Thousands of people are organising autonomously around

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housing, food, land, education, health, care, culture. In the process, they deal with the malaises produced by capitalism such as drug addiction, depression, crime, domestic violence, despair, within contexts of extreme poverty and social exclusion. We contend that the present struggles around social reproduction signal a form of class struggle that takes place in the neighbourhood, the community, rural settings, the harbour, the forest and the highlands. These forms of struggle are our starting point for the discussion, in the next chapter, of the prefiguration of alternative futures of work and a putative ‘post-work’ utopia.28 We suggest that the general crisis of social reproduction provides fruitful terrain to concretely rethink the meaning of alternatives today. While PWP advocates confuse this situation with an unfolding end of work, we use the social reproduction standpoint to reframe this and engage with the search for alternative forms of social reproduction that is already actively taking place at the grassroots, but which the more ‘accelerationist’ strands of post-capitalist thinking dismiss as ‘folk politics’, or in other words a tendency, and political action, designed to interpret the world and to react against the ‘historical experiences of communism’.29 Srnicek and Williams, for instance, do not trust what they call ‘folk politics’: while their ‘strongest achievement’ is ‘the dissemination of feminist, anti-racist, gay-rights and antibureaucratic demands … they suffer from an inability or lack of desire to turn the more radical side of these projects into hegemonic ones’.30 ‘Radical’ is reduced here to a universalising, coordinated, state-led hegemonic project, based on directional demands, which includes the creation of ‘the people’ as the subject for a hegemonic populist project, as suggested by Srnicek and Williams. Their term ‘folk politics’ is dismissive because it situates processes of organising at the grassroots as adjunct to the hegemonic project of the left.

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This is problematic because it ignores that the creation of possibilities beyond the repressive state now lies within these organising processes around issues of social reproduction at the grassroots. To be sure, social movements are not discarded in the PWP. The idea is, of course, to build power, and it is true to say that grassroots movements are appreciated and included in the post-work political project of the left. But our contention is that while appreciated up to certain point, they are not the project. They are attached to it. A social reproduction standpoint redresses this. As Serra suggests ‘a revolutionary focus on the realm of social reproduction uncovers the utopian elements that exist in a latent state in the constellation of class struggles of the present’.31 Already today the politics of social reproduction are reinventing work and forms of reproducing life in this way, rather than waiting for the correct state policy or technological advance to come along first. These interventions are transforming the political too, challenging existing matrices of power, coloniality, patriarchy and their sociopolitical horizons. They are organising alternatives in autonomous forms of cooperative and dignified work; democracy; land; care for human and non-human life; indigenous autonomy; pedagogies; and education. Innumerable collective actions emerging from the fissures of a system in crisis are not just dedicated to making demands to governments but also to developing concrete alternatives in urban and rural territories. Enriched by traditions of resistance but bringing the new into play, these struggles led by women, indigenous and rural workers, precarious workers, Federici suggests, are …the door to a whole rethinking of the neighbourhood, the community – to a politics

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weaving together our desires, our possibilities, our crisis, and then mapping our courses of action … a new politics that moves between the wage and the common.32 We regard these organising processes around social reproduction as ‘critical affirmations’ rather than examples of the positive praxis entailed in ‘folk politics’. The distinction between positive action and critical affirmation enables us to argue for the significance of collective actions and struggles in the field ‘without the fear of the positivisation of resistance, i.e. of the state’s triumph over revolt’ and the reduction of anticipatory grassroot organisation to a mere life style choice.33 We distance ourselves from Hardt and Negri’s positivisation of the subject of radical hope in their concept of the ‘multitude’, as encountered in Chapter 4. As we will see in the next chapter, our Bloch-inspired concept of concrete utopia rejects the philosophical immanence on which Hardt and Negri’s work is based. Where the latter eliminates contradiction in praxis, concrete utopia entails a dialectical struggle over the content of a not-yet reality where ‘current possibilities can be regarded as ways out toward the future’.34 The PWP positivises the crisis of social reproduction as an unfolding end of work. But, as with any policy, this one too needs to be evaluated within the context of its own production. Critical perspectives on capitalism should not be taken at face value but contextualised as themselves ‘historically situated’ in order ‘to be able to explain the possibility of [their] own existence’.35 For us, this means that the process of organising alternative (work) futures must be contextualised. The context for a post-work imaginary that relies on the distribution of ‘money’ by the nation state is provided by a decade of global, structural, social and spatial

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transformations of capitalism. Misreading the character of the possibilities contained in the present, the PWP misses the connection between production and what precedes it, logically and historically, which is key to understanding class struggle today. It treats the class struggle as a closed case and retains the current rule of property ownership, including, crucially, that of the means of production, for which no post-capitalist or post-work vista gives a convincing vision for redress.36 UBI proposals, in particular, display little curiosity in overhauling the distribution of property and ownership that characterises inequality and misery under capitalism, talking only of a share of the spoils of what is produced under these conditions. For instance, former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn followed French Socialist presidential candidate Benoit Hamon in calling for a tax on robots to fund a UBI that will recompense the workers displaced by automation.37 But this not only reinforces but relies, for its tax revenue, on a capitalist economy. Most importantly, in these visions there is an absence of class struggle, by which we mean a vision of labour struggles recoded not only as struggles within workplaces, but outside in the sphere of social reproduction. An understanding of social reproduction as the central terrain on which capitalism establishes itself shifts our focus to how class actors resist within it. pppp On a policy level, Marxist-feminists taking a social reproduction standpoint have been central in popularising demands for a basic income, partly via demands around ‘Wages for Housework’.38 Others, however, have been more circumspect. These issues are raised and debated by Kathi Weeks in an interview for UK social democratic think-tank Compass.39 She

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addresses the way in which the ‘demand for a basic income does not directly address either the gendered division of household-based reproductive labour or its privatization’, even possibly …serv[ing] simply to offer more support for the traditional heteropatriarchal family’s gender division of productive and reproductive labour, with more men participating in waged work and more women working in the home. But, by giving ‘some measure of relief from the daily grind of sheer survival’, the basic income could also ‘shak[e] things up’ by ‘offering both men and women the opportunity to experience their working lives a little differently and to reorient their relationships to their jobs and households accordingly’, in a ‘more just, equitable and sustaining way’. Some Marxist-feminists, like Selma James, favour more specific measures to deal with the gendered division of labour around the activities of social reproduction. James has noted, for instance, how the sophisticated and differentiated system of child benefit in the United Kingdom has created significant gains for women.40 Similarly, Mariarosa Dalla Costa has explored in great detail the way the Roosevelt government restructured social relations with targeted policies during the New Deal, as we touched upon in Chapter 3.41 As we considered at the end of the previous chapter, the challenge for advocates on the left is how to create and argue for a bulletproof UBI that can’t be appropriated easily by authoritarian regimes in an age of new borders and shared projects of national renewal. The left advocates the UBI out of the best intentions, but remains within a mode of thinking that, by not understanding capitalism, does not

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understand how it is confronted and the dangers posed by alternatives to capitalism that potentiate something worse precisely by closing off the possibility of struggle. At its worst, it would fulfil the programme of right populisms and totalitarianisms through time by liquidating class conflict in production. In this way, the basic income makes possible the self-destruction of the left and of the labour movement, but it cannot fully negate the way in which labour moves: class struggle.42 In this way, the UBI is another form in which class struggle is mediated – the question is the room it provides for class struggle to move. Take, for instance, the link between demonetisation and the UBI in the Indian case, as previously discussed. The combined effect of demonetisation and the UBI would, on the one hand, replace an individualised money supply through which people access the things they need by means of the wage with one granted at state convenience. On the other, for those not currently in receipt of a wage, it creates a permanent dependence on the umbilical cord of the state irrespective of its character. Although there are specificities to the situation in India that change some of these calculations, applied more widely the UBI breaks here with some vital preconditions of class struggle and worker organisation, limiting the bases for mobilisation. In his analysis of the Keynesian state, Holloway argues that the latter constituted a specific ‘mode of domination’, as the Keynesian state contained the power of labour via the ‘monetisation’ of class conflict. Thus, ‘[i]n the face of rigidity and revolt, money was the great lubricant. Wagebargaining became the focus of both managerial change and worker discontent’. The crisis of Keynesianism was, in this sense, ‘a crisis of a form of containment of labour’.43 The UBI could become, then, another form of domination of the

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power of labour, only this time, rather than relying on ‘class’ conflict, it displaces the conflict onto the political realm, posing citizens in a relationship of mediation with the state alone, without passing through the forms of mediation which structure labour struggles inside and outside the workplace at present, and within which conflict over work, wages and the rest have room to move. Once the provision of money comes not from the wage but from the beneficence of the state, the web of relations by which workers win a better balance between their subsistence and the work they do collapses. From the impersonal power of liberal legal structures, we have the personalised power of state fiat determining who gets what. The weighty democratic, administrative, and brute-force heft that this arrangement implies will no longer be concealed behind contractual niceties, but waged openly and directly. Class conflict seemingly destroyed, the power of the state attains now its most authoritarian forms. The critical conceptualisation of capitalist society we offer in this book sees the capitalist state as criss-crossed by class struggle and, thus, as a pivotal political form of capital – not as a neutral arena or instrument of power, but as an inherent part of capitalist society, subordinated to the law of value. The question we must ask then is not so much what the UBI would do in terms of labour and capital alone, but the manner in which it mediates, and potentially replaces, by means of the state, this relationship. Insofar as this is the case, the polyvalence of the UBI makes it very much upfor-grabs politically, winding up as one part of a wider politics that the left must do its best to resist. pppp

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What our anticipatory social reproduction perspective on the futures of work suggests is that there is no escaping work without addressing the conditions that make possible a world wherein we work to live in the first place. The PWP offers no alternative infrastructure to do so independent of commodification. The UBI, a possible solution, only reinforces the rule of money-capital with which the wage is intimately connected, simply substituting the buyer of labour power with the state. The UBI may well constitute a new form assumed by the struggle over social reproduction. The UBI comes to the rescue to fill in the gap and ‘intervenes’ to eliminate the existing contradictions that exist between the two tendencies of capital: the tendency ‘to reduce as much as possible the number of workers employed’ and the tendency ‘to produce the greatest possible mass of surplus-value’.44 As Marx suggests, this contradiction results in the permanent destruction and recreation of capitalist means of production. This is not only a feature of moments of crisis but …also of the everyday reality of accumulation, as the pressure of competition leads to an intensification of class struggle, the devaluation of backward capitals, the destruction of productive capacity and the displacement of labour.45 Postcapitalism can only be realised through addressing and exploiting these contradictions to expand labour struggles. Current proposals of an automated economy producing a post-work society supported by the basic income might propose a break with work, but do not get to grips with what it would take to break with capitalism. The UBI effectively abolishes any means by which workers can struggle for a better deal, obliterating class struggle and purporting to resolve its contradictions at the imaginary level of a nation

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state paying free money to a nationally-defined people. In so doing, the vista of an abolition of work afforded by the UBI serves up the fruits of struggle prematurely, without struggles having taken place. It temporarily defers the contradictions of class antagonism without resolution through the antagonism itself. As we saw in Chapter 3, class struggle would motivate greater investment in labour-augmenting or labour-substituting technologies, whether in itself through greater militancy or secondarily through claims for higher wages.46 Indeed, radical advocates of the PWP do recognise the role that labour organisation may play in bringing about the technological shifts on which their visions rest, most vividly in the work of Paul Mason.47 But most popular imaginaries of an automated future seemingly outsource capitalist development to technology as a neutral force as opposed to one imbricated and resulting from wider social relations. Within the contradictions set out in this chapter, it is therefore a political choice to identify which kind of society we want to emerge from this crisis of the capitalist form of social reproduction. A social reproduction perspective does not pose a functional harmony between the reproduction of life as labour power and the expenditure of that labour power in production. But the post-work thesis, specifically in the proposal of a basic income, posits precisely such a functional vision of society. Namely, it eliminates conflict and contradiction and seeks to ‘solve the problem of work’. At present, all the visions for how this pans out falsely resolve these contradictions in the UBI, depriving them of the transformative dynamism through which something resembling a ‘post-capitalist’ society might be possible. In the next chapter, we suggest an alternative that liquidates neither social reproduction as class struggle, nor class struggle as social reproduction. As we will see, social

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movements and cooperative experiments in Latin America and Europe offer different ways of drawing down money from either employers or states as the benefactors of last resort to strike different concords around work and shared productive activity. Such examples are important to keep in mind when discussing ‘post-work’ utopias because they make us notice that work is also social reproduction. Rather than being simply dismissed as ‘folk politics’ they deserve to be appreciated as a source of knowledge and experience for any left project addressed to the future of work. They centre, we suggest, on the practical creation of ‘concrete utopias’ that keep open the capacity of the subjects involved to struggle and contest the institutionalised forms their social relations assume. pppp

8 HOPE AND PREFIGURATIVE TRANSLATION ON UTOPIA

In terms of its political programme, post-capitalist thinking hinges on a transitional period running out of the present and into the future.1 But this, we argue, will not come through the suite of options presently on offer which purport to escape work alone and do not in any substantial sense seek to escape the social relations and social forms that characterise capitalist society, among them value, commodities and money. Our critique suggests that while work is still central, work as such is not the central social relationship that defines capitalism, but rather the value relation. Any attempt to define a post-capitalist society based on a set of transitional political prescriptions that address only work and stop short of addressing this aspect will obstruct rather than facilitate the development of an alternative. It is our contention that the potential solution to the impasses of the post-work prospectus (PWP) is to work within contradictions and expand them, seeking to anticipate the unknown possibilities that lurk in the present reality and

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indicate a possible future. Most notably today, this relates to class struggle recoded not only as struggles within workplaces, but outside in the sphere of social reproduction mainly led by ‘surplus’ populations. An understanding of social reproduction as the central terrain on which capitalism establishes itself shifts our focus to how class actors resist within it. This alternative prospectus has a major contribution to make to ongoing attempts to fashion critical and radical responses to the crisis of work and the wage. From this perspective, technology and automation cannot be reified as neutral forces the unfolding of which will deliver us a workless world supported by the intervention of the capitalist state as the new wage payer. Rather, even on the terms of the post-capitalist prospectus itself, and in the absence of convincing evidence that automation will lead to technological unemployment on the scale anticipated, class struggles would be necessary to accomplish the kind of economy-wide automation of production on which their vistas of the future hinge.2 But the transitional measures may actually serve to close contradictions and restrict the room to move of struggles for better alternative and non-capitalist forms of social reproduction. For the absence of this factor, their utopia is an abstract one. In other words, it is an abstract utopia because it exists disconnected from the struggles that are taking place at the grassroots, subordinated to the pursuit of a hegemonic ‘policy solution’ that may or may not ameliorate the hardship and vulnerability of capitalist existence. As argued in Chapter 7, for us, the key to the futures of work and life is hidden in the politics of social reproduction. It is in the class struggles around issues related to social reproduction where we can navigate the contradictions of capitalist life as labour power. There is a contradiction between needing money to reproduce human life and needing to destroy its

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command over life to reproduce dignified forms of living. As we will explore further in this chapter, a politics of social reproduction poses questions about the possibility of producing an uncontainable ‘excess’ at the point where this contradiction can no longer be reconciled. The monetary provision of a universal basic income (UBI) will only serve to falsely resolve this contradiction and deprive it of its transformative dynamism. Rather than abstract money-led ‘solutions’ to the problem, the practical experience of this contradiction in different circumstances provides a concrete and historically situated starting point, from which we can articulate alternative forms of social reproduction, against, despite and beyond money. Retaining money, commodities and value under the rule of the nation-state, the proposed transition between post-work and post-capitalist society remains stuck at the level of an ‘abstract utopia’ that breaks insufficiently with the present, in some ways making it worse by replacing a wage over which workers can lawfully bargain with a state-administered monetary payment that creates a more individualised mediation of the relationship between citizen and state, liquidating labour struggles around both production and social reproduction. Against the generalised embrace of abstract utopias like the automated worklessness of advanced robotics and the UBI, we suggest in this chapter that the space to create concrete utopias is required. Thus far, we have brought recent developments in open Marxism to bear upon the question of the futures of work and (post)capitalism. In this last chapter, we bring the book to a close by establishing a connection between the social struggles around issues of social reproduction and Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope.3 By recasting the relation between work, social reproduction and new forms of utopia, this approach points to the inadequacy of abstract utopias

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and the significance of concrete utopia to understand how social movements are navigating the contradictions of capitalism today, and by so doing, anticipating alternative futures of work in the present with an eye on the future. We show how social mobilisation around issues of social reproduction, i.e. the politics of social reproduction, are creating concrete utopias that enhance the capacity to negate, affirm, contest and reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the capitalist state. Rather than abstract dreams for a better future, these experiences are cracking out from within capitalist contradictory dynamics indicating the real possibility of an alternative latent, but by no means automatic, in the uncertain present. As we will see, these experiences are not subjective and inoffensive but deal with the real material possibilities that exist in the world. A necessary first step to the delineation of such concrete utopias in the present is to address class, property and social reproduction whilst still allowing struggle to thrive, harnessing the legal and political weaponry at hand to expand space for alternatives through, and not in spite of the present state of things. It is imperative to locate where this potential for change lies.4 Placing bets on a ‘transition’, we propose, actually forestalls the possibility of prefiguring real alternatives in the present. We accept that ‘welfare state 1 the UBI’ is clearly not the final horizon of post-work politics, and would require further transformation built on struggle. Our disagreement lies instead in the different understanding of utopia and the future. A ‘concrete utopian’ alternative creates the capacity to reshape the relationship between individuals, society and the rule of money, value and the state rather than reinforce it, principally by devolving monetary and non-monetary resources and power rather than centralising them in the

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hands of an all-powerful ‘post-capitalist’ state. In aiming towards such an alternative, the ‘co-construction’ of policy, which attempts to signify a process by which innovative practices that are being created at the grassroots enter into the mainstream, does not go far enough. We argue that what is required is prefigurative translation – an allencompassing approach that makes the effort to understand how the politics of social reproduction navigate major obstacles and contradictions in the process of creating alternative forms of social relations beyond capitalist, patriarchal and colonial social relations, and attempts to facilitate this process in order to innovate in political organisation and left policy.5 In this chapter, we suggest that the epithet ‘folk politics’ falls short of capturing the utopian content of the politics of social reproduction in two ways. First, folk politics indicates that the constitution of political hegemony from the left is separated from grassroot organising, i.e. organising from below. The latter, seen as folk politics, cannot inform a project of ‘post-capitalist’ transformation for which the decision over what to focus on – automation, the UBI, etc. – has already been taken. Second, the characterisation of ‘folk politics’ reinforces an Eurocentric vision of the left that has been challenged in practice by the reality of those struggling at the grassroots, mainly in the Global South. It is there where, as Santos and Meneses argue, people are ‘changing the world in their own terms and according to [their] own aspirations not always understood, acknowledged or valued by the left in the Global North’.6 One of their contributions has been to problematise ‘modernity’ and reveal the epistemic violence that accompanies Eurocentrism. Yet, Srnicek and Williams’ critique of what they describe as folk politics is conceived of as part of a wider strategy for ‘left politics as a politics of modernity’. In this way, the proposal

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for an hegemonic project of the left minimises, neglects and subsumes not only grassroots organising but non-Western and non-Eurocentric resistances to a general analysis of the ‘world’ by use of Eurocentric categories that reproduce the kind of thinking and action that many movements are struggling against. The critique of Eurocentrism and coloniality is unfolding as a main component of the critique of capitalism and patriarchy, through a myriad of collective actions that include indigenous people, but also landless rural workers, women, refugees, immigrants. Non-Eurocentric approaches are difficult to detect through a Eurocentric lens. To be sure, today’s struggles are calling into question ‘dominant ways of thinking and ordering of the real’ as well as the forms in which we understand them.7 Any discussion of the meaning of a non-capitalist society or any utopian demands must be necessarily rooted in concrete struggles for the social reproduction of life. But more important, it must be recognised that these struggles around the social reproduction of life are rooted in a plurality of knowledges and experiences that are realising improbable possibilities of rediscovering alternative forms of social reproduction. In this context, for example, the proposal of ‘the right to be lazy’, initially that of Paul Lafargue but followed up by several of the current crop of post-work thinkers, may be appealing to some but may well sound offensive to millions struggling for survival in the Global South. On this terrain, the politics of social reproduction are not exhausted in ‘lifestyle’ politics, or in mobilisation in favour of abstract utopias of state control by the left, but become a structuring principle of concrete utopias that remedy many of the flaws of the PWP. We show how the Unemployed Workers Organizations in Argentina in the 1990s illustrate the process by which an unlikely labour subject created a

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‘concrete utopian’ alternative that remade the relationship between individual workers, labour organisations, commons and the rule of money and the capitalist state, rather than reinforcing the existent one. By so doing, the Piqueteros’ praxis ‘reshaped the labour question’, pointing at the problem of social reproduction and the utopian surplus, created by unlikely subjects such as the unemployed, that is missing in theoretical debates about the future of work.8 We argue that an imaginative project of the Left should grasp the concrete utopian content of present (class) struggles around social reproduction at a time of crisis and destruction as a starting point.9 pppp We see social organising around social reproduction as a process of organising and learning hope.10 Our notion of ‘utopia’, inspired by Ernst Bloch’s work, is anticipatory. According to Levitas, Bloch criticised utopian thought that was not transformative, that is, that was not anticipatory.11 Eric Olin Wright famously offers a similar term, real utopia, to describe how social movements envision new worlds and can transform capitalism.12 He suggests that the expression “real utopia” ‘is meant to be a provocation, for “utopia” and “real” do not comfortably go together’. Wright’s “real” utopias are not only desirable but, according to the author, they are necessarily viable and achievable. Wright claims that ‘if you worry about desirability and ignore viability or achievability, then you are just a plain utopian. Exploration of real utopias requires understanding of these other two dimensions’.13 The Bloch-inspired notion of concrete utopia is radically different and, we think, more appropriate to capture present struggle around social reproduction. Where ‘real’ utopia requires ‘objective’ conditions for its realisation,

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concrete utopia is not concerned with ‘feasibility’ but with opening the possibility to enact a collective dream. The notion of ‘concrete utopia’ refers to the concrete anticipation of what Ernst Bloch names the not-yet-conscious and, more generally, the not-yet.14 Rather than feasibility, the key term in the philosophy of Ernst Bloch is ‘possibility’.15 Possibility exists in the materiality of world in the form of the not yet. As Moir suggests ‘material reality is utopian in the sense of being literally not (yet) “there” in a finished form’.16 Bloch’s concept of the not yet consciousness/ reality is politically compelling at a time when we are failing to survive as humans. To Bloch …humanity is conceived as a possibility, as a challenge to become, not as a given, and this means that no actual assumption concerning the content of being can be made.17 Humanity is not yet in possession of itself and it ‘is something that has yet to be discovered’.18 This ‘discovery’ is not contemplative or passive. It is praxis. This practical component means that the concept of concrete utopia cannot be equated with the act of building castles in the air or romanticising resistance: it is inextricably connected with Bloch’s historical materialist conception of history and a material understanding of the world.19 Concrete utopia gives materiality to the not-yet through praxis. Along the same lines, utopia, as Bloch argues, is a material aspect of reality. Thus, the struggles to articulate alternative forms of social reproduction are not probable or expected but rather emerge out of an uncertain and contradictory praxis that affirms life amidst the destruction that is hidden in the real abstractions that govern social life in capitalist society. Thus, the main difference between abstract and concrete utopia is that abstract utopia is a ready-made utopia that is

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created before the existence of a revolutionary subject capable of bringing it about, while concrete utopia is of an anticipatory kind ‘which by no means coincides with abstract utopia dreaminess, nor is directed by the immaturity of merely abstract utopian socialism’.20 Abstract utopias create plans – sometimes to be led by a party – out of collective imaginations, to be realised in the future only when the expected conditions arise. Concrete utopia, meanwhile, is a collective act of venturing beyond. We can read how Marx refers to the Paris Commune 150 years ago: The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par d´ecret du people … They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.21 Hope is central to Bloch’s philosophy.22 Bloch contended that ‘the terrain of hope, yearning and desire must not be abandoned to the enemy’ by reducing critical theory to the simple ‘unmasking’ of ideologies.23 Bloch’s philosophy is all about ‘political’ possibility. It harbours hope, not in far-off promised lands, but in what already exists within our own life and materiality of existence – that we can engage with through collective dreams. To Bloch, hope is not merely a projection of reason, a ‘mental creation’ of human thought, but an expression of what is really possible.24 Changing the world is always possible because, in Bloch’s philosophy, hope links subjective aspirations with objective tendencies so that humans are directed ‘not just to [their] future psychological state but to a future world as well’.25 The anticipatory consciousness of the not yet connects us with the other material dimension of reality that inhabits the

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present one. The future that Bloch alludes to is a truly ‘authentic future’, that is a future that is not a preordained ideal to which we all must walk towards, and wherein the only uncertain issue is the uncertainty of how to get there. An authentic future knows neither the path nor the point of arrival. Inspired by Bloch’s understanding, what one of us has elsewhere termed the art of organising hope (TAOH) problematises autonomous struggles around social reproduction, their relationship with the state and ahistorical and onedimensional understandings of radical change.26 It is an art that flourishes in many occasions in extremely adverse contexts and deploys knowledge creatively and politically to weave dreams out of misery, against the odds, to protect life. Rather than being synonymous with a misplaced optimism, TAOH means to learn how to engage with hope and manage setbacks and endure disheartening circumstances. Organising in the present continuous tense captures the movement, the process and the open character of the struggle around social reproduction. The political coordination of existing alternatives and the process of creation of new ones is uncertain, but the political organisation is part of this prefigurative process of creating alternatives. It understands how concrete utopias translate into law and policy and the untranslatable excess they leave behind. The intellectual utopianism and political voluntarism that underpin proposals for an UBI-enabled ‘post-work’ society are unable to facilitate such a process of prefiguration. What matters is a proper engagement of political/policy proposals with the development of social struggles at the grassroots. Struggle and contradiction are essential elements of prefiguration, foreshadowing alternative futures in the here and now. This dimension of struggle in the prefiguration process has been neglected by neo-anarchist scholar-activists

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theorising radical change. Regarded as a central tenet of autonomous movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the term prefigurative politics has been recently deployed to explain social movements’ strategy towards the enactment, in the present of the society we want to see in the future.27 Prefigurative politics can also mean the experience of creating horizontal and democratic organisations and relations that serve a broader political process, or as the embodiment of new potentialities for the generation of revolutionary consciousness.28 For us, meanwhile, prefiguration is a collective process of steering through the contradictions of the capital relation in specific historically-contextualised struggles – which today circulate around issues of social reproduction. Social struggles create surplus possibilities within, against and beyond the real abstractions that govern social life and regulate resistance. These possibilities are untranslatable into conventional social sciences epistemology: ‘the power of the focus on Marx’s value-form is not simply to suggest an alternative form of social epistemology but a radical epistemology of the social’.29 This radical epistemology of the social enables a ‘prefigurative critique of political economy’30 that, with Bloch, reads Marx’s critique of political economy in the key of hope in order to grasp prefiguration as a radical praxis against and beyond the value-form. Thus, we see prefiguration is not the result of the process of creation of a new society in the present, but the result of a struggle with, against and beyond capitalist social relations.31 The term prefigurative translation offers an alternative approach for the left that involves the ‘translation of grassroot innovations’ into new mediations.32 We suggest that any alternative to the present state of things would need to move through real abstractions and capitalist mediations in order to establish new ones, rather than seek an impossible immediacy

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of social relations. A policy intervention from the left that wants to avoid the suffocation of alternatives by a domineering state and its institutions should unavoidably engage with the movements’ alternative-creating capacity in order to create an open programme for an unclosed reality. In other words: …an adequate translation via co-construction [of policy] can only be achieved by a method of translation that engages with the processes of prefiguration, or it cannot be considered a “coconstruction of policy” at all. We acknowledge the tension that lives within prefigurative translation that must not be ignored, for it emanates from capitalist society: policy is both an enabling practice and a tool for regulating and deradicalising social change. But policy is a contradictory and political process of contention. Policy reforms are the crystallisations of ongoing contradictions and conflicts. Prefigurative translations therefore contain the potential to escape the contours of the regulative and oppressive state in order to venture into the creativity of grassroots movements.33 pppp Latin America and the Caribbean are constant sources of inspiration for emancipatory praxis due to a tradition of radical grassroots movements that mobilise libertarian, autonomist, anarchist and Marxist traditions, combined with liberation theology and indigenous insurgency. The region offers the world a variety of resourceful forms of struggle against colonial-patriarchal capitalism. Since the 1990s, Latin American movements have embraced autonomy as their mobilising utopia and have been experimenting with alternative politics and social relations. Led by women,

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indigenous people, the landless, the unemployed, rural workers, the marginalised and others, new movements have become the protagonists of a sea of radical forms of ‘organising hope’, creating new autonomous organisations and democratic practices in urban and rural settings.34 In the following, we consider the example of one of the sectors of the Argentinian Unemployed Workers Organizations (UWOs) as an illustration of how the impasses outlined in previous chapters can be overcome and concrete utopias envisioned.35 This example is important insofar as the narrow concern with the productive sphere inherent in PWP is overcome with reference to new forms of social reproduction.36 Moreover, where the UBI establishes an individualised dependence on the benevolence of the state, here the relationship with the state is mediated through new collective institutions, and the concept of continuing class struggle in an antagonistic manner and societal contradiction is kept intact. While they are always at risk of being integrated into the modus operandi and dynamics imposed by the powers that they confront, and therefore suffer de-radicalisation, the ‘translation’ of these concrete utopias into state policy is a process of struggle that allows room for, rather than forecloses, radical change.37 In this respect they provide a counterweight to the state-oriented demands for transformation issuing from the so-called ‘post-work’ or ‘postcapitalist’ left. Originating in the late 1990s, the Argentinean Unemployed Workers Organisations are well-known in Latin America and elsewhere for their struggle for autonomy and dignity against social exclusion and unemployment. Unemployment in Argentina had risen from 6% in 1991 to 18% in 1995. Organisationally spontaneous roadblock protests called for ‘job creation, public workers, essential services

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[and] participation in the management of employment programmes’.38 The ‘Piqueteros’ had a strategy of …leveraging state resources through a combination of protest and social projects in the community and not only challenged the common view of the unemployed as excluded and redundant but also influenced the institutional framework within which social demands could be made. They did so through the creation of new UWOs which, through resistance and struggle, were successful in drawing down state benefits that would have been paid individually and paid them collectively for community projects that were decided collectively to address the needs of social reproduction. As a paradigmatic and unique movement, the Piqueteros’ experience permits us to rethink how the struggles around social reproduction, in this case the struggles of the unemployed, reframed the labour question with regards to traditional forms of understanding working class identity, the nature of unemployment and the capitalist state as a mediation of class struggle. One UWO in particular is worthy of specific scrutiny: the Union Trabajadores Desocupados (UTD), or Unemployed Workers Union, a group of autonomous Piqueteros. The UTD was formed following the privatisation of the local state oil company – only 5,600 of 51,000 workers remained. In the municipality of General Mosconi, 34.6% of the population was unemployed by 2001. The UTD was led by ex-oil workers, who assessed projects for support according to ‘local need’, ‘dignity’ and ‘genuine work’ in ‘solidarity’. Projects addressed ‘long-term sustainability’ in ‘housing, education and environmental protection’, and also everyday issues like ‘recycling, refurbishing public buildings and houses, community farms, soup kitchen … retirement homes, health care visits to the ill

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and disabled, production of regional crafts, carpentry … maintaining and repairing hospital emergency rooms and schools’.39 In this way, the UTD became the ‘quasi-city council’ of General Mosconi. Thus, the UWO was to some extent funded by the state, but not in a direct way reliant on the benevolence of the state, or as a way to tame ‘unruly’ Piquetero bodies through clientelistic practices. Rather, resources were captured in an active and open relationship of conflict and negotiation that created space for things to exceed the capacity of the state to control and govern how the money was spent. The UWOs fought for ‘the re-appropriation of social programmes for collective purposes’ and they did this by switching between two modes of activity: mobilisation, which used the roadblocks to demand resources; and policy, which moved state resources through the neighbourhood to provide funding for collective social projects. It is only by means of and through the seeming contradiction between these two registers of mobilisation and social policy that state resources can be leveraged at all. The UWOs worked within contradiction rather than seeking to escape in a final, closed settlement that established an abstract utopia. Their concrete utopia, insofar as it was achieved at all, was subject to and thrived from these contradictions, ‘using resistance as a conduit for community development and community development as a conduit for resistance’. Rather than a welfare policy granted from up on high to which individual recipients must address themselves, the UWOs instituted ‘welfare policy from below’. Benefits of £30 per head per month were paid every 6 months from the state, and then distributed by the UTD among the ‘unemployed workers’ who were ‘willing to undertake community work’. By 2005, the UTD managed as many programs as the municipality and more than the provincial governments – housing co-ops, garment factory, training centres, a university. It also served as a job

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agency and trade union, using its leverage to get unemployed workers jobs, backed up by ‘access blockades’ outside and, once enough UTDs employed, ‘line stoppages’ within. As such, welfare was locked into a convincing reconstitution of a community of work and workers. UTD, for example, identified ‘work as a true human attribute that must be used for the production of useful goods and services’. The key issue here was ‘dignity’. Their search for dignified work permitted neither Prometheanism nor neurosis around what is conceptualised correctly as an everyday point of meaning and antagonism. By working within the contradictions that confront the everyday practice of work and the abstract determination of labour in capitalist society, the UWOs challenged the individualistic logic of workfare and state policy and reconceptualised ‘work’ in capitalist society. They did so in far more concrete and practical a way than the PWP, whilst also embedding this in an attempt to overhaul the socially reproductive social relations of subsistence that compel us to work in the first place. As Zechner and Hansen highlight, ‘struggles around social reproduction allow for a renegotiation of what is considered work, or what is valued as such’.40 We can see in the Piqueteros’ struggle over social reproduction a similar renegotiation, situating the separation from the means of subsistence and the compulsion to sell one’s labour power in historical context. Theoretically, this destabilises it. Practically, it allows the concrete search for contemporary on-the-ground alternatives with, against and beyond the state. The possibility of a post-capitalist transition consists in the protection and expansion of this space of excess. pppp The UWOs are suggestive of the possibilities of ‘translating’ radical political and social practice into institutionalised

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solutions struck with the state. Translation is defined as ‘the processes, mechanisms and dynamics through which the state incorporates the cooperation and solidarity ethos of the SSE [Social and Solidarity Economy] practiced by social movements through policy’.41 However, with this the risk is run of the ‘depoliticisation’ of these movements by the new legal structures put in place to superintend the state programs on which their claims are made. UWOs had to become NGOs, registered and assessed by the state, or else, as did the UTD, retain autonomy by using the registration of a friendly NGO, so as to ‘access funding [whilst] continuing to design its own strategies and implement its own community ventures’.42 But it was working within this antagonistic and contradictory relationship with the state that allowed their social gains to be achieved. The UBI, on the other hand, concentrates power absolutely in the hands of the state as a benefactor rather than a boss, with the more subservient and compliant relationship this implies. The UWOs permit acceptance that the embeddedness of social actors ‘in, against and beyond’ the state will always be contested. It is this from which we proceed as a starting point, rather than approaching it as a limit, so that ‘institutionalisation’ is always already ‘contested’ all the way up and down. Social movements, in posing alternatives, ‘navigate the tension between resistance and integration’.43 And it is this tension that is productive: …embedding autonomy appears to be achievable by recreating social relations at community level, and by engaging with the institutions of society… Autonomous collective action by civil society actors remains alive through the steady, continuing and often painful struggles underpinned by the tension between affirmation of autonomy and recuperation of autonomy by the state.44

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The Piqueteros wielded power by managing and using this tension, rather than avoiding it, politicising their struggle by means of appropriating some of the tools of the traditional labour movement.45 But they also developed their own tools and moved beyond it. The tensions, conflicts and translations create an excess that totalising solutions like the UBI and ‘full automation’, by implying the presence of a strong and all-powerful state, do not. In prior work, one of us identifies four dimensions or ‘zones’ in the autonomous movements’ struggle, not staggered but contained dialectically within one another: the ‘No’ zone, the ‘affirmative/creative’ zone, the ‘contradiction and translation’ zone, and the ‘beyond zone’.46 Regardless of compromises lost in translation, in the last of these lies an untranslatable excess characterised by the impossibility of completely translating movement’s concrete utopian practices into policy. The possibility of a non-capitalist society consists for now in the protection and expansion of this space of excess. To pre-empt a possible objection, it is transparent that UWOs also imply a relationship with the state, dependent on its support and funding even where this is devolved to the most autonomous level. But they facilitated space for the continued development of conflict and negotiation in, against and beyond the state. The UBI, meanwhile, suppresses class struggles and implies a state that to serve its purpose must be all-powerful and, possibly, all-knowing, and against which the recipient of the UBI stands as an individual rather than, as in the UWOs, a member of a collective that can organise and bargain for better beyond the electoral cycle. Of course, there is the potential that under the UWO system the state can act to stifle class struggles. But the antagonistic reflex to resist against such impositions is retained, whereas the UBI sublates it under the

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sign of a falsely universalised national people. By producing a totalising response to the problems of a totalizing system, even where it is posed as a transitional demand, the UBI threatens an end to struggle and the finality whereby institutionalisation loses the contested character that it has by default under the current configuration of capitalist social relations. By means of this example, we also argue that social reproduction struggles do not take place ‘outside’ anywhere. They are embedded in their own context of production and this marks their contradictory form of existence in, against and beyond capitalist institutional mediations and powers. The Piqueteros did not demand only job creation, security and inclusion via a job or via the UBI: they struggled for dignified work and articulated what Weeks calls a ‘utopian demand’, ‘a political demand that takes the form not of a narrowly pragmatic reform but a more substantial transformation of the present configuration of social relations’.47 The Piqueteros’ ‘local’ projects were now part of an international network of worldwide experiences of resistance and contributed to the formation of a new labour internationalism.48 By negating the ‘precariat condition’ they did not fulfil the expectation of becoming the victims of the neoliberal dismantling of hope. Rather they organised themselves outside mainstream labour organisations and developed alternative realities to that of exclusion and vulnerability. Their concrete utopias re-signified the meaning and experience of work in ways that associated work with dignity and solidarity. They created territories of hope, or ‘commons’ in the Argentine neighbourhoods, where the struggle for the ‘unemployed’ became a symbol of the labour struggle for dignity. The old ‘labour question’ was renewed. The Piqueteros belong to a new social/labour movement that

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is developing in the neighbourhoods, rural settlements, urban spaces, rainforests and countryside of the Global South, and elsewhere, and which some post-work scholars have subsumed under the Eurocentric and dismissive notion of folk-politics. These are priceless sources of knowledge for those who are dedicated to rethinking the futures of work today.49 The UWOs demonstrate a collective alternative against the individualised structure of the UBI. The collective use of individual social/unemployment benefits for community development purposes, financed by state programs, but devised, implemented and supervised by NGOs, as in the UWO’s case, might not be unimaginable in the UK environment.50 It is fair to say, however, that the character of the state and its relationship with society is somewhat different in, say, the United Kingdom, when compared to Argentina. The UWOs were created during a bloody process of struggle, rather than planned around a table with activists, policy makers and thinktanks. This took place in a context of crisis, underpinned by the lack of unemployment benefit at the time and a particular history of resistance. While offering an analysis of the many lessons that grassroot movements from the global South can bring to the North is beyond the scope of this book, it is clear that some of the same principles as found in the UWOs already appear, for example, in the Business and Employment Cooperatives that have seen some uptake in continental European countries like France and Belgium and attracted the attention of the UK government via recent policy initiatives like the Taylor Review.51 Indeed, it is increasingly clear that workers are already organising autonomously of the state, in pursuit of both shaping the latter and designing and organising alternative mediations of the social metabolism in the context of intractable crisis. These include new forms of trade union such as those among freelancers in North America and gig economy

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workers in the United Kingdom, Business and Employment Cooperatives like the French Clara Cooperative Culturelle, mutual assistance schemes like the Dutch Broodfonds into which freelancers contribute monthly sums to guarantee payment for members sick or out of work, and guild-style networks based on the struggle to establish emergent forms of professional identity, such as those found in the Italian experience.52 Three particularly interesting examples from our own research are SMart, a salaried platform cooperative based in Belgium but with a presence in several European countries, and Indycube, a co-working cooperative and trade union for the self-employed originating in South Wales and steadily extending its reach into the wider United Kingdom.53 SMart intermediates between freelancers and their clients by employing the former and invoicing the latter, guaranteeing the freelancer all the rights, privileges and security of formal salaried employment whilst sustaining the autonomy and independence associated with freelance work. Indycube offers co-working space to reconstruct a sense of community in the atomised new world of work and has started offering invoice-chasing services and advice to freelancers through a new cooperative trade union – with a view to implementing the SMart model in the United Kingdom.54 Finally, the Cooperative University Project in the United Kingdom aims to ‘develop and define a conceptual framework of knowledge production grounded in co-operative values and principles’, grounding this project in a Marxist critique of labour and property, but with a capacity to respond to ‘democratic alternatives that go beyond the distinction of public and private education’.55 Such re-mediations of work, sitting between social collectivities and the state in society, suggest that it may be possible to harbour alternatives in concrete

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existing struggles sooner than the speculative programs of the PWP might consider the case. pppp Combined, the approaches presented above suggest that the escape from ‘work’ need not open the path to postcapitalism, and indeed may even prevent it. Either way, the attainment of both postwork society and post-capitalist society is not nearly so easy as those who propose them would have us believe. Clearly, that we must work presupposes relations of distribution that relate less to labour than life itself. Work in capitalist society produces economic forms that mediate relations with the means of life. Postcapitalism cannot be realised through work alone, but only through addressing these dimensions together. This is not a prospect presently on offer in the post-capitalist visions gripping the popular imagination but, as we have argued, in the struggles around social reproduction seeking not only to criticise capitalism but to reinvent social reproduction beyond it. This would mean a move towards the abolition of capitalist work, but not necessarily ‘work’ itself. Facing up to the contradictory character of political subjectivity and class struggle in a world dominated and mediated by real abstractions like money and state, the open Marxist critique deployed in this book escapes ‘the na¨ıve immediatism and subjectivism’ of postoperaist approaches such as those explored in Chapter 4, as well as the ‘fatalism and quietism’ implied in more determinist Marxist perspectives.56 Until recently, open Marxism, mainly seen as represented by the work of John Holloway, has been criticised for the lack of specificity with which it approaches class struggle, and the lack of realism in its hopeful appraisal of the capacity for emancipated human

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practice to spring forth in moments of crisis that temporarily liberate subjects from their formal domination under the rule of labour, value, money and the state. For critics like Guido Starosta, open Marxism’s ‘reality principle’ about the contradictory character of resistance in and against social mediation may well resist affirmationism and immediatism. But it poses a similarly ‘abstractly free and self-determined’ revolutionary subject as that found in both.57 Due to the ‘negative aspect’ of the class relation in capitalist society, forged not from possession but continued dispossession, open Marxism holds no candle for a proletariat or other revolutionary class actor capable of sparking social transformation. Rather it sets it store in a generic humanity representing the struggle of ‘human dignity’ against the ‘cash nexus’.58 Starosta (as well as his co-author Axel Kicillof) critiques how the ‘open Marxist’ conceptualisation of social and political transformation suggests that such a subject stands capable of temporarily or permanently escaping its determination as an alienated personification of economic categories, mistaking for unmediated and unalienated freedom the very ‘personal freedom of personifications of commodities’ that is a condition of the determinate subjectivity of labour as a moment of capital itself.59 Starosta insists that the concealed ‘human content’ open Marxism seeks to set free from its abstract determination can only be said to attain its subjectivity through the continuation of its alienation as a socially mediated form of the development of capital, and has no existence independent of the latter. For Starosta, any ‘revolutionary political subject’ is not an exception or escape from capitalist social mediation but ‘a much more developed mode of existence taken by the original commodity owner with which the dialectical exposition started’ in the unfolding of the history of

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primitive accumulation from its appearance in the form of value that sits at the centre of open Marxism. In this context, it is not an unmediated or unalienated existence that lies beyond the value-form, the state-form and so on, but a progressively more developed form of that alienation and mediation.60 But open Marxists themselves criticise autonomist Marxism’s attempt to challenge the predominance of the logic of capital in structural Marxist analyses by creating two subjects of class struggle that oppose each other: capital and labour. Holloway contends that this is wrong because the ‘real force of Marx’s theory of struggle lies not in the reversal of the polarity between capital and labour, but in its dissolution’.61 Bonefeld also asserts that the creation of two entities ‘destroys the insight that labour is a constitutive power [for] capital’.62 Thus, ‘the critique of structuralist Marxism requires, therefore, not an inversion of the class perspective from capital to labour but an explanation of the mode in which labour exists in and against capital. By separating labour from capital (which allows for the argument for refusal to work and selfvalorisation) the autonomist critique of structuralist Marxism cannot explain how human activity is the producer of “perverted forms” of existence, that is, that labour is against itself in the form of capital’.63 In this light, our work theorises the subjectivity of labour as being transformed and mediated by the (objective and subjective) real abstractions that govern capitalist society.64 This means that social/labour struggles cannot escape mediation, and therefore class struggle should be understood ultimately as a struggle over the form within which the subjectivity of labour is mediated, which asserts itself as a

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struggle over a diverse array of social mediations including the state and other institutions, the law, policy, money, but also over forms of political participation, labour organisation and rights, etc. By struggling over the forms of mediation class struggle assumes, labour struggles break through and open possibilities that cannot be thought of in advance by an intellectual and political left. In the process of demediation and re-mediation, the most dramatic changes can take place. Relatedly, for thinkers in the mould of Starosta’s ‘practical criticism’, abstract labour is not something specific to capitalist society, but represents a more profound condition whereby the results of human practice take on objectified forms that stand apart from and above their producers – a condition made possible by the particularity of the human capacity to conceive and execute which according to Marx sets us apart from other animals, as we discussed in Chapter 3.65 Abstraction is intrinsic to human life because it is intrinsic to human thought; as Ray Brassier argues, an outright assault on abstraction has ‘debilitating consequences for thought’ – as, we might add, it has had in the various instances where totalitarians have sought to reconcretise social domination and eliminate the ‘abstract’ from social life.66 It is therefore insufficient to simply pose against abstract labour a ‘simple and unmediated’ form of ‘sensuous human practice’ or ‘human dignity’ resistant to the form such objectifications presently assume in money or the state.67 It is rather a case of the forms within which abstract labour is mediated, of which the examples raised in this chapter represent alternatives. We would thus distance our approach from those that set their store out upon a crude and politically ambiguous advocacy of the ‘concrete’ as part of a wider critique of ‘abstract’ social forms in terms of how capitalism is critiqued and utopias delineated. There is

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undoubtedly a danger in posing ‘concrete’ labour against ‘abstract’ labour – instead of seeing them as two expressions of capitalist work. Open Marxism analyses ‘the relation between abstract and concrete’ in historical context.68 As we have already mentioned, our view is that concrete labour cannot ‘recover’ or ‘retrieve’ itself from its abstract form of existence because concrete labour is already contaminated with its alter-form abstract labour. Rather, as Marx reflects in the Grundrisse, The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception.69 And yet, we must also distance ourselves from positions such as Starosta and Kicillof, who conflate the necessary abstraction and mediations of human activity with the specific form of existence of labour in capitalist society: ‘abstract labour’. The latter, we believe, is specific to capitalism, for abstract labour contains the category of capitalist work (expropriation, dispossession, and private property) within it. On this front, and in terms of how utopias are delineated, it is also important to clarify the meaning of ‘concrete’ in our Blochian definition of concrete utopias that emerge, we argue, as a result of the struggles around issues of social reproduction. Moishe Postone rightly warns that a narrow focus on seeking an escape from ‘concrete domination’ in the development of ‘emancipatory civil societies’ serves to blind revolutionary analyses to the importance of the abstract

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forms of domination that characterise capitalism, which cannot be easily personified in given individuals or organisations.70 Critiquing capitalism solely on the terrain of the concrete, as has been the tendency for the populist left and right in recent years, leads to a search for ‘concrete acts or concrete people who are responsible for the state of the world’, at the expense of the impersonal abstract mediations that really structure life and work in capitalist society. For Postone, utopian approaches that ‘vilify’ the abstract whilst simultaneously ‘reifying’ the concrete are dangerous insofar as they cleave off the one from the other, when capital is defined by the contradictory unity between the two.71 ‘Privileging immanence over transcendence, multiplicity over unity, and concrete local engagements over abstract mediations’, Postone argues ‘is just simply taking one pole of the dichotomies constituted by capital’.72 We concur with Postone’s view that ‘concrete utopia’ needs to be distinguished from a ‘utopia of the concrete’. Seeking ‘concrete utopias’, of course, implies quite the opposite of the latter. It means an anticipation of the Novum in alternative forms of social reproduction that could not have been thought before subjects involved themselves in prefigurative collective actions, focusing and dealing with precisely those real abstractions that mediate the creation of possibilities both in and beyond capitalist reality. The excess that emerges out of the process of steering through real abstractions (or mediations) bear a high probability of disappointment, but even in failure leave an inevitable impact on the form of the mediation, be it the state, money or the law. Whilst we have had reason to criticise the accelerationist critique of ‘folk politics’ throughout this book, Srnicek and Williams quite reasonably suspect political projects based on the illusion of an extension of the concrete and the elimination of the abstract. In the Accelerationist Manifesto, Williams and Srnicek are quite right to skewer the incapacity of social

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movements, preoccupied with the celebration of their own powers of ‘self-valorisation’ and confined to a ‘neo-primitivist localism’ rooted in a false authenticity and immediacy, to reckon with the abstract and global character of capitalism.73 This recognises a serious limitation to some of the ‘utopian’ political projects we discuss above, and correctly captures how left movements should and should not reckon critically and practically with capitalism. However, the alternative to the ‘folk political’ aversion to mediation and real abstraction, for Williams and Srnicek, is instead to embrace the abstractions operative to capitalist society and take them to their logical conclusion, in order to create the possibility of new mediations. Whilst this circumnavigates the search for an impossible immediacy inherent to left localism and horizontal participation, and their satisfaction with the creation of small islands of ‘non-capitalist social relations’ in a society shaped by the mediation of capitalist social relations on a global scale, the mediations that Srnicek and Williams seek to move through instead are arguably the wrong ones - stressing the quantitative and calculative infrastructures of data and high-frequency trading, for instance - rather than the right ones - liberal institutions and human rights, which whilst mediations, more generously accommodate within them the cut and thrust of class struggle and the fight for human dignity. At the same time as emphasising some practical guises assumed by abstractions in capitalist society over others, accelerationism’s celebratory approach towards abstraction is overly general, eliding the relationship between different kinds of cognitive and social abstraction and the ‘real abstraction’ that mediates the two in capitalist society, as well as the concrete determination that is expressed, concealed in and negated in abstract forms. Going all in for abstraction in such an undiscriminating fashion, accelerationism winds up the inverse of the folk politics it criticises for a fetishisation of the concrete, fetishising the

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abstract instead without acknowledging the contradictory unity of the two.74 The open Marxist approach we deploy here recognises no such sharp distinction between abstract and concrete, each pole bearing its own corresponding political projects and actors. The ‘concrete utopias’ we outline above are not concrete because they represent a ‘more concrete’ version of utopia in terms of how that utopia exists in itself, but rather owing to the concrete character of the material determinations that produce the tendency towards the social transformations they represent. Levitas highlights that Bloch’s idea of concrete utopia ‘is not simply a “correct” version of utopia, but a praxis-oriented category’.75 Far from being utopianist, concrete utopia is praxis.76 The process of creation of concrete utopia does not eliminate, but rather entails, a struggle over the form of the real abstractions that mediate human activity seeking to create an ‘excess’ for what is radical about these movements to survive ‘translation’. The Bloch-inspired concept of concrete utopia rejects immanent hope, here and now, which is celebrated by Hardt and Negri in their attempt to eliminate dialectical thinking.77 Instead, Bloch offers a radical hope where praxis is inextricably engaged with the not-yet reality: ‘while immanent hope might pacify utopian desires by promising that the future is somehow already present’, the ‘Blochian radical hope of the not-yet animates them by identifying current possibilities as ways out toward the future’.78 In these respects, and as we have explored over the course of this book, the sphere of social reproduction, which open Marxism opens out upon through its concern with ongoing primitive accumulation and the conflicted interdependence through which a society that lives as labour power subsists, may constitute a suitable arena for identifying possibilities of social transformation that reckon with futures ‘in, against and

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beyond’ capitalist forms of social mediation. In so doing, the delineation of concrete utopias does not propose to escape all forms of mediation for a concrete immediacy, but confronts contradictions and when possible also seeks out moments of demediation that inhere not only ‘in and against’ but ‘in, against and beyond’ the mediation of struggles in the real abstractions of capital, value and state.79 The theory and praxis of refuting mediation here does not lead us down the path to a pure immediacy impossible in a world that subsists and is reproduced through real abstractions, but rather asks us to struggle against and beyond capitalist mediations, thus leaving the question of new mediations open to praxis. As open Marxists our analysis focuses on the …dialectic of the relation between abstract and concrete. By doing so it reflects on the reality of change within, or as a means of existence of, the abstract structure of capitalism. As such, open Marxism is densely interwoven with the process of past-present-future. Although it doesn’t share the (arrogant) certainty of … dogmatism, it promotes the politics of Marxism through the ’militant optimism’ (Bloch) whereby ’home’ is to be achieved. Hence its practical strength.80 The analysis above, informed by Bloch’s philosophy of praxis81 and his critical philosophy of hope, shows us that we must thus distinguish between good and bad utopias. Good utopias are connected to praxis and embrace possibilities that were not conceived of before. As one of us argues elsewhere, the problem for open Marxism and critical theorists is how to theorise praxis when the misery of the world is fostering an affirmative praxis around the principle of life – a principle

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that, at the time of writing these closing paragraphs of the book, the COVID-19 pandemic has put right in front of us.82 Meanwhile, the post-work utopia in vogue on the British left in recent years is a daring proposal that nonetheless disregards the rule of real abstractions difficult to grasp at the policy or political level. It thus threatens to leave us more, not less, beholden to capital, increasingly repressive states, and scarce resources and money. In short, it risks consolidating capitalism, a capitalism that is producing a series of crises wherein life is at stake. Contemporary struggles around social reproduction show a different path. Experiments in food, care, land, work and housing led by social movements and organisations worldwide highlight how it is conceivable to defy capitalism in a broader, more resourceful way by exploring different forms of the social reproduction of life. By intervening in and ‘commoning’ our access to the things we need, cooperative projects seemingly unrelated to the contemporary world of work may pose the most radical challenge to it. These projects develop not outside or ‘post’ capitalism but within it, through struggles, in many cases bloody ones. It is not robots who are taking heaven by storm. It is people’s concrete utopias, surprising us every day with alternative practices, ideas and horizons that exist in the here and now. They are crisscrossed by tensions and contradictions, disappointments and setbacks, yes. But it is here where we can find the promise of a future beyond capitalism, if not necessarily a ‘post-work’ one. pppp

NOTES

Chapter 1: Post-work, Post-capitalism, Post-what? An Introduction 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

Bonefeld, W. (1987). Open Marxism. Common Sense, (1), 36–37. Bastani, A. (2015). We don’t need more austerity, we need luxury communism. Vice Magazine, June 12. Retrieved from http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/luxury-communism933; Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane; Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the Future. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books. Bolton, M., & Pitts, F. H. (2018). Corbynism: A Critical Approach. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Williams, A., & Srnicek, N. (2013). The Accelerationist Manifesto. Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved from https:// criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifestofor-an-accelerationist-politics/ Cruddas, J., & Pitts, F. H. (2020). The Politics of Postcapitalism: Labour and Our Digital Futures. The Political Quarterly, 91(2), 275–286; see Mason, P. (2019). Clear Bright Future (pp. 226). London: Allen Lane. Pitts, F. H. (2020). The multitude and the machine: Productivism, populism, posthumanism. The Political Quarterly, 91(2), 364–372; see Bastani, A. (2019). Fully Automated Luxury Communism (p. 239). London: Verso; Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2017). Assembly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hester, H., & Stronge, W. (2021). Post-Work. London: Bloomsbury.

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Macqueen, R. (2020). UK workers hit by the economic pain of coronavirus need an income guarantee. The Guardian, April 7. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/com mentisfree/2020/apr/07/uk-workers-economic-coronavirusguarantee-universal-basic-income See Saad Filho, A. (2020). Coronavirus, Crisis, and the End of Neoliberalism. SP The Bullet, April 17. Retrieved from https://socialistproject.ca/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-andthe-end-of-neoliberalism/#more; Mezzadri, A. (2020). A crisis like no other: Social reproduction and the regeneration of capitalist life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Developing Economics, April 20. Retrieved from https:// developingeconomics.org/2020/04/20/a-crisis-like-noother-social-reproduction-and-the-regeneration-of-capitalist-life-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/ Dinerstein, A. C., & Neary, M. (2002). Anti-Value-inMotion: Labour, Real Subsumption and the Struggles against Capitalism. In A. C. Dinerstein & M. Neary (Eds.), The Labour Debate. An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work (pp. 237). Aldershot: Ashgate. Trenkel, N. (2014). The crisis of abstract labor is the crisis of capitalism. Libcom.org, January 9, Retrieved from https://libcom.org/library/crisis-abstract-labor-crisis-capital ism-norbert-trenkle-krisis-group Holloway, J. (2010). Crack Capitalism (pp. 157). London: Pluto Press. Lombardozzi, L., & Pitts, F. H. (2019). Social form, social reproduction and social policy: Basic income, basic services, basic infrastructure. Capital & Class Online First. Accessed on February 28, 2020. doi:10.1177/0309816 819873323 Mason (2019) gives a good account of this configuration of forces. See also Cruddas and Pitts (2020). Battistoni, A. (2017). The False Promise of Universal Basic Income. Dissent Magazine. Spring 2017. Retrieved from https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/false-promise-un iversal-basic-income-andy-stern-ruger-bregman

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Chapter 2: Futures Past and Present: On Automation 1. Benanav, A. (2019). Automation and the Future of Work – 1. New Left Review 119, Sept–Oct, 5–38. 2. Benanav, 2019. 3. Morgan, J. (2019). Will we work in twenty-first century capitalism? A critique of the fourth industrial revolution literature. Economy and Society, 48, 1–28; Sturdy, A., & Morgan, G. (2018, September 1). Management consultancies: Inventing the future? Futures of Work. Retrieved from https://futuresofwork.co.uk/2018/09/05/managementconsultancies-inventing-the-future-2/; Kinsley, S. (2019). Present Futures: Automation and the Politics of Anticipation. Futures of Work, July 8, 2019. Retrieved from https:// futuresofwork.co.uk/2019/07/31/imagining-automationpresent-futures-and-the-politics-of-anticipation/ 4. Benanav, 2019. 5. Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane. 6. Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2014). The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. 7. Mokyr, J., Vickers, C., & Ziebarth, N. L. (2015). The history of technological anxiety and the future of economic growth: Is this time different? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 31–50. See also Mason, 2015, pp. 47–48. 8. Spencer, D. (2018). Fear and hope in an age of mass automation: Debating the future of work. New Technology, Work and Employment, 33, 1–12. 9. Autor, D. (2015). Why are there still so many jobs? The history and future of workplace automation. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 3–30; Fleming (2018). 10. Mokyr et al, 2015. 11. Mason 2015, p. 33. 12. Mason 2015, pp. 47–48; Dicken, P. (2015). Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy (p. 101). New York, NY: Guilford. 13. Benanav 2019. 14. Mason, 2015, pp. 47–48.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

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Spencer 2018. Benanav, 2019. Spencer, 2018; Mokyr et al, 2015. Fleming, P. (2019). Robots and organization studies: Why robots might not want to steal your job. Organization Studies, 40(1), 23–38. Mokyr et al, 2015. Mason, 2015, pp. 47–48; Dicken (2015), p. 101. Spencer, 2018. Benanav, 2019. Autor, 2015. Moody, K. (2018). High Tech, Low Growth: Robots and the Future of Work, Historical Materialism, 26(4), 3–34. Benanav, 2019. Spencer, 2018. Moody, 2018; Brenner, R. (2006). The economics of global turbulence: The advanced capitalist economies from long boom to long downturn, 1945-2005. London: Verso; see also Clarke, S. (1999). Capitalist Competition and the Tendency to Overproduction: Comments on Brenner’s ‘Uneven Development and the Long Downturn’. Historical Materialism, 4(1), 57–72; Postone, M. (2007). Theorizing the contemporary world: David Harvey, Giovanni Arrighi, Robert Brenner. In R. Albritton, B. Jessop, R. Westra (Eds.), Political economy of the present and possible global future(s) (pp. 7–24). London: Anthem Press. Spencer, 2018. Dicken, 2015, p. 79; Benanav, 2019. Dicken, 2015, p. 101. Spencer, 2018; Fleming, 2018. Rifkin, J. (1995). The end of work: The decline of the global labor force and the dawn of the post-market era. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons; Wajcman, J. (2017). Automation: Is it really different this time? British Journal of Sociology, 68, 119–127. Moody, 2018; Spencer, 2018. Dicken, 2015, p. 102. Pitts, F. H. (2014). Time crisis: Autonomist thought, the immaterial working day and the dot.com boom andbust. Sociologia del Lavoro, 133, 171–182; Pitts, F. H. (2013).

Notes

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39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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Labour-time in the dot.com bubble: Marxist approaches. Fast Capitalism, 10(1), 145–157. Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Mokyr et al, 2015, Fleming, 2018. Thompson, P. (2020). Capitalism, Technology and Work: Interrogating the Tipping Point thesis. Political Quarterly, 91(2), 299–309. OECD. (2017). Future of work and skills. Paper presented at the 2nd Meeting of the G20 Employment Working Group, Hamburg. Retrieved from https:// www.oecd.org/els/emp/wcms_556984.pdf Mokyr et al, 2015. Thompson, 2020. Spencer, 2018. Thompson, 2020. Huws, 2014, cited in Spencer, 2018. Spencer, 2018. Benanav, 2019. Moody, 2018. Spencer, 2018. Brynjolffson & McAfee, 2014; Fleming, 2018; Morgan, 2019, p. 373. Autor, 2015. Fleming, 2018; Wajcman, 2017. Ford, M. (2016). The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment. London: Oneworld Publications; Manyika, J., et al. (2017). McKinsey Global Institute: A future that works: Automation, employment and productivity. Brussels. Retrieved from https:// www.mckinsey.com/;/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Ins ights/Digital%20Disruption/Harnessing%20automation% 20for%20a%20future%20that%20works/MGI-A-futurethat-works_Full-report.ashx Knight, W. (2016). China is building a robot army of model workers. MIT Technology Review. Retrieved from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601215/china-is-buil ding-a-robot-army-of-model-workers/ OECD, 2017. Spencer, D. A. (2017). Work in and beyond the Second Machine Age: the politics of production and digital

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60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

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technologies, Work, Employment and Society, 31(1), 142–152. Morgan, 2019, see also Ford, 2016, Wajcman, 2017. Spencer, 2017. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, (2014); see Fleming, 2018. Frey, C., & Osborne, M. (2013). The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? Oxford: Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/view/1314 Frey, C. B., & Osborne, M. A. (2017). The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114, 254–280. McKinsey, 2017, cited in Fleming, 2018. Haldane, 2015, cited in Spencer, 2018. Wajcman, 2017. Thompson, 2020. Lordan, G., & Neumark, D. (2018). People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs. Labour Economics, 52, 40–53. Arntz, M., Gregory, T., & Zierahn, U. (2016). The risk of automation for jobs in OECD Countries. A comparative analysis, OECD Social Employment and Migration Working Papers, No 189. OECD Publishing, Paris. Arntz, M., Gregory, T., & Zierahn, U. (2017). Revisiting the risk of automation. Economics Letters, 159, 157–160 Manyika et al, 2017. Manyika et al, 2017, p. 105; see also Shestakofsky, B. (2017). Working Algorithms: Software Automation and the Future of Work. Work and Occupations, 44(4), 376–423. Autor, 2016, cited in Thompson, 2020. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, (2014). Thompson, 2020. Moody 2018. cited in Thompson, 2020. Spencer 2018, see also Clark, I. (2018). Abandoned Spaces and Technology Displacement by Labour: The Case of Hand Car Washes. New Technology, Work and Employment, 33(3), 234–249.

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76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Spencer, 2017. Thompson, 2020. Moody, 2018. Fleming, 2018. Thompson, 2020. Moody, 2018. Fleming, 2018. Moody, 2018. Spencer, 2017. Spencer, 2017. Thompson, 2020. Srnicek, 2017, pp. 59–60. Moody, 2018. Moody, 2018. IFR. (2017). World Robotics Report 2016: Executive Summary. Retrieved from https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/ news/world-robotics-report-2016; Moody 2018. Moody, 2018. Mason, P. (2019). Clear Bright Future (p. 72). London: Penguin. Bastani, A. (2019). Fully Automated Luxury Communism (p. 239). London: Verso. Moody, 2018. Moody, 2018. Dicken, 2015, p. 75. Wright, S. A., & Schultz, A. E. (2018). The rising tide of artificial intelligence and business automation: Developing an ethical framework. Business Horizons, 61(6), 823–832. Manyika et al, 2017. Benanav, 2019. Knight 2016. IFR, 2017. Spencer, D., & Slater, G. (2020). No automation please, we’re British: Technology and the prospects for work. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 13(1), 117–134. doi:10.1093/cjres/rsaa003 Spencer, 2018. Brynjolffson and McAfee cited in Spencer, 2017. Spencer and Slater (2020).

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105.

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106. Berg, A., Buffie, E. F., & Zanna, L.-F. (2018). Should We Fear the Robot Revolution? (the Correct Answer Is Yes). Journal of Monetary Economics, 97, 117–148; Park, R. (2018). The Roles of Ocb and Automation in the Relationship between Job Autonomy and Organizational Performance: A Moderated Mediation Model. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 29(6), 1139–1156. 107. Brougham, D., & Haar, J. (2018). Smart Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Algorithms (stara): Employees’ Perceptions of Our Future Workplace. Journal of Management and Organization, 24(2), 239–257. 108. Benanav, 2019. 109. Moody, 2018. 110. Benanav, 2019. 111. Brenner, 2006. 112. Benanav, 2019. 113. Benanav, 2019. 114. Moody, 2018. 115. Benanav, 2019. 116. Benanav, 2019.

Chapter 3: The Post-work Prospectus: On Labour 1.

This chapter draws upon Dinerstein, A. C., & Pitts, F. H. (2018). From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction. Journal of Labor and Society, 21(4), 471–491; Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017b). Postcapitalism, basic income and the end of work: A critique and alternative. Bath Papers in International Development and Wellbeing (No. 55); Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017a). Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction. Capital & Class, 41(3), 423–434; and Pitts, F. H. (2020). Creative Labour, Metabolic Rift and the Crisis of Social Reproduction. In M. Banks & K. Oakley (Eds.), Cultural Industries and the Environmental Crisis: New Approaches for Policy. Palgrave Macmillan.

Notes

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Frey, C., & Osborne, M. (2013). The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? Oxford: Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/view/1314 3. Arntz, M., Gregory, T., & Zierahn, U. (2016). The risk of automation for jobs in OECD Countries. A comparative analysis, OECD Social Employment and Migration Working Papers, No 189. OECD Publishing, Paris. 4. Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017a). Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction. Capital & Class, 41(3), 423–434; See Yamamori, T. (2016). Christopher Pissarides, a Nobel Laureate, argues for UBI at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Basic Income News, February 6. Retrieved from http://basicincome.org/news/2016/02/international-christo pher-pissarides-a-nobel-economist-argues-for-ubi-at-adebate-in-davos/ 5. Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism. London: Allen Lane; Bastani, A. (2019). Fully Automated Luxury Communism (p. 239). London: Verso. 6. For critiques see Spencer, D. A. (2017). Work in and beyond the Second Machine Age: the politics of production and digital technologies. Work, Employment & Society, 31(1), 142–152; and Dyer-Witheford, N. (2015). CyberProletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. London: Pluto Press. 7. Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell; Lash, S., & Urry, J. (1994). Economies of Signs and Space. London: SAGE Publications; Giddens, A. (2002). Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books. 8. Doogan, K. (2009). New Capitalism: The Transformation of Work (pp. 55). Cambridge: Polity. 9. See e.g. Aronowitz, S., & Cutler, J. (Eds.). (1998). PostWork: Wages of Cybernatio. Abingdon: Routledge; Aronowitz, S., & DeFazio, W. (2010). The Jobless Future. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 10. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse (pp. 704–706). London: Penguin; Trott, B. (2018). The ‘Fragment on Machines’ as

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13.

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15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Notes science fiction; or, reading the Grundrisse politically. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 42(4), 1107–1122. Pitts, F. H. (2017). Beyond the Fragment: Postoperaismo, postcapitalism and Marx’s ‘Notes on machines’, 45 years on. Economy and Society, 46(3–4), 324–345. Negri, A. (1991). Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundriss. New York, NY: Autonomedia; Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Harvard: Harvard University Press. See Pitts, F. H. (2018). A crisis of measurability? Critiquing post-operaismo on labour, value and the basic income. Capital & Class, 42(1), 3–21. White, M. (2009). The politics of youth. Adbusters, 82. Retrieved from https://www.adbusters.org/article/the-politicsof-youth/ Mason (2015); Srnicek and Williams (2015); Bastani (2019). Mason, P. (2015b). The end of capitalism has begun. The Guardian, July 17. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian. com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalismbegun; Beckett, A. (2017). Accelerationism: How a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. The Guardian, May 11. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringephilosophypredicted-the-future-we-live-in Mason, P. (2019). Clear bright future. A radical defence of the human being (pp. 226). London: Allen Lane. Mason (2015). Mason (2015), p. 150. Mason (2019, p. 118). Pitts, F. H. (2017b). Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Harvey, D. (2002). Spaces of Hope (pp. 20). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Harvey, D. (2002), p. 200. Cleaver, H. (2002). Work is Still the Central Issue! New Words for New Worlds. In A. C. Dinerstein & M. Neary (Eds.), The Labour debate. An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work (pp. 138). London; New York, NY: Routledge.

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25. Holloway, J. (1992). Crisis, Fetishism, Class Composition. In W. Bonefeld , R. Gunn, K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism (Vol. II, pp. 152). London: Pluto Press. 26. Cleaver (2002), p. 138. 27. Foster, J. B. (1999). Marx’s theory of metabolic rift: Classical foundations for environmental sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 105(2), 366–405. ´ 28. Marx, (1973), p. 489; also M´eszaros, I. (1970). Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin Press. 29. Foster (1999), p. 380; Foster, J. B. (2016). Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialectical rifts on the left. International Critical Thought, 6(3), 393–421. 30. Marx, K. (1976). Capital (pp. 284–285). London: Penguin. 31. Foster (2016), p. 404. 32. Lefebvre, H. (2008). Critique of Everyday Life (Vol. 79, pp. 89). London: Verso. 33. Marx (1976), p. 133; see also Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labour and Social Domination: A reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 34. Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labour. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. 35. Holloway, J., & Picciotto, S. (1977). Capital, crisis and the state. Capital & Class, 1(2), 76–101. 36. Gunn, R. (1992). Against Historical Materialism: Marxism as First-Order Discourse. In W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, & K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism: Theory and Practice (Vol. II). London: Pluto Press; also Gunn, R. (1994). Marxism and Contradiction. Common Sense, 15, 53–59. Retrieved from http://commonsensejournal.org.uk/issue-15/ 37. Clarke, 1991, p. 85. 38. Clarke, 1992, p 140. 39. Foster (2016), p. 383. 40. 1980, cited in Foster, 2016, p. 413. 41. Foster (1999), p. 381. 42. Foster (1999), p. 388. 43. Cleaver (2002). 44. Harvie, D. (2005). All Labour Produces Value For Capital And We All Struggle Against Value. The Commoner, 10, 132–171.

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45. See John Holloway’s impassioned critique of this aspect of abstract labour in Holloway, J. (2002). Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto Press. 46. Dinerstein, A. C. (2002). Regaining Materiality: Unemployment and the Invisible Subjectivity of Labour. In A. C. Dinerstein & M. Neary (Eds.), The Labour debate. An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work (pp. 203–225). Aldershot: Ashgate. 47. De Angelis, M. (1995). Beyond the Technological and the Social Paradigms: A Political Reading of Abstract Labour as the Substance of Value. Capital & Class, 19(57), 118. 48. Trenkel, N. (2014). The crisis of abstract labor is the crisis of capitalism. Libcom.org, January 9, Retrieved from https://libcom.org/library/crisis-abstract-labor-crisis-capital ism-norbert-trenkle-krisis-group; On crisis of abstract labour see also Holloway, J. (2020). Cracks and the Crisis of Abstract Labour. Antipode, 42(4), 900–923. 49. Kay, G., & Mott, J. (1982). Political Order and the Law of Labour. London; Basingstoke: Macmillan. 50. Postone, M. (1993). Time, Labour and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 51. For social form as a ‘mode of existence’ see Gunn, R. (1992). Against historical materialism: Marxism as firstorder discourse. In W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, & K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open marxism: Theory and practice (Vol. II). London: Pluto Press; see also Pitts, F. H. (2014a). Follow the money? Value theory and social inquiry. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 14(3), 335–356. 52. e.g. Bastani, 2019, Srnicek and Williams (2015). See Cruddas, J., & Pitts, F. H. (2020). The Politics of Postcapitalism: Labour and Our Digital Futures. The Political Quarterly, 91(2), 275–286. 53. Ferrari Bravo, L. (2014). The New Deal and the New Order of Capitalist Institutions (1972). Viewpoint Magazine, (4). Retrieved from https://viewpointmag.com/ 2014/10/02/the-new-deal-and-the-new-order-of-capitalist-institutions-1972/

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54. Cohen, N. (2018). Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (pp. 145). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 55. Pitts, F. H., Lombardozzi, L., & Warner, N. (2017). Speenhamland, automation and the basic income: A lesson from history? Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 25(3–4), 145–155. 56. Marcuse, H. (1972). Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (pp. 33). London: Abacus. 57. Marcuse (1972), 33. 58. Marcuse (1972), 37. 59. McRobbie, A. (2016). Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Oxford: Polity. 60. Wajcman, J. (2017). Automation: Is it really different this time? British Journal of Sociology, 68, 119–127. 61. Sloterdijk, P. (2010). The Grasping Hand: The modern democratic state pillages its productive citizens. Winter. Retrieved from http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_1_ snd-democraticstate.html; For critical discussions see ˇ zek, S. (2010). Living in the End Times (pp. 236–240). Ziˇ London: Verso, and Honneth, A. (2009). Fatal profundity. Die Zeit, September 24, 2009. Retrieved from http:// www.cshingleton.com/2010/02/axel-honneth-against-slote rdijk-fatal.html 62. Stronge, W. (2017). Misconstruing Post-Work. Autonomy Institute. Retrieved from http://www.autonomyinstitute. org/portfolio/comments-recent-ubi-post-workinterventions co-founder-will-stronge/ 63. Ness, I. (2016). Southern Insurgency. The coming of the global working class. London; New York, NY: Pluto press.

Chapter 4: Productivist Mandates: On Value 1.

Marx, K. (1976). Capital (Vol. I, pp. 644). London: Penguin. This chapter draws upon Dinerstein, A. C., & Pitts, F. H. (2018). From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction. Journal of Labor and Society, 21(4), 471–491; Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017b). Postcapitalism, basic income and the end of work: A critique and alternative. Bath Papers in International Development

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and Wellbeing (No. 55); Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017a). Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction. Capital & Class, 41(3), 423–434; and Pitts, F. H. (2018). A crisis of measurability? Critiquing post-operaismo on labour, value and the basic income. Capital & Class, 42(1), 3–21. 2. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Harvard: Harvard University Press; Lucarelli, S., & Fumagalli, A. (2008). Basic income and productivity in cognitive capitalism. Review of Social Economy, 66(1), 71–92; Fumagalli, A., & Morini, C. (2013). Cognitive Bio-capitalism, social reproduction and the precarity trap: Why not basic income. Knowledge Cultures, 1(4), 106–126; Monnier, J. M., & Vercellone, C. (2014). The foundations and funding of basic income as primary income. Basic Income Studies, 9(1–2), 59–77. 3. Hardt and Negri (2001); Marazzi, C. (2008). Capital and language: From the new economy to the war economy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). 4. Arvidsson, A. (2010). The ethical economy: New forms of value in the information society? Organization, 17(5), 637–644. 5. Arvidsson (2010), p. 639. ¨ 6. Bohm, S., & Land, C. (2012). The new ‘hidden abode’: Reflections on value and labour in the new economy. Sociological Review, 60(2), 217–240. 7. Harvie, D., & Milburn, K. (2010). How organizations value and how value organizes. Organization, 17(5), 631–636. 8. Elson, D. (1979). Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: CSE Books. 9. Heinrich, M. (2012). An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press; Bonefeld, W. (2014). Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason. London: Bloomsbury. 10. Harvie and Milburn (2010), p. 633. 11. Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labor. In P. Virno, M. Hardt (Eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (pp. 133–150). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 12. Vercellone, C. (2010). The crisis of the law of value and the becoming-rent of profit. In A. Fumagalli & S. Mezzadra

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Chapter 5. Pennies from Heaven: On Money 1.

2.

3.

4.

This chapter draws upon Dinerstein, A. C., & Pitts, F. H. (2018). From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction. Journal of Labor and Society, 21(4), 471–491; Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017b). Postcapitalism, basic income and the end of work: A critique and alternative. Bath Papers in International Development and Wellbeing (No. 55); Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017a). Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction. Capital & Class, 41(3), 423–434; and Pitts, F. H. (2018). A crisis of measurability? Critiquing post-operaismo on labour, value and the basic income. Capital & Class, 42(1), 3–21. See Basic Income UK at https://www.basicincome.org.uk/ reasons-support-basic-income; Widerquist, K. (2019). End the threat of economic destitution. In N. Howard & C. Thibos (Eds.), Universal Income. A way through the storm?, openDemocracy (pp. 12). Retrieved from https:// www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/ universal-basic-income-way-through-storm/ Federici, S. (2014). From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation, South Atlantic Quarterly, 113(2), 234. Cowburn, A. (2017). Labour sets up ‘working group’ to investigate universal basic income, John McDonnell reveals. The Independent, Feb 5. Retrieved from http:// www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-sets-upworking-group-toinvestigate-radical-idea-of-basic-incomejohn-mcdonnell-reveals-a7563566.html; Painter, A., & Thoung, C. (2016). Creative Citizen, Creative State: The Principled andPragmatic Case for a Universal Basic Income. London: Royal Society of the Arts; Pearce, N. (2015). Back to the future: The revival of interest in a Universal Basic Income. IPR Blog. Institute of Policy Research, University of Bath. 10 December. Retrieved from http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/iprblog/2015/12/10/backto-the-future-the-revival-of-interest-in-a-universal-basicincome/. Accessed on May 17, 2018; Reed, H., &

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5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

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Lansley, S. (2016). Universal Basic Income: An Idea Whose Time Has Come? London: Compass. Bregman, R. (2018). Utopia for realists. And How we can get there (pp. 199). London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Standing, G. (2013). Pleasure before Business. The European, July 28. Retrieved from http://www.theeuropeanmagazine.com/guy-standing–2/7231-life-after-labour Standing, G. (2019). Basic Income and the three varieties of freedom. In N. Howard & C. Thibos (Eds.), Universal Income. A way through the storm? (p. 12). openDemocracy. Retrieved from https://www.opendemoc racy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/universal-basicincome-way-through-storm/ Frase, P. (2016). Four Futures. Life After Capitalism (pp. 145). London; New York, NY: Verso. Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane. Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books. Srnicek and Williams (2015), p. 120. Stronge, W. (2017). Misconstruing Post-Work. Autonomy Institute. Retrieved from http://www.autonomyinstitute. org/portfolio/comments-recent-ubi-post-workinterventions co-founder-will-stronge/ Coyle, D., & Macfarlane, L. (2018). Diana Coyle on fixing Britain’s economy. Open Democracy, March 5. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/videodiane-coyle-fixing-britains-economy/ Bonefeld, W. (1994). Human Practice and Perversion: Beyond Autonomy and Structure, Common Sense, 15, 43–52. Retrieved from http://commonsensejournal.org.uk/ issue-15/; Dinerstein, A. C. (2002). Regaining Materiality: Unemployment and the Invisible Subjectivity of Labour. In A. C. Dinerstein & M. Neary (Eds.), The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work (pp. 203–225). Aldershot: Ashgate. Dinerstein, A. C. (2012). Interstitial revolution: The explosive fusion of Negativity and hope. Capital & Class, 36(3), 521–540. Holloway, J. (2010). Crack Capitalism (pp. 157). London: Pluto Press.

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17. Dinerstein (2012). 18. Trenkel, N. (2014). The crisis of abstract labor is the crisis of capitalism. Libcom.org, January 9, Retrieved from https://libcom.org/library/crisis-abstract-labor-crisis-capital ism-norbert-trenkle-krisis-group 19. Holloway, J., & Picciotto, S. (1977). Capital, crisis and the state. Capital & Class, 1(2), 76–101. 20. Clarke, S. (1988). Keynesianism, Monetarism and the crisis of the state (pp 13–14). Aldershot: Edward Elgar. 21. Smith cited in Clarke S (1988), p. 32. 22. Bonefeld, W. (2002). Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: On class and constitution. In A. C. Dinerstein & M. Neary (Eds.), The Labour debate. An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work (pp. 65–88). Aldershot: Ashgate. 23. Dinerstein, A. C. (2015). The politics of autonomy in Latin America: The art of organising hope (pp. 20). Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. 24. Critisticuffs. (2015). What is wrong with free money? Gruppen gegen Kapital und Nation. Retrieved from http:// antinational.org/en/what-wrong-free-money 25. Cleaver, H. (1996). The Subversion of Money-as-Command in the Current Crisis. In W. Bonefeld & J. Holloway (Eds.), Global Capital, Nation States and the Politics of Money (pp. 141–177). London: Palgrave Macmillan. 26. Lilley, S., & Papadopoulos, D. (2014). Material Returns: Cultures of Valuation, Biofinancialisation and the Autonomy of Politics. Sociology, 48(5), 972–988. 27. Bonefeld, W. (2020). Capital Par Excellence: On Money as an obscure thing. Estudios de Filosof´ıa, 62, 33–56. doi:10.17533/udea.ef.n62a03 28. Neary, M. (2002). Labour Moves: A Critique of the Concept of Social Movement Unionism. In A. C. Dinerstein & M. Neary (Eds.), The Labour debate. An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work (pp. 149–178). Aldershot: Ashgate. 29. Aglietta, M., & Orl´ean, A. (1984). La violence de la monnaie, PUF. Paris: Economie en Liberte. 30. Clarke (1988), pp. 13–14. 31. Clarke (1988), pp. 13–14. 32. See Widerquist, K. (2019). End the threat of economic destitution. In N. Howard & C. Thibos (Eds.), Universal

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36. 37. 38. 39.

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Income. A way through the storm?, openDemocracy (pp. 12). Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/universal-basic-income-waythrough-storm/; Bregman, R. (2018). Utopia for realists. And How we can get there (pp. 199). London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury; Standing, G. (2019). Basic Income and the three varieties of freedom. In N. Howard & C. Thibos (Eds.), Universal Income. A way through the storm? (p. 12). openDemocracy. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/universal-basic-income-way-through-storm/; Frase, P. (2016). Four Futures. Life After Capitalism (pp. 145). London; New York, NY: Verso; Basic Income UK. Retrieved from https:// www.basicincome.org.uk/reasons-support-basic-income Mason (2015), p. 284. Clarke (1988), pp. 13–14. Frase, P. (2016). Four Futures. Life After Capitalism (pp. 145). London; New York, NY: Verso; Beverungen, A., Murtola, A. M., & Schwartz, G. (2013). The communism of capital? Ephemera, 13(3), 483–495. Beverungen et al. (2013), p. 483. Holloway (2010). Lotz, C. (2014). The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction. Lanham, MD: Lexington. See Nelson, A., & Timmerman, F. (Eds). (2011). Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies. London: Pluto Press; Cleaver, H. (2015). Rupturing the dialectic. The struggle against work, money and financialisation. AK Press. Milburn, K. (2015). On Social Strikes and Directional Demands. Plan C. Retrieved from http://www.wearepl anc.org/blog/on-social-strikes-and-directional-demands

Chapter 6: Basic Income in One Country: On the State 1.

This chapter draws upon Dinerstein, A. C., & Pitts, F. H. (2018). From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction. Journal of Labor and Society, 21(4), 471–491; Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017b).

Notes

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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Postcapitalism, basic income and the end of work: A critique and alternative. Bath Papers in International Development and Wellbeing (No. 55); and Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017a). Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction. Capital & Class, 41(3), 423–434. Stronge, W. (2017). Misconstruing Post-Work. Autonomy Institute. Retrieved from http://www.autonomyinstitute. org/portfolio/comments-recent-ubi-post-workinterventions co-founder-will-stronge/ Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books. Srnicek and Williams (2015), p. 127. Mathers, A. (2019). Universal basic income and cognitive capitalism: A post-work dystopia in the making? Capital & Class, 1. doi:10.1177/0309816819852748 Milburn, K. (2015). On Social Strikes and Directional Demands. Plan C. Retrieved from http://www.wearep lanc.org/blog/on-social-strikes-and-directional-demands Critchley, S. (2007). Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso. ˇ zek, S. (2007). Resistance is Surrender. London Review Ziˇ of Books, 29(22), 7; and Critchley, S. (2009). Violent thoughts about slavoj zˇ iˇzek. Naked Punch, October 21. Retrieved from http://www.nakedpunch.com/books/39 Toscano, A. (2014). Reformism and Melancholia: Economic Crisis and the Limits of Sociology. Sociology, 48(5): 1024–1038. Gorz, cited in Toscano, A. (2014), pp. 1031–1032. Zechner, M., & Hansen, B. R. (2015). Building power in a crisis of social reproduction. ROAR Magazine. Retrieved from https://roarmag.org/magazine/building-power-crisissocial-reproduction/ Mathers (2019). Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (p. 286). London: Allen Lane. Mason (2015), pp. 284–286. Clarke, S. (1991). State, Class Struggle and the Reproduction of Capital. In S. Clarke (Ed.) The State Debate (pp. 183–203). Basingstoke: Macmillan; See also: Bonefeld, W.

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(1993). The Global Money Power of Capital and the Crisis of Keynesianism: A Research Note. Common Sense, 13, 54–62; and Holloway, J. (1995b). Global capital and the national state. In W. Bonefeld & J. Holloway (Eds.), Global Capital, National States and the Politics of Money (pp. 116–140). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gorz, A. (1982). Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-industrial Socialism (pp. 11). London: Pluto Press. London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (LEWRG). (1980). In and Against the State (pp. 56). London: Pluto Press. See also Dinerstein, A. C. (2018). John Holloway: A theory of interstitial revolution. In B. Best, W. Bonefeld, & C. O’ Kane (Eds.), Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Vol. 1, pp. 533–549), Ch. 32. Hirsch cited in Bonefeld, W., & Holloway, J. (Eds.). (1991). Post-Fordism and Social Form. London: Macmillan. Marazzi, C. (1996). Money in the World Crisis: The New Basis of Capitalist Power. In Bonefeld, W., & Holloway, J. (Eds.), Global capital, national state and the politics of money (pp. 85). London: Macmillan. London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (1980), p. 56. Clarke (1991), p. 185. Holloway, J., & Picciotto, S. (1977). Capital, crisis and the state. Capital & Class, 1(2), 76–101. Holloway and Picciotto (1977), p. 80. Bonefeld, W. (2010). Free economy and the strong state: Some notes on the state. Capital & Class, 34(1), 22. Clarke, S. (1992). The global accumulation of capital and the periodization of the capitalist state. In W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, & K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism. Dialectics and History (Vol. I, pp. 133–150). London: Pluto Press. Holloway and Picciotto (1977). London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (1980), p. 59. Garton Ash, T. (2016) Populists are out to divide us. They must be stopped. The Guardian, November 11. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/ nov/11/populists-us?CMP5share_btn_tw; Mishra, P. (2016). Rise of the Egocrats. N11, Nov 11. Retrieved from https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/election/rise-of-theegocrats/. Accessed on May 17, 2018.

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29. Caruso, L. (2017). Digital Capitalism and the End of Politics: The Case of the Italian Five Star Movement. Politics & Society, 45(4), 585–609. 30. Economist. (2017a, February 2). Bonfire of the subsidies: India debates the case for a universal basic income. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/2 1716027-india-should-replace-its-thicket-welfare-paymentssingle-payment-india-debates-case 31. Maiorano, D. (2016). India’s crackdown on cash corruption is really all about politics. The Conversation. November 21. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/ indias-crackdown-on-cash-corruption-is-really-all-aboutpolitics-68701 32. Kumar, R. (2016). Notebandi Sounds a Death Knell for Already Neglected Social Sector. The Quint, December 21. Retrieved from https://www.thequint.com/news/india/notebandi-sounds-a-death-knell-for-already-neglected-socialsector-demonetisation-note-ban-niti-aayog-black-money 33. Davala, S., Jhabyala, R., Mehta, S. K., & Standing, G. (2015). Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India. London: Bloomsbury. 34. Economist. (2017b, February 4). Rupees for nothing: India floats the idea of a universal basic income. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/ 21716064-powerful-idea-unfeasible-now-india-floats-ideauniversal 35. Robinson, N. (2016). Authoritarian Democracy: A Playbook. Dissent, November 14. Retrieved from https:// www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/authoritarian-democracyplaybook-modi-erdogan-trump 36. Chakraborty, A. (2017). Trump’s #MuslimBan and Modi’s #NoteBan are fascist policies hiding as national interest. The Daily, Jan 30. Retrieved from http://www.dailyo.in/ politics/donald-trump-america-president-narendra-modimuslim-ban-islamophobia-demonetisation-fascism-noteban/story/1/15386.html 37. Sharma, B. (2016). Modi Govt. Plans To Grant Indian Citizenship To Hindu Refugees By Independence Day. The Huffington Post, June 22. Retrieved from http://www.huffi ngtonpost.in/2016/06/22/modi-govt-plans-to-grant-indiancitizenship-to-hindu-refugees-b/; Das K. N. (2016) Indian

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40. 41.

42.

43.

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PM Narendra Modi’s party vows to strip Muslim immigrants of vote. The Sydney Morning Herald. March 12. Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/world/indian-pmnarendra-modis-party-vows-to-strip-muslim-immigran ts-of-vote-20160311-gnghsp.html Chakraborty (2017). Coates, A. (2016). Does Galloway Blaze Trail for ‘Left’ Shift to Align with Nationalist Right? Tendance Coatesy, April 17. Retrieved from https://tendancecoatesy.wordpre ss.com/2016/04/17/does-galloway-blaze-trail-for-left-shiftto-align-with-nationalist-right/; Henri-Levy, B. (2016). The politics of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will dominate the world post-Brexit. New Statesman, July 4. Retrieved from http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/st aggers/2016/07/politics-donald-trump-and-vladimir-putinwill-dominate-world-post-brexit Bonefeld (1993), p. 61. Huws, U. (2016). The key criticisms of basic income, and how to overcome them. Open Democracy, December 14. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/newecon omics/the-key-criticisms-of-basic-income-and-how-to-over come-them/ Stronge (2017); See also McCann, D. (2017). 7 Principles for a Sovereign Wealth Fund: How to Build a Fund for Britain. New Economics Foundation. May 25. Retrieved from http://neweconomics.org/2017/05/7-principles-sove reign-wealth-fund/ Lombardozzi, L., & Pitts, F. H. (2019). Social form, social reproduction and social policy: Basic income, basic services, basic infrastructure. Capital & Class Online First. Accessed on February 28, 2020. doi:10.1177/ 0309816819873323; Portes, J., Reed, H., & Percy, A. (2017). Social prosperity for the future: A proposal for Universal Basic Services. London: Institute for Global Prosperity. Retrieved from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/ igp/sites/bartlett/files/universal_basic_services_-_the_institute_ for_global_prosperity_.pdf; Coyle, D., & Macfarlane, L. (2018). Diana Coyle on fixing Britain’s economy. Open Democracy, March 5. Retrieved from https://www.opendem ocracy.net/neweconomics/video-diane-coyle-fixing-britainseconomy/

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44. Dinerstein, A. C., Contartese, D., & Deledicque, M. (2010). La Ruta de los Piqueteros. Luchas y Legados. Capital Intelectual, Buenos Aires.

Chapter 7: Liquidating Labour Struggles? On Social Reproduction 1.

2.

3. 4.

This chapter draws upon Dinerstein, A. C., & Pitts, F. H. (2018). From post-work to post-capitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction. Journal of Labor and Society, 21(4), 471–491; Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017b). Postcapitalism, basic income and the end of work: A critique and alternative. Bath Papers in International Development and Wellbeing (No. 55); Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017a). Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction. Capital & Class, 41(3), 423–434; and Dinerstein, A. C. (2014). The dream of dignified work: On good and bad utopias. Development and Change, 45(5), 1037–1058. Stronge, W. (2017). Misconstruing Post-Work. Autonomy Institute. Retrieved from http://www.autonomyinstitute. org/portfolio/comments-recent-ubi-post-workinterventionscofounder-will-stronge/ Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Vol. 1, pp. 45). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Schulkind, R. (2017). Could Labour implement universal basic income? New Statesman, July 24. Retrieved from https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2017/07/ could-labour-implement-universal-basic-income. Accessed on May 17, 2018; Cowburn, A. (2017). Labour sets up ‘working group’ to investigate universal basic income, John McDonnell reveals. The Independent, Feb 5. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/laboursets-up-working-group-toinvestigate-radical-idea-of-basicincome-john-mcdonnell-reveals-a7563566.html; Fenton, S. (2016). Universal Basic Income: Jeremy Corbyn considering backing radical reforms. The Independent, August 7. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/uk/politics/universal-basic-income-jeremy-corbynconsidering-labour-party-a7177121.html. Accessed May

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17, 2018; Stewart, H. (2016). John McDonnell: Labour taking a close look at universal basic income. The Guardian, June 6. Retrieved from http://www. theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/05/john-mcdonnelllabour-universal-basic-income-welfare-benefits-compassreport. Accessed on May 17, 2018. 5. See Pearce, N. (2015). Back to the future: The revival of interest in a Universal Basic Income. IPR Blog. Institute of Policy Research, University of Bath. 10 December. Retrieved from http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/iprblog/2015/12/10/ back-to-the-future-the-revival-of-interest-in-a-universalbasic-income/. Accessed on May 17, 2018; Reed, H., & Lansley, S. (2016). Universal Basic Income: An Idea Whose Time Has Come? London: Compass; Harris, J. (2016). Should we scrap benefits and pay everyone £100 a week? The Guardian, April 13. Retrieved from http://www. theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/13/should-we-scrap-be nefits-and-pay-everyone-100-a-week-whether-they-workor-not. Accessed on May 17, 2018. 6. Conaty, P., Bird, A., & Ross, C. (2018). Working Together: Trade union and cooperative innovations for precarious workers. Coops UK, p. 98. Retrieved from https://www.uk.coop/WorkingTogether. Accessed on May 17, 2018. 7. For an example of the former see Wolf, M. (2014). Enslave the robots and free the poor. Financial Times, February 11. Retrieved from http://on.ft.com/1iM0pyN. Accessed on May 17, 2018. 8. Birnbaum, S., & De Wispelaere, J. (2019). The power to walk away: Is basic income a bridge too far. In N. Howard & C. Thibos (Eds.), Universal Income. A way through the storm?, openDemocracy (p. 12). Retrieved from https:// www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/ universal-basic-income-way-through-storm/ 9. Munck, R. (2013). The Precariat: A View from the South. Third World Quarterly, 34(5), 759. 10. Zechner, M., & Hansen, B. R. (2015). Building power in a crisis of social reproduction. ROAR Magazine. Retrieved from https://roarmag.org/magazine/building-power-crisissocial-reproduction/ 11. Fraser, N. (2014). Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode. New Left Review, 86(Mar–Apr), 57.

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12. Ferguson, S., & McNally, D. (2015). Social Reproduction Beyond Intersectionality: An Interview’. Viewpoint Magazine, 5. Retrieved from https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/ 31/social-reproduction-beyond-intersectionality-an-inter view-with-sue-ferguson-and-david-mcnally/ 13. Marx, K. (1976). Capital (Vol. I, pp. 644). London: Penguin. 14. Denning, M. (2010). Wageless Life. New Left Review, Nov/Dec, 80. 15. Dalla Costa, M. (2015). Family, welfare and the state. Between progressivism and the New Deal. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions. 16. Dalla Costa, M. (1995). Capitalism and Reproduction. In W. Bonefeld R. Gunn, J. Holloway, & K. Pshychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism (Vol. III, pp. 7–16). London: Pluto Press. 17. Ferguson and McNally (2015). 18. Bhattacharya, T. (2015). How Not To Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labour and the Global Working Class. Viewpoint Magazine, 5. Retrieved from https://viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/how-not-to-skip-class-socialreproductionoflabour-and-the-global-working-class/ ´ social y clase 19. Bhattacharya, T. (2018). Reproduccion obrera global. Marxismo Cr´ıtico. Retrieved from https:// marxismocritico.com/2018/03/05/reproduccion-social-deltrabajo-y-clase-obrera-global/ 20. Marx (1976), p. 24, p. 711. 21. Dinerstein, A. C. (2015). The politics of autonomy in Latin America: The art of organising hope (p. 20). Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. 22. Bhattacharya (2018). 23. Ferguson and McNally (2015). 24. Weeks, K., & Curcio, A. (2015). Social Reproduction, Neoliberal Crisis, and the Problem with Work. Viewpoint Magazine, (5). Retrieved from https://viewpointmag.com/ 2015/10/31/social-reproduction-neoliberal-crisis-and-theproblem-with-work-a-conversation-with-kathi-weeks/ 25. Dinerstein, A. C. (2002). Regaining Materiality: Unemployment and the Invisible Subjectivity of Labour. In A. C. Dinerstein & M. Neary (Eds.), The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work (pp. 203–225). Aldershot: Ashgate.

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26. Zechner, M., & Hansen, B. R. (2015). Building power in a crisis of social reproduction. ROAR Magazine. Retrieved from https://roarmag.org/magazine/building-power-crisissocial-reproduction/ 27. Caffentzis, G. (2002). On the Notion of a Crisis of Social Reproduction: A Theoretical Review. The Commoner, 5, 1–22. 28. Dinerstein, A. C. (2017a). Concrete Utopia: (Re)producing life in, against and beyond the open veins of capital. Public Seminar, New School for Social Research, New York. Retrieved from http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/12/ concreteutopia/ 29. Srnicek, N., & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books. 30. Srnicek and Williams (2015), p. 19. 31. Serra, F. (2015). Reproducing the Struggle. A new feminist Perspective on the concept of social reproduction. Viewpoint Magazine, 5. Retrieved from https://www.view pointmag.com/2015/10/31/reproducing-the-struggle-a-newfeminist-perspective-on-the-concept-of-social-reproduction/ 32. Federici, S., & Sitrin, M. (2016). Social reproduction: Between the wage and the commons. ROAR Magazine, (2). Retrieved from https://roarmag.org/magazine/social-repr oduction-between-the-wage-and-the-commons/ 33. Dinerstein, A. C. (2019). A critical theory of hope. Critical Affirmations beyond fear. In A. C. Dinerstein, G. Vela, E. ´ Gonzalez, & J. Holloway (Eds.),Open Marxism 4. Against a closing world (pp. 33–46). London; New York, NY: Pluto Press. ´ K., & Klewenhagen, A. (2020). 34. Wo´zniak, M., Jesien, Rethinking Marxism with Ernst Bloch. Praktyka Teoretyczna, 1(35), 7–11. 35. Postone, M. (2007) Marx Reloaded. Repensar la Teor´ıa ´ ´ Cr´ıtica del Capitalismo A. Riesco Sanz, & J. Garc´ıa Lopez (Eds.). Madrid: Bifurcaciones, Traficantes de Sueños. 36. J. Cruddas, quoted in Sodha, S. (2017). Is Finland’s basic universal income a solution to automation, fewer jobs and lower wages? The Observer, February 19. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/19/basicincome-finland-low-wages-fewer-jobs

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37. Rayner, G. (2017). Jeremy Corbyn plans to ’tax robots’ because automation is a ’threat’ to workers. Daily Telegraph, September 26. Retrieved from https://www.teleg raph.co.uk/news/2017/09/26/jeremy-corbyn-plans-taxrobots-automation-threat-workers/. Accessed on May 17, 2018. For Hamon, see Bell, D. A. (2017). France: The Death of the Elephants. Dissent, February 2. Retrieved from https:// www.dissentmagazine.org/online_books/france-electionsfillon-hamon-melenchon-le-pen-unpredictable 38. Federici, S. (2012). Wages against Housework (1975). In Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (pp. 5–22). Brooklyn: Common Notions; Huws, U. (2016). The key criticisms of basic income, and how to overcome them. Open Democracy, December 14. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/the-key-criticisms-of-basic-income-and-how-toovercome-them/ 39. Weeks, K., & Cruz, K. (2016). A feminist case for Basic Income: An interview with Kathi Weeks. Compass, August 25. Retrieved from https://www.compassonline.org.uk/afeminist-case-for-basic-income-an-interview-with-kathiweeks/ 40. James, S. (2016). Child benefit has been changing lives for 70 years. Let’s not forget the woman behind it. The Guardian. August 6. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/06/child-benefit70-years-eleanor-rathbone 41. Dalla Costa, M. (2015). Family, welfare and the state. Between progressivism and the New Deal. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions. 42. Cruddas, J., & Kibasi, T. (2016). A universal basic mistake. Prospect, July 2016. Retrieved from http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/a-universal-basic-mistake; for the concept of ‘labour moves’, see Neary, M. (2002). Labour Moves. A Critique of the concept of social Movement Unionism. In A. C. Dinerstein & M. Neary (Eds.), The Labour Debate. An investigation into the theory and reality of capitalist work (pp. 149–178). Aldershot: Ashgate. 43. Holloway, J. (1996). The abyss opens: The rise and fall of Keynesianism. In W. Bonefeld & J. Holloway (Eds.),

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44. 45.

46.

47.

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Global Capital, Nation States and the Politics of Money (pp. 7–34). London: Macmillan. Marx, K. (1976), p. 420. Clarke, S. (1992). The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodization of the Capitalist State. In W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, & K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism (Vol. I, pp. 133–150). London: Pluto Press. For the relationship between struggle and machines see Caffentzis, G. (2013). In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crises of Capitalism. PM Press. Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane, Ch. 7; See also Srnicek and Williams (2015).

Chapter 8: Hope and Prefigurative Translation: On Utopia 1.

2.

3.

This chapter draws upon Dinerstein, A. C. (2014). The dream of dignified work: On good and bad utopias. Development and Change, 45(5), 1037–1058; Dinerstein, A. C., & Pitts, F. H. (2018). From post-work to postcapitalism? Discussing the basic income and struggles for alternative forms of social reproduction. Journal of Labor and Society, 21(4), 471–491; Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017). Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017b). Postcapitalism, basic income and the end of work: A critique and alternative. Bath Papers in International Development and Wellbeing (No. 55); Pitts, F. H., & Dinerstein, A. C. (2017a). Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction. Capital & Class, 41(3), 423–434; and Pitts, F. H., (2020), ‘Creative Labour, Metabolic Rift and the Crisis of Social Reproduction’. in: Mark Banks, Kate Oakley (eds) Cultural Industries and the Environmental Crisis: New Approaches for Policy. Palgrave Macmillan. Spencer, D. (2018). Fear and hope in an age of mass automation: Debating the future of work. New Technology, Work and Employment, 33, 1–12. Dinerstein, A. C. (2019). A critical theory of hope. Critical Affirmations beyond fear. In A. C. Dinerstein, G. Vela, E. ´ Gonzalez, & J. Holloway (Eds.),Open Marxism 4. Against

Notes

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

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a closing world (pp. 33–46). London; New York, NY: Pluto Press. Dinerstein, A. C., Pitts, F. H., & Taylor, G. (2016). A postwork economy of robots and Machines is a bad utopia for the left. The Conversation, May 23. Retrieved from https:// theconversation.com/a\post-work-economy-of-robots-andmachines-is-a-bad-utopia-for-the-left-59134 Dinerstein, A. C. (2017b). Co-construction or prefiguration? Rethinking the “translation” of SSE practices into policy. In P. North & M. Scott Cato (Eds.), Towards just and sustainable economies: The social and solidarity economy North and South (pp. 57–71). Bristol: Policy Press. Santos, B. de S., & Meneses, M. P. (2020). Introduction. Epistemologies of the South - Giving voice to the diversity of the South. In B. de S. Santos & M. P. Meneses (Eds.), Knowledge orn in the Struggle. Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (p. xvvii). Oxon: Routledge. ´ Icaza, R., & Vazquez, R. (2013). Social Struggles as Epistemic Struggles. Development and Change, 44(3), 683–704. Dinerstein, A. C. (2014). The dream of dignified work: On good and bad Utopias. Development and Change, 45(5), 1037–1058. Dinerstein, A. C. (2017a). Concrete Utopia: (Re)producing life in, against and beyond the open veins of capital. Public Seminar, New School for Social Research, New York. Retrieved from http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/12/ concreteutopia/ Dinerstein, A. C. (2015). The politics of autonomy in Latin America: The art of organising hope (p. 20). Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Levitas, R. (2008). Pragmatism, Utopia and Anti-Utopia. Critical Horizons, 9(1), 42–59. Wright, E. O. (2010). Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso. Wright, E. O. (2013, February). Transforming Capitalism through Real Utopias. American Sociological Review, 1–26. Bloch, E. (1959/1986). The Principle of Hope (pp. 146). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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15. Amsler, S. (2016). Learning Hope: An Epistemology of Possibility for Advanced Capitalist Society. In A. C. Dinerstein (Ed.), Social sciences for an-other politics. Women theorising without parachutes (pp. 19–32). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 16. Moir (2018), p. 201. 17. Daly, F. (2013). The Zero Point: Encountering the Dark ˇ zek Emptiness of Nothingness. In P. Thompson & S. Ziˇ (Eds.), The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (p. 172). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 18. Bloch, E. (2006). Traces (pp. 18). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 19. Moir, C. (2018). Ernst Bloch: The Principle of Hope. In B. Best, W. Bonefeld, & C. O’ Kane (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (pp. 199–215). Los Angeles, CA; London; New Delhi; Washington, DC; Melbourne: SAGE Publications. 20. Bloch, E. (1959/1986). The Principle of Hope (pp. 146). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 21. Marx, K. (1871). The civil war in France. 22. Boldyrev, I. (2015). Ernst Bloch and his contemporaries. Locating Utopian Messianism today. London; Oxford; New York, NY; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury. 23. Neupert-Doppler, A. (2018). Critical Theory and Utopian Thought. In B. Best, W. Bonefeld, & C. O’ Kane (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (pp. 719). Los Angeles, CA; London; New Delhi; Singapore; Washington, DC; Melbourne: SAGE Publications. 24. Bronner, S. (1997). Utopian Projections: In Memory of Ernst Bloch. In J. O. Daniel & T. Moylan Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (pp. 177). London; New York, NY: Verso. 25. Boldyrev (2015), p. 33. 26. Dinerstein A.C. (2015). 27. Maeckelbergh, M. (2011). Doing is believing: Prefiguration as strategic practice. Social Movement Studies, 10(1), 1–20. 28. Raekstad, P. (2017). Revolutionary practice and prefigurative politics: S clarification and defense. Constellations, 2017, 9.

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29. Neary, M. (2019). Chain Reaction: Critical Theory Needs Critical Mass—Contradiction, Crisis and the Value-Form. SERRC, September 16, Retrieved from https://social-epist emology.com/2019/09/16/chain-reaction-critical-theoryneeds-critical-mass-contradiction-crisis-and-the-valueform-mike-neary/ 30. Dinerstein, A. C. (2016). Denaturalising Society: Concrete Utopia and the prefigurative critique of political economy. In A. C. Dinerstein (Ed.), Social sciences for an-other politics. Women theorising without parachutes (pp. 49–63). Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. 31. Maeckelbergh, M. (2011). Doing is believing: Prefiguration as strategic practice. Social Movement Studies, 10(1), 1–20. 32. Dinerstein A.C. (2017b). 33. Dinerstein (2017b), p. 69. 34. Dinerstein A.C. (2015). 35. Dinerstein, A. C. (2013). From Corporatist to Autonomous: Unemployed Workers Organisations and the Remaking of Labour Subjectivity in Argentina. In Howell, J. (Ed.), Non-Governmental Public Action and Social Justice (Vol. 2, pp. 36–59). Houndmills; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. See also Chatterton, P. (2005). Making autonomous geographies: Argentina’s popular uprising and the “Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados” (Unemployed Workers Movement). Geoforum, 36, 545–556. 36. Mason-Deese, L. (2016). ‘Unemployed Workers’ Movements and the Territory of Social Reproduction. Journal of resistance Studies, 2, 65–99. 37. Dinerstein A.C. (2015). 38. Dinerstein, A. C. (2010). Autonomy in Latin America: Between Resistance and Integration. Echoes from the Piqueteros experience’, Community Development Journal, 45(3), 358. All quotes that follow from pages 360–361. 39. Dinerstein (2010), p. 359. 40. Zechner, M., & Hansen, B. R. (2015). Building power in a crisis of social reproduction. ROAR Magazine. Retrieved from https://roarmag.org/magazine/building-power-crisissocial-reproduction/ 41. Dinerstein, A. C. (2017b). Co-construction or prefiguration? Rethinking the “translation” of SSE practices into policy. In

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50. 51.

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P. North & M. Scott Cato (Eds.), Towards just and sustainable economies: The social and solidarity economy North and South (pp. 57–71). Bristol: Policy Press. Dinerstein (2010), p. 360. Dinerstein (2010), p. 364. Dinerstein (2010), p. 364. Mason-Desse, L. (2020). From the picket to the women’s strike: Expanding the meaning of labour struggles in Argentina. Ephemera, February 2020. Retrieved from http://www.ephemerajournal.org Dinerstein (2017a). Weeks, K. (2011). The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (pp. 230). Durham, CA; London: Duke University Press. See Costa, H. A. (2006). The Old and the New in the New Labour Internationalism. In S. de Sousa Santos (Ed.) Another Production is Possible. Beyond the Capitalist Canon (pp. 243–276). London and New York: Verso. Lambert, R., & Webster, E. (2006). Social Emancipation and the New Labour Internationalism. In B. de Sousa Santos (Ed.), Another Production is Possible. Beyond the Capitalist Canon (pp. 279–320). London; New York, NY: Verso. ¨ See Lang, S. M., Konig, C., & Regelmann, A. (Eds.). (2018) Alternatives-in-a-World-of-Crisis, Global Working Group Beyond Development, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Brussels ´ Bol´ıvar Ecuador; also Office - Universidad Andina Simon Kothari, A. (2020). Earth Vikalp Sangam: Proposal for a Global Tapestry of Alternatives. Globalizations, 17(2), 245–249. doi:10.1080/14747731.2019.1670955 Dinerstein (2010), pp. 364, 365. Conaty, P., Bird, A., & Ross, C. (2015). Not alone. Trade union and co-operative solutions for self-employed workers. Retrieved from https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/ files/uploads/attachments/not_alone_-_trade_union_and_ co-operative_solutions_for_self-employed_workers_3.pdf; Taylor, M. (2017). Good work: The Taylor review of modern working practices. London: HM Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/good-workthe-taylor-review-ofmodern-working-practices

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52. Cohen, N. S., (2012). Cultural Work as a Site of Struggle: Freelancers and Exploitation. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 10(2),141–155; Conaty et al (2015); Boffo, M. (2014). From Post- to Neo-: Whither Operaismo Beyond Hardt and Negri? Historical Materialism, 22(3–4), 425–528; Bologna, S. (2018). The Rise of the European Self-Employed Workforce. Milan: Mimesis International. 53. Graceffa, S., & de Heusch, S. (2017). Reinventing the world of work. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 23(3), 359–365; Xhauflair, V., Huybrechts, B., & Pichault, F. (2018). How Can New Players Establish Themselves in Highly Institutionalised Labour Markets? A Belgian Case Study in the Area of Project-Based Work. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 56(2), 370–394; Zanoni, P. (2018). Belgium: Reinvigorating The SelfRegulated Labour Market Model. In M. Neufind, J. O’Reilly, & F. Ranft (Eds.), Work in the Digital Age: Challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (pp. 317–332). London, New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield. Zanoni, P. (2019). Labour Market Inclusion Through Predatory Capitalism? The “Sharing Economy,” Diversity, and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in the Belgian Coordinated Market Economy*. In P. V. Steve & A. Kovalainen (Eds.), Work and Labour in the Digital Age, Research in the Sociology of Work (Vol. 33, pp. 145–164); Fuzi, A. (2015). Co-working spaces for promoting entrepreneurship in sparse regions: The case of South Wales. Regional studies, regional science, 2(1), 462–469. 54. Pitts, F. H. (2019). SMart solutions for the self-employed beyond the ‘British Way’. Migration Mobilities Bristol, April 29. Retrieved from https://migration.blogs. bristol.ac.uk/2019/04/29/smart-solutions-for-the-self-empl oyedbeyond-the-british-way/; Ross, P., Bird, A., Pitts, F. H., & Crowley, L. (2017). A new way of working for the self employed- SMart. Coops.Consultancy, December 15. Retrieved from http://www.alexbird.com/a-new-way-ofworking-for-the-self employed-smart/ 55. Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2017). Beyond Public and Private: A Framework for Co-operative Higher Education. Open Library of Humanities, 3(2), 2. doi:10.16995/olh.195; also

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71. 72. 73.

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Neary, M. (2020). Student as Producer: How do Revolutionary Teachers Teach?. Hampshire: Zero Books. Starosta, G. (2017). Fetishism and Revolution in the Critique of Political Economy: Critical Reflections on some Contemporary Readings of Marx’s Capital. Continental Thought and Theory, 1(4), 365–398. Starosta (2017), p. 382. Bonefeld W., & Psychopedis K. (Eds.). (2005). Human Dignity: Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism. Aldershot: Ashgate; cf. Starosta (2017), p. 378. Starosta (2017), p. 382. Starosta (2017), p. 387. Holloway, J. (1995a). From Scream of Refusal to Scream of Power: The Centrality of Work’. In W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, J. Holloway, & K. Psychopedis (Eds.), Open Marxism (Vol. III, pp. 164). London: Pluto Press. Bonefeld, W. (1994). Human Practice and Perversion: Beyond Autonomy and Structure, Common Sense, 15, 43–52. Retrieved from http://commonsensejournal.org.uk/ issue-15/ Dinerstein (2015), p. 46. Dinerstein, A.C. (2002). Starosta (2017), pp. 388, 389; Kicillof, A., & Starosta, G. (2007). Value form and class struggle: A critique of the autonomist theory of value. Capital & Class, 31(2), 13–40. Brassier, R. (2014). Wandering Abstraction. Mute Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.metamute.org/editorial/ articles/wandering-abstraction Starosta (2017), pp. 388, 389. Bonefeld, W. (1987). Open Marxim. Common Sense, (1), 36–37. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse (pp. 704–706). London: Penguin. Postone, M., Hamza, A., Ruda, F. (2017). An interview with Moishe Postone: That Capital has limits does not mean it will collapse. Crisis and Critique, 3(3), 500–517. Postone et al. (2017), p. 511. Postone et al. (2017), p. 513. Williams, A., & Srnicek, N. (2013). The Accelerationist Manifesto. Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved from https:// criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifestofor-an-accelerationist-politics/

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74. For critiques see Noys, B., & Galloway, A. (2014). Crash and Burn: Debating Accelerationism. 3:AM Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/crashand-burn-debating-accelerationism/ 75. Levitas, R. (1997). Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia. In J. O. Daniel & T. Moylan (Eds.), Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (p. 70). London; New York, NY: Verso. 76. Geoghegan, V. (1996). Ernst Bloch (p. 38). Abingdon: Routledge. 77. For critiques see Pitts, F. H. (2017b). Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, and Pitts, F. H., and Cruddas, J., (2020). Pitts, F. H., & Cruddas, J. (2020). The Age of Immanence: Postoperaismo, Postcapitalism and the Forces and Relations of Production, School of Sociology. Politics, & International Studies Working Paper Series, 01–20(2020). ´ K., & Klewenhagen, A. (2020). 78. Wo´zniak, M., Jesien, Rethinking Marxism with Ernst Bloch. Praktyka Teoretyczna, 1(35), 7–11. 79. Dinerstein (2015), pp. 21–22. 80. Bonefeld, W. (1987), p. 36. 81. Rehman, J. (2020). Ernst Bloch as a Philosopher of Praxis. Praktyka Teoretyczna, 1(35), 75–94. 82. Dinerstein (2019), p. 35.

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INDEX Abstraction. See Real abstraction Affirmation, 155 Alienation, 55, 94, 161–162 Alternatives, 4, 114–115, 129–130, 142, 148–150, 155, 159, 163–164 Antagonism, 1–2, 11–12, 14, 55–56, 59–60, 91–92, 133–134, 153–154 Argentina, 4, 14, 143–145, 151–152, 158 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 29–30, 41 Arvidsson, Adam, 71 Authoritarianism, 111–113 Automation, 1, 7–8, 17–18, 18, 30–31, 87–88 discourse, 18–20, 24–25 Autor, David, 20–21, 23–24, 29–30, 33 Basic income, 2–3, 63–64, 70, 73–74, 101–102, 104–105, 141

directional demand, 12–13, 81–82, 99, 103–104, 110–111, 129–130 non-reformist reform, 104, 110–111 transitional measure, 9–10, 12–13, 65, 96–97, 101–102, 142 universal, 1, 48, 87–88, 101–102, 140–141 Bastani, Aaron, 48, 50, 60–61, 37–38 Benanav, Aron, 18 Beyond zone, 156 Bloch, Ernst, 14, 141–142, 145–149 ¨ Bohm, Steffen, 72 Bonefeld, Werner, 1, 72–73, 84, 92–94, 98–99, 107, 113–114, 161–162, 167–168 Brassier, Ray, 163–164 Bregman, Rutger, 88–89 Broodfonds, 159

209

210

Brynjolfsson, Eric, 20, 29–31, 33, 36, 41 Business and Employment Cooperatives, 158–159 Capitalism, 8, 11–12, 49–50, 53–54, 164–165, 127–128 capitalist social relations, 8–9, 79–80, 92, 119, 164–165 capitalist society, 8–9, 126 China, 31, 38–39, 68 Clarke, Simon, 24, 55–56, 92, 108 Class, 112 struggle, 61–62, 123–124 working class, 64–65, 68, 79–80, 118–119, 165 Classical political economy. See also Smith, Adam; Ricardo, David, 20–21 Cleaver, Harry, 53–54, 57 Cohen, Nicole, 62–63 Collective bargaining, 23–24, 35–36 Commodity, 26–27, 51, 58–59, 63–64, 122–123 Conference of Socialist Economists, 107 Contradiction, 4, 14, 55–56, 126–127,

Index

136, 140–141, 153–154 Corbyn, Jeremy, 2–3, 132 Coughlin, arles, 83 COVID-19, 6–7, 168 Crisis, 15–16 2008 Financial Crisis, 128 crisis of measurability, 70–71, 73 crisis of social reproduction, 88, 91, 118–119, 128, 131–132 crisis of the law of value, 70–71, 75 oil crisis financial of the 1970s, 128 Critchley, Simon, 103–104 Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, 84–85, 133 Demonetisation/Note Ban (India), 134–135 Dignified work, 16, 130–131, 157 Dignity, 118–119, 151–154 Directional demands. See also Basic income—directional demand, 12–13, 81–82, 99, 103–104, 110–111, 129–130 Elson, Diane, 72–73 Exchange, 12, 56–57 Exploitation, 33–34, 45 Federici, Silvia, 130–131

Index

Ferguson, Susan, 122 Fetishism/fetishised/ fetishisation, 55 Fleming, Peter, 20–21, 23–25, 27––30, 35 Folk politics, 4, 103, 129–131, 138, 143–144, 165–167 Form/Social Form, 8–9, 9–10, 53–54, 59–60, 160 Four-day week, 67–68 Fragment on Machines, 8, 49, 50–51, 64–65 Frase, Peter, 88–89, 121 Fraser, Nancy, 121 Frey, Carl, 31–32, 47 Friedman, Milton, 82–83 Fully Automated Luxury Communism, 50 Gorz, Andr´e, 104, 106–107, 109–111 Gramsci, Antonio, 103 Great Recession, 23, 26–28, 83 depression, 23 Gunn, Richard, 15–16, 55–56 Hamon, Benoit, 132 Hardt, Michael, 5, 49, 52, 59, 70–71, 77–80, 131–132, 167 Harvey, David, 53 Harvie, David, 53, 72–73 Holloway, John, 9–10, 53––56, 91–92, 97–98, 108,

211

134–135, 138, 161–162 Hope, 147–148 The Art of Organising, 147–148 Huws, Ursula, 27–28, 114–115 Immanence, 131–132, 165 India, 12–13, 38–39, 101–102, 111–112 Industrial Revolution, 17–18, 20–22 Fourth, 18–19 Indycube, 159 Institutionalisation, 115–116, 133 contested, 115–116 James, Selma, 133 Keynes, John Maynard, 23 Keynesianism, 134–135 Kicillof, Alex, 161–164 Labour abstract, 8–10, 49, 52, 57–58 concrete, 8–9, 52, 163–164 free, 52, 102 immaterial, 50, 73 power, 12, 96–97, 154 process, 48–49, 53–55 unpaid, 74–75 Labour movement, 67–68 party, 67–68 socially reproductive, 42 struggles, 156

212

unskilled, 62–63 Land, ris, 72 Latin America, 138, 150–152 Left, the, 2–3, 109–110, 133–134 Levitas, Ruth, 145–146, 167 Long, Huey, 83–84 Machines, 22 Marcuse, Herbert, 63–65 Marx, Karl, 1, 52, 92–95, 121–122, 136, 146–147, 164 Autonomist Marxism, 1–2, 70, 161–162 Fragment on Machines, 8, 49, 50, 51, 64–65 Marxist-feminism, 13 Open Marxism, 1, 52, 72–73, 141–142, 160–162 Mason, Paul, 1–2, 19–20, 21, 23, 37–38, 50–52, 89, 95, 105–106, 136–137 McAfee, Andrew, 20, 29–31, 33, 36, 41 Mediation, 13, 56–57, 165 Metabolism, 53–57 Milburn, Keir, 72–73, 81–82, 103–105, 110–111 Modi, Nerendra, 101–102, 111–113 Moir, Cat, 146

Index

Mokyr, Joel, 20–21, 23, 27–28 Monetisation/ demonetisation, 111–112 Money, 87–88, 91–92, 94, 122–123 Moody, Kim, 23–26, 28, 33–38, 42–44 Movement of Unemployed Workers. See also Piqueteros; Unemployed Workers Organisations, 14, 143–145 Munck, Ronaldo, 119 Nation, 12–13, 38, 109–111 Nationalism, 113 Nature, 45–46, 56–57, 90–91 Neary, Mike, 8–9, 15–16, 79–80, 94 Negation, 112–113 Negri, Antonio, 5, 49–50, 52, 59, 70–71, 74, 77–81, 131–132, 167 Neoliberalism, 6–7, 103, 128 rise of, 24, 103 New Deal, 11–12, 61–64, 133 New Economy, 50, 65, 70–71 New Reading of Marx, 52

Index

Non-monetary, 98, 142–143 Non-reformist reforms. See also Basic income—nonreformist reform, 104 Not-Yet reality, 131–132, 145–146, 167 Occupations, 2–3, 31–32, 34–35 Occupy, 2–3, 50 Piqueteros, 144–145, 151–154, 156–159 Platform, 26–27 Policy co-construction, 142–143, 150 prefigurative translation, 142–143, 149–150 Politics of social reproduction, 121, 130–131, 140–141, 143–145 Populism, 133–134 Post-capitalism, 1, 5, 136–137, 160 Postone, Moishe, 24, 55–56, 131–132, 164–165 Praxis, 131–132, 164–165, 167–168 Prefigurative politics, 148–149 translation, 142–143

213

Primitive accumulation, 121–122, 161–162, 167–168 Production, 8, 21, 24–25, 72–73, 125–126, 157 Productive activity, 8–9, 70, 75–76, 122–123, 155 Productiveness, 69–70 Productivism, 81 Productivist mandates, 81 Productivity, 5, 23–24, 35–36, 43–44, 60–61, 124–125 Property, 70, 96–97, 131–132 Real abstraction, 55–56, 58, 161–162, 169 Reality, 55–56, 74, 168 material dimension of, 147–148 Reduction in working hours. See Four-day week Reform, 104, 115–116 non reformist, 104, 110–111 Revolution, 17–18 Ricardianism, 51 Ricardo, David, 20–21, 51 Rifkin, Jeremy, 25–26 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 33–34, 83 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 143–144

214

Scientific Management (Taylorist), 22 Share Our Wealth, 11–12, 83–84 Sloterdijk, Peter, 66–67 SMart, 159 Smith, Adam, 20, 51, 92–93 Social crisis of reproduction, 88, 91, 118–119, 128, 131–132 form, 66–67 metabolism, 55–56 movements, 145–146 relations. See Capitalist social relations Social Reproduction Theory, 13 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 55–56 Solow paradox, 42–43 Speenhamland, 63–64 Spencer, David, 20–24, 27–28, 30–31, 33–34 Srnicek, Nick, 1–2, 4, 26–27, 48, 90, 103, 106, 129–130, 165–167 Standing, Guy, 88–89, 112, 118–119 Starosta, Guido, 160–164 State/Capitalist state, 2–3, 106–107, 109–110, 152–153 Taylor Review, 158 Technological

Index

change, 27–28, 33–34, 38, 42 innovation, 18, 23–24 possibilities, 19, 30, 33 Technology digital, 36 labour-substituting, 18, 35 smart, 30–31, 41 workplace, 40 Time abstract labour time, 8–10, 50–51, 57–58 concrete labour time, 8–9, 52, 163–164 socially necessary labour time, 57, 71 Totalitarianism, 133–134 Trade unions. See also Labour movement, 60–61 Transitional measures. See also Basic income— transitional measure, 2–3, 9–10, 12–13, 65, 139–140 Translation. See Prefigurative translation Trenkel, Norbert, 9 Trump, Donald, 111–113 Underemployment, 19, 42 Unemployed Workers Organisations, 151–152 Unemployment, 19

Index

technological, 20, 23–24, 47, 64–65, 139–140 Union Trabajadores Desocupados (UTD), 152–153 United Kingdom, 27–28, 31, 40–41, 118–119, 159 United States, 6, 11–12 Universal basic income, 1, 48, 87–88, 101–102, 140–141 as recompense, 76 as redistribution, 70 as reward, 70 as right, 80–81 Universal Basic Services, 114–115 Universal Credit, 99 Utopia abstract, 141–142 anticipatory, 146–147 bad, 168 concrete, 14, 145–146 good, 168 post-work, 128–129, 169 real, 145–146 Utopian, 23, 167 Utopianism, 5, 148–149 Value, 11–12

215

crisis of law of, 74–75 form, 11–12 form theory, 53 Value theory labour theory of value, 51, 52 Ricardian theory of value, 11–12 value theory of labour, 60, 72–73 Wage, 10–11, 123–124 Wajcman, Judy, 25–26, 30, 32, 65 Wall Street Crash, 23 Weeks, Kathi, 11–12, 81, 125–126, 132–133, 157 Williams, Alex, 1–2, 50, 90, 106, 165–167 Workers, precarious, 1–2, 33–34, 118–119 World Bank, 88 World Economic Forum, 18–19, 33–34, 47 Wright, Erik Olin, 145–146 Zechner, Manuela, 104–105, 121, 127, 153–154 Ziebarth, Nicolas, 20 Zierahn, Ulrich, 32, 47

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