Conclusion

You live the surprise results of old plans.

Jenny Holzer

Where, then, do we stand? The latest cycle of struggles has been exhausted, undone by their tendencies towards folk politics, and everywhere today mass outrage combines with mass impotence. We have argued that the most promising way forward lies in reclaiming modernity and attacking the neoliberal common sense that conditions everything from the most esoteric policy discussions to the most vivid emotional states. This counter-hegemonic project can only be achieved by imagining better worlds – and in moving beyond defensive struggles. We have outlined one possible project, in the form of a post-work politics that frees us to create our own lives and communities. Triumph in the political battles to achieve it will require organising a broadly populist left, building the organisational ecosystem necessary for a full-spectrum politics on multiple fronts, and leveraging key points of power wherever possible.

Yet the end of work would not be the end of history. Building a platform for a post-work society would be an immense accomplishment, but it would still only be a beginning.¹ This is why conceiving of left politics as a politics of modernity is so crucial: because it requires that we not confuse a post-work society – or indeed any society – with the end of history. Universalism always undoes itself, possessing its own resources for an immanent critique that insists and expands upon its ideals. No particular social formation is sufficient to satisfy its conceptual and political demands. Equally, synthetic freedom compels us to reject contentment with the existing horizon of possibilities. To be satisfied with post-work would risk leaving intact the racial, gendered, colonial and ecological divisions that continue to structure our world.² While such asymmetries of power would hopefully be unsettled by a post-work world, the efforts to eliminate them would undoubtedly need to continue. Further, we would still be seeking a systemic replacement for markets and facing the task of building new political institutions. We would still not know what a sociotechnical body can do, and we would still have to unfetter technological development and unleash new freedoms. Transcending our reliance on waged labour is important, but we would still be faced with the immense tasks of undoing other political, economic, social, physical and biological constraints. A project towards a post-work world is necessary but insufficient.

Yet a post-work platform does provide us with a new equilibrium to aim at, completing the shift from social democracy to neoliberalism to a new post-work hegemony. We believe it focuses the tasks of the present and provides a stable point from which to seek out further emancipatory gains. As with any platform, those who create it cannot fully predict how it will be used. While certain constraints and opportunities are built into a platform, they do not exhaustively determine the ways of life it will enable. A platform leaves the future open, rather than presuming to close it.³ When it is designed correctly, it succeeds precisely by allowing people to build further developments on top of it. With a post-work platform, people may begin to participate more in political processes, or perhaps they will retreat into individualised worlds formed by media spectacles. But there are reasons for hope, given the shift in work ethic required for a post-work society. Such a project demands a subjective transformation in the process – it potentiates the conditions for a broader transformation from the selfish individuals formed by capitalism to communal and creative forms of social expression liberated by the end of work. Humanity has for too long been shaped by capitalist impulses, and a post-work world portends a future in which these constraints have been significantly loosened. This does not mean that a post-work society would simply be a realm of play. Rather, in such a society, the labour that remains will no longer be imposed upon us by an external force – by an employer or by the imperatives of survival. Work will become driven by our own desires, instead of by demands from outside.⁴ Against the austerity of conservative forces, and the austere life promised by anti-modernists, the demand for a post-work world revels in the liberation of desire, abundance and freedom.

Such a future is undoubtedly risky, but so is any project to build a better world. There are no guarantees that things will work out as expected: a post-work world may generate immanent dynamics towards the rapid dissolution of capitalism, or the forces of reaction may co-opt the liberated desires under a new system of control. Concerns about the risks of political action have led parts of the contemporary left into a situation where they desire novelty, but a novelty without risk. Generic demands to experiment, create and prefigure are commonplace, but concrete proposals are all too often met with a wave of criticism outlining every possible point at which things might go wrong. In light of this dual tendency – for novelty, but against the risks inherent in social transformation – the allure of political ideas celebrating spontaneous ‘events’ becomes clearer. The event (as revolutionary rupture) becomes an expression of the desire for novelty without responsibility. The messianic event promises to shatter our stagnant world and bring us to a new stage of history, conveniently voided of the difficult work that is politics. The hard task ahead is to build new worlds while acknowledging that they will create novel problems. The best utopias are always riven by discord.

This imperative runs in opposition to the kind of precautionary principle that seeks to eliminate the contingency and risk involved in making decisions. On strong readings, the precautionary principle aims to convert epistemic uncertainty into a guardianship of the status quo, gently turning away those who would seek to build a better future with the imperative to ‘do more research’. We might also consider here that the precautionary principle contains an almost inherent lacuna: it ignores the risks of its own application. In seeking to err always on the side of caution, and hence of eliminating risk, it contains a blindness to the dangers of inaction and omission.⁵ While risks need to be reasonably hedged, a fuller appreciation of the travails of contingency implies that we are usually not better off taking the precautionary path. The precautionary principle is designed to close off the future and eliminate contingency, when in fact the contingency of high-risk adventures is precisely what leads to a more open future – in the words of conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, ‘You live the surprise results of old plans.’ Building the future means accepting the risk of unintended consequences and imperfect solutions. We may always be trapped, but at least we can escape into better traps.⁶

AFTER CAPITALISM

The post-work project and, more broadly, the project of postcapitalism are progressive determinations of the commitment to universal emancipation. In practice, these projects involve ‘a controlled dissolution of market forces … and a delinking of work from income’.⁷ But the ultimate trajectory of universal emancipation is towards overcoming physical, biological, political and economic constraints. This ambition to undo constraints is one that, taken to its limits, leads inexorably towards grand and speculative frontiers. For the early Russian cosmists, even death and gravity were obstacles to be overcome through future ingenuity.⁸ In these post-planetary speculations, we see the project of human emancipation transformed into an unceasing one that winds its way along two highly intertwined paths of development: technological and human.

Technological development follows a recombinant path, bringing together existing ideas, technologies and technological components into new combinations. Simple objects are united into increasingly complex technological systems, and each newly developed piece of technology forms the basis for a further technology. With this expansion, the combinatorial possibilities rapidly proliferate.⁹ It would appear that capitalist competition has been a significant driver of this technological advancement. Under a popular narrative, inter-capitalist competition is seen as driving technological changes in the production process, while consumer capitalism demands an increasingly differentiated set of products. But at the same time, capitalism has placed substantial obstacles in the way of technological development. While the carefully curated image of capitalism is one of dynamic risk-taking and technological innovation, this image in fact obscures the real sources of dynamism in the economy. Developments like railways, the internet, computing, supersonic flight, space travel, satellites, pharmaceuticals, voice-recognition software, nanotechnology, touch-screens and clean energy have all been nurtured and guided by states, not corporations. During the golden postwar era of research and development, two-thirds of research and development was publicly funded.¹⁰ Yet recent decades have seen corporate investment in high-risk technologies drastically decline.¹¹ And with neoliberalism’s cutback in state expenditure, it is therefore unsurprising that technological change has diminished since the 1970s.¹² In other words, it has been collective investment, not private investment, that has been the primary driver of technological development.¹³ High-risk inventions and new technologies are too risky for private capitalists to invest in; figures such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk slyly obscure their parasitical reliance on state-led developments.¹⁴ Likewise, multi-billion-dollar megascale projects are ultimately driven by non-economic goals that exceed any cost–benefit analysis. Projects of this scale and ambition are in fact hindered by market-based constraints, since a sober analysis of their viability in capitalist terms reveals them to be profoundly underwhelming.¹⁵ In addition, some social benefits (those offered by an Ebola vaccine, for example) are left unexplored because they have little profit potential, while in some areas (such as solar power and electric cars) capitalists can be seen actively impeding progress, lobbying governments to end green-energy subsidies and implementing laws that obstruct further development. The entire pharmaceuticals industry provides a particularly devastating illustration of the effects of intellectual property monopolisation, while the technology industry is increasingly plagued by patent trolling. Capitalism therefore misattributes the sources of technological development, places creativity in a straitjacket of capitalist accumulation, constrains the social imagination within the parameters of cost–benefit analyses and attacks profit-destroying innovations. To unleash technological advancement, we must move beyond capitalism and liberate creativity from its current strictures.¹⁶ This would begin to liberate technologies away from their current purview of control and exploitation, and towards the quantitative and qualitative expansion of synthetic freedom. It would enable the utopian ambitions of megaprojects to be unleashed, invoking the classic dreams of invention and discovery. The dreams of space flight, the decarbonisation of the economy, the automation of mundane labour, the extension of human life, and so on, are all major technological projects that find themselves hampered in various ways by capitalism. The boot-strapping expansionary process of technology, once liberated from capitalist fetters, can potentiate both positive and negative freedoms. It can form the basis for a fully postcapitalist economy, enabling a shift away from scarcity, work and exploitation, and towards the full development of humanity.¹⁷

Intertwined with this picture of liberated technological transformation is therefore the future of human beings. The pathway towards a postcapitalist society requires a shift away from the proletarianisation of humanity and towards a transformed and newly mutable subject. This subject cannot be determined in advance; it can only be elaborated in the unfolding of practical and conceptual ramifications. There is no ‘true’ essence to humanity that could be discovered beyond our enmeshments in technological, natural and social webs.¹⁸ The idea that a post-work society would simply inculcate further mindless consumption neglects humanity’s capacity for novelty and creativity, and invokes a pessimism based upon current capitalist subjectivity.¹⁹ Likewise, the development of new needs must be distinguished from their commodification. Whereas the latter locks new desires into a profit-seeking framework that constrains human flourishing, the former denotes a real form of progress. The ‘extension and differentiation of needs as a whole’ is to be lauded over any folk-political dream of returning to a ‘primitive natural state of these needs’. The complexification of needs is disfigured under capitalist consumer society, to be sure, but, unbound from this mutation, ‘their aim is necessarily the development of a “rich individuality” for the whole of mankind’.²⁰

The postcapitalist subject would therefore not reveal an authentic self that had been obscured by capitalist social relations, but would instead unveil the space to create new modes of being. As Marx noted, ‘all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature’, and the future of humanity cannot be determined abstractly in advance: it is first of all a practical matter, to be carried out in time. Nevertheless, some general notions might be entertained. For Marx, the primary principle of postcapitalism was the ‘development of human powers which is an end in itself’.²¹ Indeed, the fundamental aim of his project was universal emancipation. The various ideas that Marxists have advanced to get there – the socialisation of production, ending the value-form, eliminating wage labour – are simply means towards achieving this end. The immediate question is: What does this aim entail? The synthetic construction of freedom is the means by which human powers are to be developed. This freedom finds many different modes of expression, including economic and political ones,²² experiments with sexuality and reproductive structures,²³ and the creation of new desires, expanded aesthetic capabilities,²⁴ new forms of thought and reasoning, and ultimately entirely new modes of being human.²⁵ The expansion of desires, of needs, of lifestyles, of communities, of ways of being, of capacities – all are invoked by the project of universal emancipation. This is a project of opening up the future, of undertaking a labour that elaborates what it might mean to be human, of producing a utopian project for new desires, and of aligning a political project with the trajectory of an endless universalising vector. Capitalism, for all its appearances of liberation and universality, has ultimately restrained these forces in an endless cycle of accumulation, ossifying the real potentials of humanity and constricting technological development to a series of banal marginal innovations. We move faster – capitalism demands it; yet we go nowhere. Instead, we must build a world in which we can accelerate out of our stasis.

BEFORE THE FUTURE

The argument of this book has been that the left can neither remain in the present nor return to the past. To construct a new and better future, we must begin taking the necessary steps to build a new kind of hegemony. This runs counter to much of our political common sense today. The tendencies towards folk politics – emphasising the local and the authentic, the temporary and the spontaneous, the autonomous and the particular – are explicable as reactions against a recent history of defeats, of partial, ambivalent victories, and of surging global complexity. But they remain radically insufficient for achieving broader victories against a planetary capitalism. Rather than seeking temporary and local relief in the various bunkers of folk politics, we must today move beyond these limits. Against ideas of resistance, withdrawal, exit or purity, the task of the left today is to engage the politics of scale and expansion, along with all the risks such a project entails. Doing so requires us to salvage the legacy of modernity and reappraise which parts of the post-Enlightenment matrix can be saved and which must be discarded; for it is only a new form of universal action that will be capable of supplanting neoliberal capitalism.

Without tabulae rasase or miraculous events, it is within the tendencies and affordances of our world today that we must locate the resources from which to build a new hegemony. While this book has focused on full automation and the end of work, there is a broad palette of political options for a contemporary left to choose from. This would mean, most immediately, rethinking classic leftist demands in light of the most advanced technologies. It would mean building upon the post-nation-state territory of ‘the stack’ – that global infrastructure that enables our digital world today.²⁶ A new type of production is already visible at the leading edges of contemporary technology. Additive manufacturing and the automation of work portend the possibility of production based on flexibility, decentralisation and post-scarcity for some goods. The rapid automation of logistics presents the utopian possibility of a globally interconnected system in which parts and goods can be shipped rapidly and efficiently without human labour. Cryptocurrencies and their block-chain technology could bring forth a new money of the commons, divorced from capitalist forms.²⁷

The democratic guidance of the economy is also accelerated by emerging technologies. Famously, Oscar Wilde once said that the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. Increasing economic democracy could require us to devote an overwhelming amount of time to discussions and decisions over the minutiae of everyday life.²⁸ The use of computing technology is essential in avoiding this problem, both by simplifying the decisions to be made and by automating decisions collectively deemed to be irrelevant. For example, rather than deliberating over every aspect of the economy, decisions could instead be made about certain key parameters (energy input, carbon output, level of inequality, level of research investment, and so on).²⁹ Social media – divorced from its drive to monetisation and tendency towards narcissism – could also foster economic democracy by bringing about a new public. New modes of deliberation and participation might emerge from a postcapitalist social media platform. And the perennial problem facing postcapitalist economies – that of how to distribute goods efficiently in the absence of market prices – can also be overcome through computers. Between the early Soviet attempts at economic planning and today, computing power has grown exponentially, to become 100 billion times more powerful.³⁰ The calculation of how to distribute our main productive resources is increasingly viable. Equally, data collection on resources and preferences through ubiquitous computing means that the raw data for running an economy are more readily available than ever before. And all of this could be mobilised towards the implementation of the Lucas Plan on national and global scales – redirecting our economies towards the self-conscious production of socially useful goods like renewable energy, cheap medicine and the expansion of our synthetic freedoms.

This is what a twenty-first-century left looks like. Any movement that wishes to remain relevant and politically potent must grapple with such potentials and developments in our technological world. We must expand our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows. Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power, the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonising the economy, space travel, robot economies – all the traditional touchstones of science fiction – in order to prepare for a day beyond capitalism. Neoliberalism, as secure as it may seem today, contains no guarantee of future survival. Like every social system we have ever known, it will not last forever. Our task now is to invent what happens next.