Notes

Preface: the putting to work of everything we do

  1     Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 2013), p. 45; emphasis added.

  2     Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 189.

1 Lifework

  1     See Keith Grint and Darren Nixon, The Sociology of Work (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), chpt. 3; a rare engagement with this tradition by anti-work writing has recently appeared in James A. Chamberlain’s discussion of Nancy on désœuvrement in Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), pp. 123–130, which shares some emphasis with the final section of this chapter.

  2     Michel Foucault, History of Madness: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, ed. and trans. by Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 72.

  3     Roy Porter, ‘Foucault’s Great Confinement’, History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990) 47–54 (49).

  4     Foucault, History of Madness, pp. xxxix, 536.

  5     Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 171–173.

  6     Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), chpt. 4.

  7     For the history of the term, see Grint and Nixon, The Sociology of Work, chpt. 9.

  8     Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p. 72.

  9     For examples, see Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (London: Norton, 2014); Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Employment; and with greater historical scope and accordant scepticism, John Urry, What Is the Future? (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).

10    Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), p. 85.

11    Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 21–22.

12    Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

13    Peter Fairbrother and Gavin Poynter, ‘State Restructuring: Managerialism, Marketisation and the Implications for Labour’, Competition and Change 5 (2001) 311–333 (319).

14    Forty per cent of Britons reportedly see their work this way; David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (London: Penguin, 2018).

15    Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 109: ‘immaterial labour, in other words, is today in the same position that industrial labour was 150 years ago, when it accounted for only a small fraction of global production and was concentrated in a small part of the world but nonetheless exerted hegemony over all other forms of production. Just as in that phase all forms of labour and society itself had to industrialise, today labour and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective’.

16    David Frayne, The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (London: Zed Books, 2015), p. 40.

17    Figures from 2017 showed sixty children – mainly Muslim boys – being reported every week, often with no greater justification than having ‘become overly passionate in some of their viewpoints’ or appearing to be experiencing low self-esteem. As Karma Nabulsi describes, expressions of what are referred to as ‘perceived grievances’ with Western foreign policy are also to be reported, pathologising dissent and turning critical political engagement itself into ‘an indicator – indeed evidence – of extremism’; ‘Don’t Go to the Doctor’, London Review of Books 18/05/17 [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n10/karma-nabulsi/dont-go-to-the-doctor].

18    ‘A Guide to the Hostile Environment: The Border Controls Dividing Our Communities – And How We Can Bring Them Down’, Liberty (2018) [https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/sites/default/files/HE%20web.pdf].

19    Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018), p. 36.

20    Chamberlain begins his Undoing Work, Rethinking Community with a similar comment on this work-centredness of radical politics at both ends of the political spectrum (pp. 1–2).

21    Andrea Komlosy, Work: The Last 1000 Years (London: Verso, 2018), p. 180.

22    Robert Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Labourers: Transformation of the Social Question, trans. Richard Boyd (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), p. xiii.

23    Guy Standing, Work after Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2009), p. 43.

24    William Beveridge quoted in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 26.

25    Nancy Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’, New Left Review 100 (2016) 99–117 (111).

26    Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975), p. 26.

27    Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), pp. 13–14.

28    Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: Verso, 2015), p. 105.

29    Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005), pp. 142–143; also, Jill Quadagno, The Colour of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

30    Isabel Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. Aileen Derieg (London: Verso, 2015), p. 42.

31    See J.A. Smith, ‘Fake News Literary Criticism’ in Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses, ed. by Robert Eaglestone (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 118–130.

32    Quoted in Anton Jäger, ‘Why “Post-Work” Doesn’t Work’, Jacobin 19/11/18 [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/11/post-work-ubi-nick-srnicek-alex-williams].

33    Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, praised in Mark Fisher, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings, ed. by Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater, 2018), pp. 769–770.

34    Andy Beckett, When the Lights Go Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), pp. 143–144.

35    Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life after Capitalism (London: Verso, 2016), p. 43.

36    See Smith, ‘Fake News Literary Criticism’ on the examples of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and F.R. Leavis’s writings of the 1960s, collected as Nor Shall My Sword (1972).

37    Frayne, The Refusal of Work, p. 83; for interim contributions, see, for example, Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (New York: Putnam Books, 1997); and Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler (eds.), Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation (New York: Routledge, 1998).

38    Frederick Harry Pitts, ‘Beyond the Fragment: Postoperaismo, Postcapitalism and Marx’s “Notes on Machines”, 45 Years On’, Economy and Society 46:3–4 (2017) 324–345.

39    William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi, Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision for a Post-Neoliberal World (London: Pluto, 2017), chpt. 9.

40    On the necessity of separating the philosophical dimension of the question in this way, see John Danaher, ‘Will Life Be Worth Living in a World Without Work? Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life’, Science and Engineering Ethics 23:1 (2017) 41–64.

41    Frayne, The Refusal of Work, p. 158.

42    André Gorz, Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage Based Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), p. 113.

43    Frayne, The Refusal of Work, p. 180; and elsewhere: ‘people were motivated by a sense of genuine utility: a desire to create, help others, and avoid ethically dubious work. They defined success not in terms of material wealth or social status but in terms of the opportunity to develop their personal capacities … Some used their time to take care of their elderly parents or play with their children’ (p. 155).

44    Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. by Anna Snaith (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 143.

45    Q.D. Leavis, ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite!’, Scrutiny 7 (1938) 203–214.

46    In a remarkably precise inversion of Leavis’s gender conservatism and class radicalism, when Woolf was advised (by the founder of the Fabian Society, Beatrice Webb) to treat her marriage only as a ‘waste paper basket of the emotions’ to clear her mind for her art, her retort was, ‘I daresay an old family servant would do as well’; Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 117.

47    Frayne, The Refusal of Work, p. 40.

48    Frase, Four Futures, pp. 46–47; Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 113–114; Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), chpt. 1; Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (London: Verso, 2019).

49    Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, pp. 113–114.

50    Karl Marx, The German Ideology, trans. by W. Lough, C. Dutt and C.P. Magill (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), p. 54; for contextualisation in Marx’s wider work, see Frase, Four Futures, pp. 38–41.

51    Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 204, 209.

52    Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 50.

53    Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, p. 85.

54    Frayne, The Refusal of Work, p. 36.

55    Owen Hatherley, ‘Work and Non-Work’, Libcom 22/04/13 [https://libcom.org/library/work-non-work-owen-hatherley].

56    Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 2.

57    William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral (London: Penguin, 1995 [1935]), p. 20.

58    Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 3.

59    Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 7.

60    Donald E. Pizer (ed.), American Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

61    Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 4.

62    Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 66.

63    Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 28.

64    Raymond Williams, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’, Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 148–169.

65    Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 41; it is for this reason that Jeremy Gilbert includes Nancy among the thinkers of what he calls ‘the non-fascist crowd’: the communal that does not demand the destruction of the individual, in Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (London: Pluto, 2014), chpt. 5.

66    ‘A singular being has the precise structure of a being of writing: it resides only in communication’. Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 78.

67    Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 29.

68    Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 78.

69    Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans by Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press), p. 158.

2 Work expulsions

  1     See Christopher Ricks, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1988), chpt. 1.

  2     Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death’ in Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings and others (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2005), v. 2, p. 796.

  3     Thanks to Sue Tilley for confirming these details.

  4     In Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 89, 94; also, Ruth Levitas, The Inclusive Society: Social Exclusion and New Labour (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 15.

  5     Adam Perkins, The Welfare Trait (London: Palgrave, 2015).

  6     This is not to minimise the significance of the changes they did effect. For an account of the experience of unemployment and new limitations on unemployment benefit, as well as organised resistance to them, see Brian Marren, We Shall Not Be Moved: How Liverpool’s Working Class Fought Redundancies, Closures and Cuts in the Age of Thatcher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), chpt. 4.

  7     Social Justice Policy Group, Breakthrough Britain: Ending the Costs of Social Breakdown (London: Social Justice Policy Group, 2007), p. 215; intriguingly, the framing of this right-wing text that supplied the blueprint for the 2010 Coalition government’s reforms is one of declining conditionality of benefits from the proposals of 1942 until 1985. In its authors’ framing, 1996 marked the start of an attempt to ‘reintroduce conditionality’.

  8     Gerry Mooney and Alex Law, ‘New Labour, “Modernisation” and Welfare Worker Resistance’ in New Labour/Hard Labour?: Restructuring and Resistance Inside the Welfare Industry, ed. by Gerry Mooney and Alex Law (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2007), 1–22 (p. 4).

  9     Stuart Hall, Selected Politics Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, ed. by Sally Davison, David Featherstone, Michael Rustin and Bill Schwarz (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2017), p. 288.

10    Andrew Wallace, Remaking Community?: New Labour and the Governance of Poor Neighbourhoods (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 23; Levitas, The Inclusive Society, p. 191.

11    Levitas, The Inclusive Society, p. 11.

12    Frank Field MP, ‘Britain’s Underclass: Countering the Growth’ in Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate, ed. by David G. Green (London: IEA, 1996), pp. 57–60 (p. 57): ‘his errors of fact, or unusualness of interpretation should not blind anyone to Murray’s main message’.

13    Richard Seymour, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (London: Verso, 2016), p. 155.

14    Richard Power Sayeed, 1997: The Future That Never Happened (London: Zed Books, 2017); looking back on the occasion of Blair’s departure as Prime Minister, Blairite intellectual Anthony Giddens (on whom more below) conceded that ‘Labour has been coy about its egalitarian aspirations, couching them in the vague language of social exclusion’, with the effect that ‘one could be forgiven for doubting the strength’ of its commitment to social justice; Over to You Mr Brown: How Labour Can Win Again (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 28.

15    Peter Mandelson, Labour’s Next Steps: Tackling Social Exclusion (London: Fabian Society, 1997), p. 35.

16    Alex Callinicos, ‘Social Theory Put to the Test of Politics: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens’, New Left Review 1:236 (1999), 77–102 (86–87).

17    Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 81.

18    David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 69.

19    Wallace, Remaking Community?, p. 20.

20    Tom Slater, ‘The Myth of “Broken Britain”: Welfare Reform and the Production of Ignorance’, Antipode 46:4 (2012) 948–968 (956).

21    Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 129.

22    Andreas Cebulla, Karl Ashworth, David Greenberg, and Robert Walker, Welfare-to-Work: New Labour and the US Experience (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 4.

23    Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia (Winchester: Zero, 2011), p. 49.

24    On ‘work-for-labour’ see Guy Standing, ‘Understanding the Precariat through Labour and Work’, Development and Change 45:5 (2014) 956–980 (963).

25    Slater, ‘The Myth of “Broken Britain”’ 660.

26    For comment on the connection between online platforms and precarious labour, see J.A. Smith, Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism (Winchester: Zero, 2020), pp. 17–18.

27    Although as one piece covering the crime observed, Beasley underestimated the kinds of surrogate intimacies formed under conditions of economic and familial breakdown between the men he appealed to; ‘old high-school friends who chat so many times a day that they need to buy themselves walkie-talkies; a father who texts his almost-grown sons as he goes to bed at night and as he wakes up in the morning’ (Hanna Rosin, ‘Murder by Craigslist’, The Atlantic 09/13 [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/advertisement-for-murder/309435]).

28    Russ Castronovo, ‘Occupy Bartleby’, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 2:2 (2014) 253–272.

29    Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. by P.N. Furbank (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 681.

30    Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Illustrated Short Stories (London: Chancellor Press, 1985, pp. 210, 31, 156.

31    Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 17.

32    Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 6.

33    See, for example, Alexander Cooke, ‘Resistance, Potentiality and the Law: Deleuze and Agamben on “Bartleby”’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 10:3 (2005) 79–89.

34    Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia, p. 79.

35    The latter irony noted in Andrew Knighton, ‘The Bartleby Industry and Bartleby’s Idleness’, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 53:2 (2007) 184–215.

36    Allen Clarke, The Effects of the Factory System (London: Grant Richards, 1899), pp. 51–52, 32.

37    Philip Alston, ‘Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom’ (2018) [https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23881&LangID=E].

38    Danny Dorling, ‘Short Cuts’, London Review of Books 39:22 (2017) [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n22/danny-dorling/short-cuts].

39    Jason Heyes, Mark Tomlinson, and Adam White, ‘Underemployment and Well-Being in the UK before and after the Great Recession’, Work, Employment and Society 31:1 (2017) 71–89 (85).

40    Frayne, The Refusal of Work, p. 38.

41    Jamie Woodcock, Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres (London: Pluto, 2017), pp. 71–72.

42    Frayne, The Refusal of Work, p. 148.

43    Nic Murray, ‘No Crying in the Breakroom’ in The Work Cure: Critical Essays on Work and Wellness, ed. by David Frayne (Monmouth: PCC Books, 2019), pp. 45–60 (p. 53).

44    Quoted in Tim Bale, The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), p. 146; for a gossipy account of the internal forces involved in the direction of Coalition welfare policy, see Matthew D’Ancona, In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government (London: Penguin, 2013), chpt. 8.

45    Alex Hern, ‘Tesco’s Unpaid Labour Shows the Flaw at the Heart of Workfare’, Left Foot Forward 16/02/12 [https://leftfootforward.org/2012/02/tescos-unpaid-labour-shows-the-flaw-at-the-heart-of-workfare]; Ewa Jasiewicz, ‘Poverty Pay Is No Alternative to Workfare: Why We’re Telling Sainsbury’s to Pay Up’, Red Pepper 01/07/12 [https://www.redpepper.org.uk/poverty-pay-workfare]; Martin Dunne, ‘My Job Was Replaced by a Workfare Placement’, Guardian 03/03/12 [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/03/job-replaced-workfare-placement].

46    Patrick Butler, ‘Shelter Warns of Leap in Working Homeless as Families Struggle’, Guardian 23/07/18 [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jul/23/shelter-warns-of-leap-in-working-homeless-as-families-struggle].

47    Michael Adler, ‘A New Leviathan: Benefit Sanctions in the Twenty-first Century’, Journal of Law and Society 43:2 (2016) 195–227 (201–202).

48    ‘4 Out of 10 PIP Claimants Do Not Appeal as It Would Be Too Stressful’, Disability Rights UK 10/09/18 [https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2018/september/4-out-10-pip-claimants-do-not-appeal-it-would-be-too-stressful].

49    Ivor Southwood, ‘The Black Dog’ in The Work Cure: Critical Essays on Work and Wellness, ed. by David Frayne (Monmouth: PCC Books, 2019), pp. 29–44 (p. 39).

50    Alston, ‘Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom’.

51    Del Roy Fletcher and Sharon Wright, ‘A Hand Up or a Slap Down?: Criminalising Benefit Claimants in Britain via Strategies of Surveillance, Sanctions and Deterrence’, Critical Social Policy 38:2 (2017) 323–344 (344).

52    ‘The main effect of imposing sanctions is to eject claimants from the benefits system and to further distance them from the world of work’; Adler, ‘A New Leviathan’ 219.

53    Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2014), p. 36.

54    See also Andrew Gibson, Modernity and the Political Fix (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 3.

55    [International Labour Organisation], Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. Third Edition (2018) [https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_626831.pdf]; the scholar of ‘footloose’ labour in the Third World, Jan Breman, usefully summarises a growing interchangeability of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ employment which will seem familiar after the analysis given here: ‘A vast number of workers are employed in informal conditions within the formal economy, through outsourcing and subcontracting. “Informality” here is simply a way to cheapen the price of labour, to reduce it to a pure commodity, with no provisions for security or sustainable working conditions, let alone for protection against adversity. You buy labour but only for as long as you need it; then you get rid of it again. That is very much the way of the informal economy. Another important reason why the informal economy is so popular among the employers and owners of capital – not to mention the IMF and World Bank – is because it makes collective action very difficult: the workforce is floating, so it’s very hard to organise. If you sell your labour power standing in the morning market for the day, how can you engage in collective action with those around you, with your competitors?’; ‘Interview: A Footloose Scholar’, New Left Review 94 (2015) 45–75 (57–58).

3 We Young-Girls

  1     Laurel Ptak, ‘Wages for Facebook’ [http://wagesforfacebook.com].

  2     Christian Fuchs, Digital Labour and Karl Marx (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 248; for a round-up of associated neologisms and the adoption of these terms within scholarship, see Richard Heeks, ‘Digital Economy and Digital Labour Terminology’, Centre for Development Informatics, working paper 70 (2017).

  3     Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), p. 54.

  4     Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Walls Press and Power of Women Collective, 1975).

  5     This has been noted since in more general terms by scholars like Kylie Jarrett, who suggests that ‘the forms of immaterial and affective labour that are exploited in the economic circuits of the commercial web can be usefully interrogated using frameworks already identified as relevant to understanding domestic labour’s role in capitalism’. Kylie Jarrett, Feminism, Labour and Digital Media (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 3.

  6     Federici, Wages Against Housework, pp. 5, 6.

  7     Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of the International Feminist Movement, 1972–77, trans. by Käthe Roth (London: Pluto, 2017), pp. 63–64.

  8     Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl, trans. by Ariana Reines (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2012), p. 15.

  9     Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. by Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 12–13.

10    Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. by James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 29; followed by Lizzie Bennett’s puncturing joke: ‘I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any’.

11    Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials, pp. 15, 17–18.

12    Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials, p. 17; Paul Sorrentino’s TV series plays off against each other a PR-savvy, commodified Vatican and an American, ultra-conservative millennial pope.

13    Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials, p. 14.

14    Nina Power, ‘She’s Just Not That into You’, Radical Philosophy 177 (2013) [https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/rp177-shes-just-not-that-into-you].

15    Jacqueline Rose, ‘Corkscrew in the Neck’, London Review of Books 37:17 (2015) [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/jacqueline-rose/corkscrew-in-the-neck]. The piece is a review of popular potboilers The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl, to which we might add The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (film version, 2011) and The Girls (2017); on the implications of 2010s popular culture’s fascination with sexually damaged young women, see Alex Dymock, ‘Flogging Sexual Transgression: Interrogating the Costs of the “Fifty Shades Effect”’, Sexualities 16:8 (2013), 880–895; for more positive academic claiming of the term ‘girl’, see the output of the Girlhood Studies interdisciplinary journal, which launched in 2008.

16    Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 65.

17    See Susan Watkins on South American (#NiUnaMenos) and Mediterranean (#NonUnaDiMeno) forms of the movement more successfully focused on solidarity by including campaigns for greater workplace security for the precarious and political agency for sex workers. Susan Watkins, ‘Which Feminisms?’ New Left Review 109 (2018), 5–76, 60–64.

18    With paternalistic pathos and nostalgic sexism, Preliminary Materials declare that ‘the Young-Girl reduces all grandeur to the level of her ass’, (p. 37), ‘the Young-Girl is not here to be criticized’ (p. 39), and most tellingly, ‘there is surely no place where one feels as horribly alone as in the arms of the Young-Girl’ (p. 35).

19    Max Horkheimer, ‘The End of Reason’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9:3 (1941), 366–388 (382).

20    Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 131–149; Nancy Woloch, A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’, 105–108.

21    Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses, trans. by Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 53–59.

22    Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern (Berlin: Insel Verlag, 2013), pp. 45, 54.

23    Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992), pp. 34–35.

24    Davis, Women, Race and Class, pp. 227–229.

25    Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, pp. 159–184, p. 182.

26    Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labor’ in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 133–146 (136).

27    Michael Hardt, ‘Affective Labor’, boundary 2 26:2 (1999), 89–100 (96); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialisation of Human Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012).

28    Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt Thomsen, and Claudia von Werlhof, Women: The Last Colony (London: Zed Books, 1988).

29    Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013), pp. 285, 287, 314.

30    Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, p. 54.

31    Jane Austen, Emma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 235–236.

32    Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (London and New York: Verso, 2019), p. 24.

33    Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women (London: Free Association Books, 1991), p. 161, 166, 171.

34    Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, p. 151.

35    Then-Prime Minister David Cameron announced the Leveson Inquiry in the same month as Winehouse’s death; there were unresolved reports that Winehouse’s own phone was among those hacked by journalists.

36    ‘Director Asif Kapadia on His Moving New Amy Winehouse Documentary’, Vogue 07/07/15 [http://www.vogue.com/article/amy-winehouse-documentary-director-asif-kapadia].

37    Diane Charlesworth, ‘Performing Celebrity Motherhood on Twitter: Courting Homage and (Momentary) Disaster – the Case of Peaches Geldof’, Celebrity Studies 5:4 (2014), 508–510 (509).

38    We argued as much in ‘For Peaches’ in EDA Collective, Twerking to Turking: Everyday Analysis volume 2, ed. by Alfie Bown and Daniel Bristow (Winchester: Zero, 2015), pp. 87–88.

39    Robert Payne, The Promiscuity of Network Culture: Queer Theory and Digital Media (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 71.

40    Fleur de Force, ‘Internet Famous: Fleur de Force’, Channel 4, 2015.

41    See Theresa Senft, ‘Microcelebrity and the Branded Self’ in A Companion to New Media Dynamics, ed. by John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013), pp. 346–354.

42    Adorno, The Culture Industry, pp. 189, 191.

43    See Tiziana Terranova, ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’, Social Text 18:2 (2000) 33–58; Julian Kücklich, ‘FCJ-025 Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry’, The Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005) [http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-025-precarious-playbour-modders-and-the-digital-games-industry].

44    ‘Mother Holle’ in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. by Jack Zipes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 81–82.

45    Gaby Dunn, ‘Get Rich or Die Vlogging: The Sad Economics of Internet Fame’, Fusion 14/12/15 [http://fusion.net/story/244545/famous-and-broke-on-youtube-instagram-social-media/].

46    Terranova, ‘Free Labour’, 53.

47    For the perils of the erosion of cultural ‘gatekeepers’ in the online economy, Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist (London: Penguin, 2013), pp. 173–180; also Andrew Ross, Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labour in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press, 2009), chpt. 1.

48    Alice Marwick has argued, along those lines, that social media technologies have enabled individuals to ‘inhabit a popular subjectivity that resembles that of the conventionally famous’. Alice Marwick, ‘You May Know Me from YouTube: (Micro)-Celebrity in Social Media’ in A Companion to Celebrity, ed. by P.D. Marshall and S. Redmond (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015).

49    Anne Helen Petersen, ‘The Real Peril of Crowdfunding Healthcare’, 10/03/17 [https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/real-peril-of-crowdfunding-healthcare?utm_term=.ofvQJ1nM0#.urLaJ8xVr].

50    Luke O’Neil, ‘Go Viral or Die Trying’, 27/03/17 [http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a54132/go-viral-or-die-trying/].

51    ‘Amid Humanitarian Funding Gap, 20 Million People across Africa, Yemen at Risk of Starvation, Emergency Relief Chief Warns Council’ 10/03/17 [https://www.un.org/press/en/2017/sc12748.doc.htm].

52    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, trans. by Franklin Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 60–61.

53    Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 165–255.

4 Three ways to want things after capitalism

  1     Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 24.

  2     See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 135–159; Jacques Derrida shows that the full magnitude of Rousseau’s problem with history appears in The Essay on the Origin of Languages, where Rousseau’s efforts only show that it is as impossible to distinguish a purely virtuous human before the fall into writing, technology, and civilisation, as it is to distinguish absolutely the first human from his ancestors. Jacques Derrida, ‘Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the Origin of Languages’ in Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 165–316.

  3     Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 24.

  4     See de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 137: ‘Granted that the mode of being of the state of nature and the mode of being of the present, alienated state of man are perhaps radically incompatible, with no road connecting the one to the other – the question remains why this radical fiction … continues to be indispensable for any understanding of the present’.

  5     E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon, 1977), p. 791.

  6     J.M. Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ in Essays in Persuasion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 321–332.

  7     Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. by Todd Dufresne and trans. by Gregory C. Richter (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview), p. 87.

  8     Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 57; Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. by Michael Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 488.

  9     Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Doubleday, 1923) [https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/afterword.htm].

10    Kate Soper, ‘Other Pleasures: The Attractions of Post-Consumerism’ in Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias: Socialist Register 2000, ed. by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Rendlesham: Merlin, 1999), pp. 115–132 (p. 117).

11    Kate Soper, ‘Marxism and Morality’, New Left Review, 163 (1987), 101–113 (106).

12    Aaron Bastani, ‘We Don’t Need More Austerity: We Need Luxury Communism’, Vice 11/06/15 [https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ppxpdm/luxury-communism-933]; Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2019) appeared too late for us to examine Bastani’s updated ideas in detail.

13    See Robert Phelps, ‘Songs of the American Hobo’, The Journal of Popular Culture 17:2 (1983) 1–21 (6–8).

14    Thus Philip Cunliffe’s scornful characterisation of FALC in Lenin Lives!: Reimagining the Russian Revolution, 1917–2017 (Alresford: Zero, 2017), as ‘the future as dreamt by under-employed, work-shy graduate students who imagine that all of life could be spent battering away on a laptop in an over-priced café in east London’ (p. 120).

15    For an excellent summary of current positions on ‘de-growth’ and the as yet unresolved debate on whether variations on a Green New Deal would result in a contraction or a considerable expansion of living standards, see Lola Seaton, ‘Green Questions’, New Left Review 115 (2019) 105–129.

16    See Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, chpt. 8.

17    Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 11–12; on the involvement of major meat corporations in the development of new vegan foods, see Amelia Tait, ‘How Veganism Went from a Fringe Food Cult to a Multibillion-Pound Industry’, New Statesman 20/03/19 [https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/03/how-veganism-went-fringe-food-cult-multibillion-pound-industry].

18    Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, pp. 176–177, 80.

19    Corey Pein, Live Work Work Work Die (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), pp. 22, 23.

20    Smith, Other People’s Politics, pp. 17–18.

21    Pein, Live Work Work Work Die, p. 68.

22    On the notion that the present stage of capitalism already represents a ‘communism of capital’, see Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 111.

23    To adopt Srnicek’s taxonomy, the platforms we primarily refer to here are ‘advertising platforms’, although our argument about their regressive logic applies in varying ways to all uses of aggregated data; Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, pp. 50–60.

24    Nolen Gertz, Technology and Nihilism (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), p. 98.

25    Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019), pp. 80–81.

26    ‘The aim for Facebook is to make it so that users never have to leave their enclosed ecosystem: news stories, videos, audio, messaging, email, and even buying consumer goods have all been progressively folded back into the platform itself’; Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, p. 110; on the impossibility of avoiding using the services of the ‘Big 5’ tech companies, see Kashmir Hill’s series of articles for Gizmodo, written over January and February, 2019 [https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five].

27    From the perspective of antitrust law (governments have been more lenient to the monopoly-seeking of digital companies than they would be to any other kind), civil liberties (Google’s rise has been inextricable from its collaboration with the growth of the US security state since 9/11), and democracy (the alleged emergence of ‘filter bubbles’ striating the opinions we access), to practical questions of the perverse outcomes of the removal of human decision-making.

28    We decline for now to consider the extent to which our critique could be applied to the assumptions about desire in neoliberalism generally, or even capitalism as such; but an important interlocutor text for answering that question would be Evgeny Morozov, ‘Digital Socialism?’, New Left Review 116/117 (2019) 33–67, especially the conclusion (36–42) that data-based transactions in fact do not constitute a substantially new kind of capitalism.

29    In 2016, then-UK Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, received criticism for recommending patients ease the pressure on the austerity-struck NHS by doing just that: ‘if you’re worried about a rash your child has, an online alternative – where you look at photographs and say “my child’s rash looks like this one” – may be a quicker way of getting to the bottom of whether this is serious or not’; Ashley Cowburn, ‘Jeremy Hunt’s Advice to Parents “Could Put Lives at Risk”, Doctors Say’, Independent 31/01/16 [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/jeremy-hunt-s-advice-to-parents-could-put-lives-at-risk-doctors-say-a6844936.html].

30    Nolen Gertz, Technology and Nihilism, p. 127.

31    Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques Alain-Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter (London: Norton, 1992), pp. 14, 230, 241.

32    Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (London: Verso, 1994), p. 103.

33    Quoted, Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 91.

34    Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 147.

35    Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).

36    Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 132.

37    It is worth noting that the working opposition we are obliged to adopt between the pleasure principle and jouissance is – as one might expect from a thinker as baroque as Lacan – not as simple as first appears. A decade after the Ethics, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Seminar 17), jouissance and its opposed category have come to be formulated as much more interrelated phenomena, signalled by a preference for referring to the latter as ‘surplus jouissance’. A kind of desire ‘put to work’ for capitalism, the potential of ‘surplus jouissance’ as a concept for the critique of advertising platforms has yet to be explored, although useful applications to contemporary capitalism more generally include Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (London: Verso, 2015); and Stijn Vanheule, ‘Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis’, Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016), 1–14.

38    For a critical account of attempts to represent data aggregation as, on the contrary, a ‘prophetic’ kind of technology, see David Beer, The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power, Perception (London: Sage, 2018), pp. 27–29.

39    Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018).

40    For ‘bad virality’, a term reportedly used by YouTube employees about questionable content the algorithms nonetheless recognise as profitable and desirable, see Mark Bergen, ‘YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant’, Bloomberg 02/04/19 [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-02/youtube-executives-ignored-warnings-letting-toxic-videos-run-rampant]; for a case study of the bizarre and sometimes disgusting material produced by algorithms (and by – what amounts to the same thing – humans posing as algorithms) in the already highly-automated world of children’s YouTube, see James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018), chpt. 9.

41    See Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London: Routledge, 2000), chpt. 1; for a classic example of the extension of this venerable genre into the critique of digital culture, see Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

42    See Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 68.

43    Andrea Long Chu, ‘On Liking Women’, n+1 30 (2018) [https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/].

44    See, for example, ‘Female Erasure’, femaleerasure.com, as pointed out by Lewis in Full Surrogacy Now, p. 53.

45    Andrea Long Chu, ‘My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy: And It Shouldn’t Have To’, New York Times 24/11/18 [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html].

46    Amia Srinivasan, ‘Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?’, London Review of Books 40:6, 22/03/18 [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex].

47    Where Bastani proposes communism could flourish even without the expunging of our carnivorous and capitalist desires, Chu insists on the right to gender transition, even if it leaves her present unhappiness intact.

48    Trebor Scholz, ‘How Platform Cooperativism Can Unleash the Network’ in ‘Ours to Hack and to Own’: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, ed. by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider (New York and London: Or Books, 2016), pp. 20–26; Morozov, ‘Digital Socialism?’.

49    Molly Fischer, ‘The Great Awokening: What happens to Culture in an Era of Identity Politics?’ The Cut 1/10/18 [https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/pop-cultures-great-awokening.html].

50    To indicate the extremes on the basis of examples from popular film, on the one hand, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Boot Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) have offered genuine innovations in dark comedy as a form for anti-racist and anti-capitalist art; on the other, banal superhero blockbusters Wonder Woman (2017) and Captain Marvel (2019) have been widely celebrated for their supposed revelatory feminism.

51    Producer Dan Harmon’s humble and self-reflective public apology for his sexual harassment of former employee Megan Ganz (who described it as ‘cathartic … like the antidote to a poison’) might be contrasted with talk show host Meghan McCain’s attempt to usurp the role of spokeswoman for American Jews to condemn Representative Ilhan Omar’s comments on the financing of the Pro Israel lobby as anti-Semitic. See Dan Harmon, ‘Don’t Let Him Wipe or Flush’, Harmontown podcast (2018), Megan Ganz, This American Life podcast, episode 674 (2019). For Meghan McCain, see Eli Valley’s brilliant cartoon and commentary in Shuja Haider, ‘Eli Valley Is Not Sorry’ March 2019, popula.com.

52    ‘Clinton in Nevada’, The Washington Post 13/02/16 [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/13/clinton-in-nevada-not-everything-is-about-an-economic-theory/?utm_term=.be869ec17587].

53    Wendy Brown, ‘Wounded Attachments’, Political Theory 21.3 (1993) 390–410 (395).

54    Laboria Cuboniks, ‘Xenofeminist Manifesto’ [laboriacuboniks.net].

55    Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (London: Polity, 2018), p. 30.

56    Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, pp. 382–400.

57    The Point podcast, episode 3 (May 2018).

58    Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, p. 28.

59    Frase, Four Futures.

Epilogue: share your limits

  1     Frederick Engels, ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), pp. 358–368 (359).

  2     Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, Volume 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. by Richards Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 113. As Marx notes on the topic of spinning machines: ‘technology reveals … the direct process of the production of [man’s] life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations’. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 493 n. 4.

  3     Engels, ‘The Part Played by Labour’, p. 367.

  4     Engels, ‘The Part Played by Labour’, p. 366.

  5     Engels, ‘The Part Played by Labour’, pp. 367, 368.

  6     Jason Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).

  7     David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 85.

  8     Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, p. 180.

  9     Tiziana Terranova, ‘Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital, and the Automation of the Common’ 08/03/14, euronomade.info.

10    Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, p. 151; Jean- Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 41.

11    Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 298; Nancy, Inoperative Community, p. 31.

12    Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013); Gilbert, Common Ground: Democracy and Individuality, p. 216; Walter Benjamin, ‘Baudelaire [Convolute J]’ in The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 360–361.