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It is important to note that the ‘jobless future’ thesis has been around since the dawn of capitalism. Sure, many occupations have certainly vanished because of mechanisation. But steam power didn’t end the reliance on living labour and AI probably won’t either. What has changed, however, is the way sophisticated technologies are now paving the way for millions of ‘crap jobs’ to flourish. [...] In this respect, technology is probably not the answer when it comes to envisaging a future that is genuinely free of work. We need to tackle the social relationships behind the deployment of automation. Otherwise, any emancipatory stance that favours full automation risks inadvertently supporting what capitalists have desired all along – escaping their dependency on labour, while tapping the riches of a new generation of impoverished and insecure workers. [...]
Why do we work? The obvious answer is ‘to live’. But it’s not our actual job – giving a lecture, selling a car, nursing a patient or flying a passenger jet – that directly secures our life conditions. For sure, as we have already demonstrated, most occupations in the West have drifted far away from the baseline of biological survival, which is partly down to the massive division of labour that has arisen in the post-industrial era. But this disconnect between labour and subsistence is also related to the main medium in which inhabitants of any capitalist society must communicate. Our specific job grants us access to manmade vouchers we call money. We then redeem these so we can then purchase life. How many vouchers we obtain and what we have to do to get them is the political question par excellence in our society and its highly skewed class relations. But it’s this fissure and complex mediation between labour (as an organic/social necessity) versus work (as a cultural artefact) that has been behind employment taking on a life of its own, spiralling out of control, absorbing everything else.
[...] Work today is simply an ideology, designed to lock in a particular class relationship and naturalise the private ownership of the means of production. It does this by falsely evoking the ruse of physiognomic necessity: if we work in order to live, then only a fool would argue against the need to build society around jobs.
[...] The work ethic mutates into something entirely different, much darker, compared to previous eras. It used to help fill in or suture over the emptiness of human vulnerability (an attack) and help a community imagine itself in positive terms. Now, however, salvation and redemption comes to those who submit to work not because it makes them whole again but allows people to see past themselves, to retroactively perceive the void they always were, while simultaneously keeping that nothingness at bay through hard labour. This foregrounding of the disposable nothingness we already were is an inadvertent consequence of blending the ethos of war with the everyday convention of work.
The organic excuse for employment (physical survival), in this sense, almost becomes a distraction from this other existential register and its secret martial law. Max Weber’s analysis of the Protestant ethic and its focus on a ‘calling’ inevitably misses this blend of faith and demise. For us today, work is no longer a vehicle for divine redemption. And it certainly does not save us. It merely forms the space in which existence can be judged by an immense absence or the void concerning the worthlessness of one’s sacrifice. [...]
[...] This is how the work ethic functions today. Occupational roles are detached from their basis in productive utility and work becomes the wandering reference point for everything else. Not a concrete activity but an abstract and diffuse prism through which all of life is myopically evaluated and managed. Overwork is an obvious outcome. So is the way political questions are now so violently reduced to the topic of employment, which almost always yields deeply conservative conclusions. Should we welcome refugees and asylum seekers? No, they’ll steal our jobs. How can we tackle gender inequality? More female CEOs. What is the leading cause of depression and suicide? Joblessness. Want to make America great again? More work. What is the objective of your government? Get Britain working. And the list goes on.
In the end, this economic model is unfeasible since it artificially distils what counts as ‘productive labour time’ down to such a bare minimum that if workers only performed this minuscule task then nothing would get done. Proper labour consists of both (a) the task and (b) the essential, supportive background activity all jobs require (using the restroom). The two can’t be separated in any practical sense. This is also why it is difficult to measure individual productivity – or the marginal product – with simple quantitative metrics in an organisation. Numerically tracking an individual’s performance misses a great deal about their real productivity since it is so intertwined with qualitative, collective processes. [...]
[...] Capitalist work systems are not defined by a numerical threshold, a kind of red line that only when crossed can we reasonably speak about exploitation. No, this is a qualitative relationship. For that reason, the capitalist mode of production by its very nature has always entailed overwork, no matter how much time is spent toiling in the post-modern office. This point is made very well by Kirsty Ross in relation to the anthropological investigations of Pierre Clastres:
[...] What we disparagingly called ‘subsistence economies’, societies where one works to satisfy one’s needs and not to produce a surplus, are to be seen, according to Clastres, as operating according to a refusal of a useless excess of activity. Work, then, appears only with the constitution of a surplus; work begins, properly speaking, as overwork.
Friedman had found the ideological lure he was looking for because an individual’s human capital (including earnings and liabilities) can be owned by nobody else. More importantly, human capital theory provides the ultimate neoclassical retort to the Marxist slogan that workers should seize the means of production. If each person is already their own means of production, then the intractable conflict at the heart of the capitalist labour process must logically dissolve. As it turns out, according to Schultz, all workers are in fact consummate capitalists: ‘labourers have become capitalists not from the diffusion of the ownership of corporation stocks, as folk law would have it, but from the acquisition of knowledge and skill that have economic value’.
It was only inevitable that the so-called ‘sharing economy’ would develop out of these socio-economic conditions. Technology, desperation and the continuing individualisation of culture has seen this industry dramatically expand in the USA, UK and elsewhere. Governments now officially speak about its importance and contribution to a nation’s economic wellbeing. The sharing economy has a list of alternative titles that make it look as if we are entering into a new age of utopian collectivism where amateurish goodwill reigns supreme: the peer economy, networked economy, on-demand economy, collaborative economy, gig economy and so forth. But once again we see a typical feature of wreckage economics behind the trend. Business platforms such as Airbnb ride on the informal economy, opportunistically exploiting the insecurity that has become a norm under crisis capitalism. The once laudable commons-based system of peer production has been commercialised by big business using old school middle-man or rentier tactics, thereby generating profits without production. They say that it’s about saving ‘waste’ (idle cars could be taxies, empty bedrooms could be holiday accommodation, etc.). But it’s really a method of exploiting the societal devastation that has unfolded following the recession. [...]
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[...] Uber, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit and similar firms function through a three-stage process: seek an impoverished sector of society, capture their time and resource (with minimal investment costs) and then present that resource to a customer for a surcharge. This is why some have suggested that the sharing economy is more about access.
I feel so validated
Conventional forms of collective protest have not disappeared regardless of what is currently being said about the rise of this dangerous brand of pan-capitalism that appears to be able to absorb everything – including revolt. And no doubt class is still the central fulcrum for resisting capitalism successfully since it is the only emancipatory category that also seeks to abolish itself when it confronts the source of economic servitude, not just perpetuate its own self-identity, which is why a number of non-class protest movements can happily subsist alongside capitalist hierarchies
kinda obvious in retrospect but worth remembering