--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781784780968" library_document_id: "391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2" source_sha256: "6406c4d6b84d37861ca9e03cc6a93f2e23141c4a65bc7e63e26297e5318b2cf9" pdf_physical_page_count: 160 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 100 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2?start=100&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2.md?start=100&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2.md?start=90&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2.md?start=110&limit=10" --- # InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=100 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED This hegemonic strategy is therefore necessary to any project to transform society and the economy. And in many senses, hegemonic politics is the antithesis to folk politics. It seeks to persuade and influence, rather than presuming spontaneous politicisation; it works on multiple scales, rather than just the tangible and local; it sets out to achieve forms of social power that are longlasting, rather than temporary; and it operates in domains that are often not superficially ‘political’ at all, rather than focusing on the most spectacular political mediums, such as street protests. A counterhegemonic strategy would include efforts to transform the common sense of society, revive a utopian social imagination, rethink the possibilities of economics, and eventually repurpose technological and economic infrastructures. None of these steps are sufficient, but they are examples in which concrete action can be taken to build the social and material conditions for a post-work world. They prepare the ground for a moment when transformative change can occur, backed by a mass movement. However, the strategy of counter-hegemony as it has been outlined so far remains abstract. What is needed is some sense of exactly how a counter-hegemonic strategy might gain traction in the real world. Hegemony needs to be constructed, and power needs to be built. We turn next to how such power can be constructed, and who will be building it. This eBook is licensed to some random, random@mailinator.com on 04/01/2016 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=101 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Constructing a people is the main task of radical politics. Ernesto Laclau A strategy may indicate the broad direction to take, but it still leaves open the question of what forces exist to carry it out. Any strategy requires an active social force, mobilised into a collective formation, acting upon the world. But while putting a counter-hegemonic strategy into practice will require the use of power, the left has been both overwhelmed by and systematically rendered averse to the use of power.1 The traditional agents of leftist power (the working class and its associated institutional forms) have wilted under attacks from the right and from their own stagnation. Meanwhile, chastened by the failures of previous attempts at social transformation, many have mobilised behind marginal and defensive folk-political actions.2 Yet building a post-work world will involve large-scale social transformation and require building capacity for the use of power. This chapter argues that, in order to install a new hegemonic order, at least three things will be required: a mass populist movement, a healthy ecosystem of organisations and an analysis of points of leverage.3 The questions of class unity and organisational form are subjects of perennial debate among the left. Class unity is thought to generate networks of solidarity, strength in numbers, confidence and an awareness of common interests. Likewise, organisational strength provides leadership, coordination, stability over time and the concentration of resources. Leverage points are less often discussed, but no less important. These are points of political or economic power that can be used to compel others to adapt to the interests of a particular group.4 The classic tactic of the strike, for instance, aims to disrupt production in order to force the owners to accede to workers’ demands. Without such leverage points, change can only come about when it is in the interests of the powerful. This chapter examines these three elements for building power and outlines some ways forward. What follows is not intended as an exhaustive or sufficient prescription for what should be done, but offers reflections on the limits of historical precedents, and an argument for the significance of the factors listed above for rebuilding the power of the left. Reconstructing this power is probably the most difficult task facing the left today, yet it is an essential task if a post-work world is to emerge from the devastation wrought by neoliberalism. A POPULIST LEFT Perhaps the most important question for building power is the question of who will be the active agent of a post-work project. What social positions will find a post-work society in their interest? The most obvious answer is one we have already seen: the expanding surplus population. Indeed, as workers in developed countries fall back into precarity, and as more and more of the global population is incorporated as ‘free’ labourers under capitalism, the basic proletarian condition is coming to characterise a wider swathe of people. We are all, as Marx argued, virtual paupers. At first glance, these trends therefore seem to support a traditional Marxist narrative, whereby the working class was supposed to achieve a dominant position by incorporating ever greater numbers of people and simplifying its economic position.5 Condensed into increasingly large industrial factories, the working class was forecast to unite in physical terms (sharing space), in terms of its interests (reduced labour, higher wages), and eventually in terms of consciousness (becoming aware of its position as a proletariat). The deskilling of labour would eliminate hierarchies between skilled and unskilled labour, while high demand for labour would mean capital cared little about identity-based divisions (over race, gender, nationality).6 This did occur in some places and at some times. For instance, while the early twentieth century saw the US black working class violently excluded from white unions, after World War II these racial divisions began to break down in many areas.7 Distinctions based on age, sex, skill, nation and income were likewise supposed to fall aside as capitalism progressed.8 Perhaps most importantly, this emerging working class had strategic importance because of its access to a set of leverage points centred on production. Strikes, factory takeovers, slow-downs and similar tactics were all designed to disrupt the production process and force management and capitalists to acquiesce to working-class demands.9 This class – paradigmatically comprised of white, male factory workers – was therefore predicted to become large, homogeneous and powerful, making it the vanguard of a post-capitalist revolution. But this did not happen. The working class fragmented, its organisational structures fell apart, and today ‘there is no longer a class fraction that can hegemonise the class’.10 Chapter 8 Building Power ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=102 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Under the combined pressures of deindustrialisation, the globalisation of production, the rise of service economies, the expansion of precarity, the demise of classic Fordist footholds and the proliferation of diverse identities, the industrial working class has become severely fractured. Across the world, the traditional working class is predominantly marginal in terms of its strength (with a few exceptions in countries such as South Africa and Brazil).11 The Chinese labour movement has some strength, but even here the outsourcing of production to peripheral countries is already working to undermine its power.12 The power of the global working class is today severely compromised, and a return to past strength seems unlikely. As it stands today, the classical revolutionary subject therefore no longer exists; there is only a diverse array of partly overlapping interests and divergent experiences. However, we might question the idea that the industrial working class was ever in a position to transform the world – today’s situation is not so different from the early years of the labour movement. First, the image of worker unity has always been more of an aspirational vision than an achieved reality. From its origins, the proletariat was riven by divisions – between the waged male worker and the unwaged female labourer, between the ‘free’ worker and the unfree slave, between skilled craftsmen and unskilled labourers, between the core and periphery, and between nation-states.13 The tendency to unify was always a limited phenomenon, and these differences persist today, exacerbated under conditions of a globalised division of labour. Perhaps more fundamentally, if deindustrialisation (the automation of manufacturing) is a necessary stage along the path towards a postcapitalist society, then the industrial working class could never have been the agent of change. Its existence was predicated upon economic conditions that would have to be eliminated in the transition to postcapitalism. If deindustrialisation is required for the transition to postcapitalism, then the industrial working class was inevitably going to lose its power in the process – fragmenting and falling apart, just as we have seen in recent decades. Who, then, can be the transformative subject today? Despite the growing size of the surplus population and common immiseration of the proletariat, we must accept that no answer readily presents itself. The breakdown of lines between employed and unemployed, formal and informal, coincides with the decline in a coherent transformative agent. The fragmentation of traditional groups of resistance and revolt and the generalised decomposition of the working class means that the task today must be to knit together a new collective ‘we’. There is no pre-existing group that would embody universal interests or constitute the necessary vanguard of this transformative project – not the industrial worker, not the intellectual labourer and not the lumpenproletariat. How, then, to compose a people in light of the fragmentation of the proletariat?14 In practice, there are a variety of ways to organise such a convergence. As we saw, the classic Marxist approach presupposed that the tendencies of capitalism would heighten the division between classes and lead to the unity of the proletariat. Others have argued for a unity on the basis of generic common interests – biological need, for instance – but minimal commonalities tend to lead to minimal demands.15 By contrast, in the Occupy movements, unity often emerged out of physical proximity – bodies working and living together in camps. Yet such unity often papered over real differences, making it nothing more than a fragile façade. When the physical proximity was destroyed in the dismantling of occupied spaces, unity rapidly collapsed. With the Arab Spring, meanwhile, unity was forged through opposition to shared tyrannical opponents, bringing together a disparate series of groups.16 However, these recent experiences demonstrate that a unity built solely upon opposition tends to break down when the opponent falls. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=103 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The problem for a post-work project is that, despite the underlying commonality of proletarian existence, this provides only a minimal cohesion, which can support a vast range of divergent experiences and interests.17 The challenge facing a transformative politics is to articulate this series of differences into a common project – without simply asserting that class struggle is the only real struggle. Under these conditions, it is no surprise to see that many of the most promising political struggles in recent years have identified themselves as populist movements rather than class movements.18 By ‘populism’, we do not mean a sort of mindless mass movement, or a lowestcommon-denominator revolt, or a movement with any particular political content.19 Populism is instead a type of political logic by which a collection of different identities are knitted together against a common opponent and in search of a new world.20 From the anti-globalisation movements, to Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, numerous Latin American movements, and Occupy across the Western world, these movements have mobilised large cross-sections of society rather than just particular class identities.21 These populist movements have originated out of the frustration of unmet demands. Under normal democratic circumstances, demands are dealt with separately and within existing institutions – for instance, minimum wage increases, unemployment benefits and healthcare provision. Small changes are granted, but institutional arrangements, including society as a whole, are never questioned. In this fashion, existing hegemonies can be reinforced and threats generally modulated effectively. By contrast, a populist movement begins to emerge when these demands – for fair pay, social housing, childcare, and so on – are increasingly blocked. As the leading thinker on political populism, Ernesto Laclau, explains: Once we move beyond a certain point, what were requests within institutions became claims addressed to institutions, and at some stage they became claims against the institutional order. When this process has overflown the institutional apparatuses beyond a certain limit, we start having the people of populism.22 Particular interests become increasingly general in this process, and populism emerges, set resolutely against the existing order. The ‘people’, unlike traditional class groupings, are held together by a nominal unity even in the absence of any conceptual unity. The people is a complex, contested and constructed actor. They name themselves as a coherent group, rather than having any necessary unity of material interests. This helps to explain why, for instance, it was so difficult to pin down the politics of the Occupy movement. The 99 per cent was held together more by a name than by any common politics. This nominal unity is complemented by populism naming the fracture in society and the opposition against which they set themselves.23 In naming an enemy, it becomes possible for a wide range of people to see their interests and demands expressed by the movement. Occupy, for example, named the 1 per cent, Podemos named ‘the caste’, and Syriza named the Troika. As with the naming of the people, the naming of the antagonism has some attachment to empirical facts, but need not be bound by them. The division that Occupy posited between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent, for instance, is an antagonism that mobilised people despite its lack of empirical accuracy.24 The naming of the people and their opposition is a political act, not a scientific statement. Both the people and the antagonism in society are therefore constituted through an act of nomination. This represents a response to the impossibility of simply reading off the antagonism of society from brute historical necessity, in an era where class identities have fragmented and differences proliferated. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=104 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED In order for the ‘people’ of populism to emerge, however, additional elements are necessary. First, one particular demand or struggle must come to stand in for the rest. The Occupy movement, for example, mobilised a range of local, regional and national grievances that became knotted together under the struggle against inequality. In such cases, it is not a particular group which seeks recognition from society, but rather a particular group which comes to speak universally for society. In order to do so, however, it must be seen to embody multiple interests. It must stand not only for its own self-interest but come to actually reflect a broad array of interests.25 For a traditional workingclass movement, common interests would be sufficient to secure the allegiance of all. But in a populist movement, the absence of an immediate unity based on material interests means its coherence is perpetually plagued by a tension between the struggle that has come to stand in for the rest and those other struggles. Populism thus involves a continual negotiation of differences and particularisms, seeking to establish a common language and programme in spite of any centrifugal forces. The difference between a populist movement and folk-political approaches lies in this stance towards differences: whereas the former seeks to build a common language and project, the latter prefers differences to express themselves as differences and to avoid any universalising function. The mobilisation of a populist movement around anti-work politics would require articulating a populism in such a way that a variety of struggles for social justice and human emancipation could see their interests being expressed in the movement. Importantly, anti-work politics provides such resources: for example, it is perhaps the best option for a red-green coalition, insofar as it overcomes the tensions between an economic programme of jobs and growth and an environmental programme of decreased carbon emissions. The post-work project is also an inherently feminist one, recognising the invisible labour carried out predominantly by women, as well as the feminisation of the labour market, and the necessity of providing financial independence for women’s full liberation. Equally, it links up with anti-racist struggles, insofar as black and other minority populations are disproportionately affected by high unemployment and the mass incarceration and police brutality associated with jobless communities. Finally, the post-work project builds upon postcolonial and indigenous struggles with the aim of providing a means of subsistence for the massive informal labour force, as well as mobilising against barriers to immigration.26 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=105 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Articulating the character of a movement that can bring together such differences helps to emphasise the importance of demands to any proper populism. Demands form a key medium for building unity, and must therefore connect in multiple ways with different people.27 Such demands do not presume to know in advance who will be called into action by them, but they allow people to see their own particular interests within them while nevertheless maintaining their differences from each other.28 For example, the demands of an anti-work politics have different meanings for a university student, a single mother, an industrial worker, and those outside the labour force; but in spite of these differences, each of them can find their own interests represented in the call for a post-work society. Mobilising these people together and under the name of a demand then becomes the work of on-theground politics. A movement predicated on a populist logic can therefore give consistency to a series of diffuse grievances and requests, without necessarily negating differences.29 Particular demands are inscribed into a coherent narrative articulating how various demands share a common antagonist. This is why a vision of the future is essential to a proper populism, and it is what many recent populist movements have lacked. Occupy, for instance, never translated the negative moment of insubordination into a positive political project around which the people could be organised. It never combined diverse interests into a project for a better future, remaining at the negative level of rejection and never providing an ‘autonomous focus of subjectivation’.30 In the end, while the post-work project demands that centrality be given to class, it is not sufficient to mobilise only on the basis of class interests. A broad spectrum of society needs to be brought together as an active and transformative force. It is to this need that populism responds. Yet the negotiation of commonality at the level of slogans, demands, signs, symbols and identities cannot remain the primary level on which such politics is conducted. A populist movement also needs to act in and through a series of organisations, as well as aiming to achieve the overturning of neoliberal common sense and create a new one in its place. It must seek to build hegemonic forms of power, in all their diverse forms, both inside and outside the state. ORGANISATIONAL ECOLOGY Organisation is a key mediator between discontent and effective action – it transforms a certain quantity of people into a qualitatively different form of power. As the Occupy movement, the anti-war movement and the anti-globalisation movement have made clear, the problem with the left is not necessarily one of raw numbers. On a purely quantitative level, the left is not noticeably ‘weaker than the right – in terms of its ability to achieve popular mobilisation, the reverse seems to be true. Particularly in times of crisis, the left seems eminently capable of mobilising a populist movement. The problem lies in the next step: how that force is organised and deployed. For folk politics, organisation has meant a fetishistic attachment to localist and horizontalist approaches that often undermine the construction of an expansive counter-hegemonic project.31 Yet this organisational fetishism is one of the most detrimental aspects of recent leftist thought: the belief that if only the proper form of organisation is developed, political success will follow.32 Folk politics is guilty of this, but the same holds for many orthodox positions as well – the range of miracle cures advanced for the decline of the left’s power have included trade unions, vanguards, affinity groups and political parties. In most cases, these organisational forms are advocated without regard for the different strategic terrains they face. Folk politics, for example, takes a particular organisational form built under specific conditions and attempts to transpose it across the entire social and political field. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=106 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Rather than a decontextualized approach to the problem of organisation, we need to think in terms of a healthy and diverse ecosystem of organisations. The simple point to make against organisational fetishism is that a political project requires a division of labour. There are a variety of essential tasks to be carried out in a successful political movement: awareness raising, legal support, media hegemony, power analysis, policy proposals, the consolidation of class memory, and leadership, to name just a few.33 No single type of organisation is sufficient for performing all of these roles and bringing about large-scale political change. We therefore do not seek to promote any single organisational form as the ideal means of embodying transformational vectors. Every successful movement has been the result, not of a single organisational type, but of a broad ecology of organisations. These have operated, in a more or less coordinated way, to carry out the division of labour necessary for political change. In the process of transformation leaders will arise, but there is no vanguard party – only mobile vanguard functions.34 An ecology of organisations means a pluralism of forces, able to positively feedback on their comparative strengths.35 It requires mobilisation under a common vision of an alternative world, rather than loose and pragmatic alliances.36 And it entails developing an array of broadly compatible organisations: The point is to create something more than mere alliance building (where the parts, understood as constituted groupings of people, are supposed to stay the same, only co-operating punctually) and less than a one-size-fits-all solution (e.g. the idea of the party). This is about strategic interventions that can attract both constituted groups and the ‘long tail’ that does not belong to any groups, pitched not as exclusive but as complementary, whose effects can reinforce each other.37 This means that the overarching architecture of such an ecology is a relatively decentralised and networked form – but, unlike in the standard horizontalist vision, this ecology should also include hierarchical and closed groups as elements of the broader network.38 There is ultimately no privileged organisational form. Not all organisations need to aim for participation, openness and horizontality as their regulative ideals. The divisions between spontaneous uprisings and organisational longevity, short-term desires and long-term strategy, have split what should be a broadly consistent project for building a post-work world. Organisational diversity should be combined with broad populist unity. A quick overview of how such an ecology might operate will offer some sense of how these proposals might work together. This can only be highly schematic, given the particularities of any given struggle and the complexity of the issues at hand. Inevitably, an ecosystem of organisations is forged in specific circumstances, with different decisions being made in the face of different political contexts. That said, a broad social movement would be essential to any anti-work politics, affording a wide range of different organisational and tactical compositions. At one end of the spectrum, there are transient bursts of political energy, in the form of riots and spontaneous protests. Urban unrest in America, for instance, was a key motivating factor behind elite support for a basic income in the 1960s.39 Such eruptions may not make intricate demands, but they demand a response. In slightly more organised modes, social movements take on the folk-political approaches seen in recent decades. Operating under principles of direct democracy can be conducive to certain objectives, such as giving people a voice, creating a powerful sense of collective agency and enabling different perspectives to be articulated.40 It can foster the creation of a populist identity and empower people to start to see themselves as a collective. But what these folk-political organisations lacked was the strategic perspective to transform spectacular scenes of protest and broad populist movements into ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=107 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED effective long-term action.41 It is often the ability of other, more long-term institutionalised organisations to hegemonise around the demands, tactics and strategies of relatively ephemeral movements that determines the ultimate effect of their protests. The most successful occupation movements in recent years have been those that have fostered ties to labour movements (in Egypt, for example) and/or to political parties. In Iceland, for instance, the greatest protest successes were achieved when a red-green coalition was voted in after forcing the conservative administration out;42 as we write, Spain is showing the potential that arises when social movements engage in a dual strategy both within and outside the party system. If a major social transformation such as the postwork project is to occur, it will come on the back of a mass movement rather than simply decreed from on high. Populist movements on the street will be one of its essential elements. It has already been hinted at in earlier chapters, but media organisations are an essential part of any emergent political ecology aimed at building a new hegemony. The tasks involved in such a strategy demand a healthy media presence – creating a new common language, giving voice to the people, naming the antagonism, raising expectations, generating narratives that resonate with people and articulating in clear language the grievances we feel. It is these elements that provide the anchors for media narratives to be changed over time. Foundations and journalists are particularly well placed to make efforts at changing media narratives.43 It was no accident that the Mont Pelerin Society included numerous journalists among its members. This communication also has to be achieved in a way that resonates with everyday conversation. The jargon of academics is rightly deemed useless by most people. Leftist media organisations should not shy away from being approachable and entertaining, gleaning insights from the success of popular websites. At the same time, the left has typically focused on creating media spaces outside the mainstream, rather than trying to co-opt existing institutions and leaking more radical ideas into the mainstream. Too often, these news organisations end up simply preaching to the choir, pushing narratives that never escape their own insular echo-chamber. The internet has enabled everyone to have a voice, but it has not enabled everyone to have an audience. Mainstream media sources remain indispensable for this and will continue to do so in the future. Their ability to influence and alter public opinion through framing what is and is not ‘realistic’ remains surprisingly strong. If a counter-hegemonic project is to be successful, it will require an injection of radical ideas into the mainstream, and not just the building of increasingly fragmented audiences outside it. Indeed, one of the key lessons from the US experience with a basic income policy is that the framing of such issues in the media is central to its prospects of success.44 It is for these reasons that existing media organisations constitute a key battleground in the project set out here. Alongside the media, intellectual organisations are indispensable components of any political ecology. These extend from bodies like think tanks, to captive university departments and other educational institutions, through to more loosely organised training and consciousness-raising bodies. But building hegemony does not necessarily mean sending down decrees from vanguard intellectual organisations. It is no accident that it is Gramsci, the key thinker of hegemony, who also struck upon the idea of the ‘organic intellectual’ – the intellectual closely linked to and emerging from key material and economic forces within society.45 Organic intellectuals are participants in practical life, organisers and constructors.46 A properly functioning leftist intellectual infrastructure would operate to support those institutions identified as broadly in line with their own worldviews by participating in them, spreading their work and, where possible, providing resources. In a world of complexity, no one has a privileged view of the totality, and thus a healthy intellectual sphere will involve intellectuals with multiple perspectives. This will combine with on-the-ground inquiries carried out by workers – examining, for instance, the way in which retail logistics function and the potentials for their disruption,47 or the detailed analysis of local power networks as a means to bring about change.48 In addition to that of organic intellectuals, certain kinds of valuable work can only be carried out in specialist bodies that are able to retain a certain distance from the hurly-burly of everyday politics. As the Mont Pelerin Society understood, some intellectual efforts need to be devoted less to immediate and pressing concerns, and more to the development of long-term proposals. These would include such vital endeavours as the development of new ways of organising and understanding the economy, which requires highly technical knowledge and long-term research. But such work always needs to be fed back into the networks of political actors and social narratives to gain its full effect. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=108 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Labour organisations have traditionally been significant forces of social transformation, but today they find themselves on the back foot. At the same time, deeply entrenched habits and inflexible – if not outright corrupt – union leaderships have made the revitalisation of these organisations an uphill battle. Yet they remain indispensable to the transformation of capitalism, and any effort to imagine a new union structure must learn lessons from both the failures of older models and the changing economic conditions facing them today. These include basic things such as enriching the connection between leadership and members, building support across traditional sectoral boundaries (academics supporting cleaners in a university, for example), learning from innovative and often worker-led unions (those around immigrant labourers, for example), radicalising existing unions and building new unions in areas devoid of this organisational lever. In broad terms, the adequacy of a union depends on the alignment of its political form with economic and infrastructural conditions. As we saw in earlier chapters, these conditions are currently defined by the emerging crisis of work. The rise of surplus populations, the return of precarity, the stagnation of wages and the painfully slow recovery of employment all present key challenges for the traditional model of trade unionism. As the work–life distinction breaks down, job security dwindles and rising personal debt lurks in the background, issues around work have effects far beyond the workplace. These shifting social conditions alter the relationship between the union, its members and the wider community. This requires, first of all, a recognition of the social nature of struggle, and the bridging of the gap between the workplace and the community.49 Problems at work spill over into the home and the community, and vice versa. At the same time, crucial support for union action comes from the community, and unions would be best served by recognising their indebtedness to the invisible labour of those outside the workplace.50 These include not only domestic labourers, who reproduce the living conditions of waged workers, but also immigrant workers, precarious workers and the broad array of those in surplus populations who share in the miseries of capitalism. The focus of unions therefore needs to expand beyond supporting only dues-paying members. To be sure, there is a history of worker organisations establishing such connections with the broader community, but today this needs to be made an increasingly explicit goal of union organising. This process can work both ways. For instance, France has seen ‘proxy strikes’ in which workers declare themselves not to be on strike (and therefore continue to get paid), yet allow people to blockade or occupy their workplace.51 In addition, workers’ movements have always relied upon the local community for moral and logistical support, and if solidarity is built up, communities will come out to defend workers against state repression.52 Unions can involve themselves in community issues like housing, demonstrating the value of organised labour in the process.53 Rather than being built solely around workplaces, unions would therefore be more adequate to today’s conditions if they organised around regional spaces and communities.54 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=109 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED In expanding the spatial focus of union organising, local workplace demands open up into a broader range of social demands. As we argued in Chapter 7, this involves questioning the Fordist infatuation with permanent jobs and social democracy, and the traditional union focus on wages and job preservation. An assessment must be made of the viability of these classic demands in the face of automation, rising precarity and expanding unemployment. We believe many unions will be better served by refocusing towards a post-work society and the liberating aspects of a reduced working week, job sharing and a basic income.55 The West Coast longshoremen in the United States represent one successful example of allowing automation in exchange for guaranteeing higher wages and less job cuts (though they also occupy a key point of leverage in the capitalist infrastructure).56 The Chicago Teachers’ Union offers another example of a union going far beyond collective bargaining, and instead mobilising a broad social movement around the state of education in general. Moreover, shifting in a post-work direction overcomes some of the key impasses between ecological movements and organised labour. The deployment of productivity increases for more free time, rather than increased jobs and output, can bring these groups together. Changing the aims of unions and organising community-wide will help to turn unions away from classic – and now failing – social democratic goals, and will be essential to any successful renewal of the labour movement. Lastly, the state remains a site of struggle, and political parties will have a role in any ecology of organisations – particularly if the traditional social democratic parties continue to collapse and enable a new generation of parties to emerge. Ensuring a post-work society for all will require more than just individual workplaces; it demands success at the level of the state as well.57 While parties are frequently denounced for their cynical consent to electoralism and the limits posed by international capital, this changes within an ecology of organisations. Rather than making them the impossible vehicle of revolutionary desires – associated with the hopeless prospect of ‘voting in postcapitalism – they can instead take on the more realistic task of forming the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in terms of political pressure, as well as developing the ability to bring together a widely varied constituency.58 The state can complement politics on the street and in the workplace, just as the latter two can broaden the options for parties. The avoidance of the state – common to so many folkpolitical approaches – is a mistake. Mass movements and parties should be seen as tools of the same populist movement, each capable of achieving different things. At their most general level, parties can integrate various tendencies within a social movement – from reformist to revolutionary – into a common project. While international capital and the inter-state system make radical change virtually impossible from within the state, there are still basic and important policy choices to be made about austerity, housing support, climate change, childcare, demilitarisation of the police and abortion rights. Simply to reject parliamentary politics is to ignore the real advances these policies can make. It takes quite a privileged position to not care about minimum wage regulations, immigration laws, changes to legal support or rulings on abortion. At their best, electoral entities can act as a disruptive force (stalling, publicising controversies, articulating popular outrage), and even act as a progressive force in some situations. This does not imply that social movements should simply be turned into the vote-mobilising wings of political parties. The relationship between parties and social movements should extend far beyond this, into a process of two-way communication. On the one hand, financial support can be given from the party to community initiatives, and various policies – such as laws on public protest – can be amended to facilitate the activities of social movements. In Venezuela, for instance, the state supported the creation of neighbourhood communes as a way to embed socialism in everyday practices.59 On the other hand, resources for new parties can be mobilised collectively – Podemos, for example, got started through crowd-funding €150,000 – and the vitality of the party can be maintained through constant institutionalised negotiations between local movements, party members and central party structures. 60 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/391232a1-3a16-47f8-8595-438b898240a2.md?start=110&limit=10)