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# InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary
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The second related feature of UBI is that it transforms precarity and unemployment from a state of insecurity to a state of voluntary flexibility. It is often forgotten that the initial push for flexible labour came from workers, as a way of demolishing the constraining permanency of traditional Fordist labour.112 The repetitiveness of a nine-to-five job, combined with the tediousness of most work, is hardly an appealing prospect for a life-long career. The demands of care labour often require a flexible approach as well, further undermining the appeal of traditional jobs. Marx himself invokes the liberating aspects of flexible labour in his famous claim that communism ‘makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic’.113 In the face of these desires for flexibility, capital adapted and coopted them into a new form of exploitation. Today, flexible labour simply presents itself as precarity and insecurity, rather than freedom. The UBI responds to this generalisation of precarity and transforms it from a state to be feared back into a state of liberation.
Third, a basic income would necessitate a rethinking of the values attributed to different types of work. Given that workers would no longer be forced to take a job, they could instead simply reject jobs that paid too little, required too much work, offered too few benefits, or were demeaning and undignified. Low-waged work is often crass and disempowering, and under a programme of UBI it is unlikely that many would want to undertake it. The result would be that hazardous, boring and unattractive work would have to be better paid, while more rewarding, invigorating and attractive work would be less well paid. In other words, the nature of work would become a measure of its value, not merely its profitability.114 The outcome of this revaluation would also mean that, as wages for the worst jobs rose, there would be new incentives to automate them. UBI therefore forms a positive-feedback loop with the demand for full automation. On the other hand, a basic income would not only transform the value of the worst jobs, but also go some way towards recognising the unpaid labour of most care work. In the same way that the demand for wages for housework recognised and politicised the domestic labour of women, so too does UBI recognise and politicise the generalised way in which we are all responsible for reproducing society: from informal to formal work, from domestic to public work, from individual to collective work. What is central is not productive labour, defined in either traditional Marxist or neoclassical terms, but rather the more general category of reproductive labour.115 Given that we all contribute to the production and reproduction of capitalism, our activity deserves to be remunerated as well.116 In recognising this, the UBI indicates a shift from remuneration based upon ability to remuneration based upon basic need.117 All the genetic, historical and social variations that make effort a poor measure of a person’s worth are rejected here, and instead people are valued simply for being people.
Finally, a basic income is a fundamentally feminist proposal. Its disregard for the gendered division of labour overcomes some of the biases of the traditional welfare state predicated upon a male breadwinner.118 Equally, it recognises the contributions of unwaged domestic labourers to the reproduction of society and provides them with an income accordingly. The financial independence that comes with a basic income is also crucial to developing the synthetic freedom of women. It enables experimentation with different forms of family and community structure that are no longer bound to the model of the privatised nuclear family.119 And financial independence can reconfigure intimate relationships as well: one of the more unexpected findings of experiments with UBI has been that the divorce rate tended to rise.120 Conservative commentators jumped on this as proof of the demand’s immorality, but higher divorce rates are easily explained as women gaining the financial means to leave dysfunctional relationships.121 A basic income can therefore enable easier experimentation with the family structure, more possibilities for the provision of childcare and an easier transformation of the gendered division of labour. Moreover, unlike the demand for ‘wages for housework’ in the 1970s, the demand for UBI promises to break out of the wage relation rather than reinforce it.
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While a universal basic income may appear economically reformist, its political implications are therefore significant. It transforms precarity, it recognises social labour, it makes class power easier to mobilise, and it extends the space in which to experiment with how we organise communities and families. It is a redistribution mechanism that transforms production relations. It is an economic mechanism that changes the politics of work. And in terms of class struggle, there is little to distinguish full employment from full unemployment: both tighten the labour market, give power to labour, and make it more difficult to exploit workers. Full unemployment has the added advantages of not being reliant upon the gendered division of labour between the household and the formal economy, of not keeping workers chained to the wage relation, and of allowing workers autonomy over their lives. For all of these reasons, the classic social democratic demand for full employment should be replaced with the future-orientated demand for full unemployment.
THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY
What are the impediments to implementing a basic income? While the problem of funding UBI appears immense, most research in fact suggests that it would be relatively easy to finance through some combination of reducing duplicate programmes, raising taxes on the rich, inheritance taxes, consumption taxes, carbon taxes, cutting spending on the military, cutting industry and agriculture subsidies, and cracking down on tax evasion.122 The most difficult hurdles for UBI – and for a postwork society – are not economic, but political and cultural: political, because the forces that will mobilise against it are immense; and cultural, because work is so deeply ingrained into our very identity. We will examine the political obstacles in the next two chapters, but turn to the cultural ones here.
One of the most difficult problems in implementing a UBI and building a post-work society will be overcoming the pervasive pressure to submit to the work ethic.123 Indeed, the failure of the United States’ earlier attempt to implement a basic income was primarily because it challenged accepted notions about the work ethic of the poor and unemployed.124 Rather than seeing unemployment as the result of a deficient individual work ethic, the UBI proposal recognised it as a structural problem. Yet the language that framed the proposal maintained strict divisions between those who were working and those who were on welfare, despite the plan effacing such a distinction. The working poor ended up rejecting the plan out of a fear of being stigmatised as a welfare recipient. Racial biases reinforced this resistance, since welfare was seen as a black issue, and whites were loath to be associated with it. And the lack of a class identification between the working poor and unemployed – the surplus population – meant there was no social basis for a meaningful movement in favour of a basic income.125 Overcoming the work ethic will be equally central to any future attempts at building a post-work world. As we saw in Chapter 3, neoliberalism has established a set of incentives that compel us to act and identify ourselves as competitive subjects. Orbiting around this subject is a constellation of images related to self-reliance and independence that necessarily conflict with the programme of a post-work society. Our lives have become increasingly structured around competitive self-realisation, and work has become the primary avenue for achieving this.126 Work, no matter how degrading or low-paid or inconvenient, is deemed an ultimate good. This is the mantra of both mainstream political parties and most trade unions, associated with rhetoric about getting people back into work, the importance of working families, and cutting welfare so that ‘it always pays to work’. This is matched by a parallel cultural effort demonising those without jobs. Newspapers blare headlines about the worthlessness of welfare recipients, TV shows sensationalise and mock the poor, and the ever looming figure of the welfare cheat is continually evoked. Work has become central to our very self-conception – so much so that when presented with the idea of doing less work, many people ask, ‘But what would I do?’ The fact that so many people find it impossible to imagine a meaningful life outside of work demonstrates the extent to which the work ethic has infected our minds.
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While typically associated with the protestant work ethic, the submission to work is in fact implicit in many religions.127 These ethics demand dedication to one’s work regardless of the nature of the job, instilling a moral imperative that drudgery should be valued.128 While originating in religious ideas about ensuring a better afterlife, the goal of the work ethic was eventually replaced with a secular devotion to improvement in this life. More contemporary forms of this imperative have taken on a liberal-humanist character, portraying work as the central means of self-expression. 129 Work has come to be driven into our identity, portrayed as the only means for true self-fulfilment.130 In a job interview, for instance, everyone knows the worst answer to ‘Why do you want this job?’ is to say ‘Money’, even as it remains the repressed truth. Contemporary service work heightens this phenomenon. In the absence of clear metrics for productivity, workers instead put on performances of productivity – pretending to enjoy their job or smiling while being yelled at by a customer. Working long hours has become a sign of devotion to the job, even as it perpetuates the gender pay gap.131 With work tied so tightly into our identities, overcoming the work ethic will require us overcoming ourselves.
The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward. The epithets thrown at homeless beggars, the demonization of those on the dole, the labyrinthine system of bureaucracy set up to receive benefits, the unpaid ‘job experience’ imposed upon the unemployed, the sadistic penalisation of those who are seen as getting something for free – all reveal the truth that for our societies, remuneration requires work and suffering. Whether for a religious or secular goal, suffering is thought to constitute a necessary rite of passage. People must endure through work before they can receive wages, they must prove their worthiness before the eyes of capital. This thinking has an obvious theological basis – where suffering is thought to be not only meaningful, but in fact the very condition of meaning. A life without suffering is seen as frivolous and meaningless. This position must be rejected as a holdover from a now-transcended stage of human history. The drive to make suffering meaningful may have had some functional logic in times when poverty, illness and starvation were necessary features of existence. But we should reject this logic today and recognise that we have moved beyond the need to ground meaning in suffering. Work, and the suffering that accompanies it, should not be glorified.
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What is needed, therefore, is a counter-hegemonic approach to work: a project that would overturn existing ideas about the necessity and desirability of work, and the imposition of suffering as a basis for remuneration. The media is already changing the conditions of possibility – positioning UBI as not only a possible solution, but increasingly as a necessary solution to problems of technological unemployment. These hegemonic trends should be amplified. The dominance of the work ethic also runs up against the changing material basis of the economy. Capitalism demands that people work in order to make a living, yet it is increasingly unable to generate enough jobs. The tensions between the value accorded to the work ethic and these material changes will only heighten the potential for transformation of the system. Actions to make precarity and joblessness an increasingly visible political problem would go some way to generating the support for a post-work society. (In the same way that Occupy raised awareness of inequality, and UK Uncut highlighted tax evasion.)132 Perhaps most importantly, there is already a widespread hatred for jobs that can be tapped into. Much as neoliberal hegemony co-opted real desires and garnered active consent, so too must any post-work hegemony find its active force in the real desires of people. The widespread demand that others adopt the work ethic is matched only by the disdain we feel for our own jobs. Today, across the world, only 13 per cent of people say they find their jobs engaging.133 Physically degraded, mentally drained and socially exhausted, most workers find themselves under immense amounts of stress in their jobs. For the vast majority of people, work offers no meaning, fulfilment or redemption – it is simply something to pay the bills. Those already excluded from jobs should not be fighting for inclusion in a society of work and labour, but rather be building the conditions to reproduce their lives outside of work. Changing the cultural consensus about the work ethic will mean taking actions at an everyday level, translating these medium-term goals into slogans, memes and chants. It will require undertaking the difficult and essential work of workplace organizing and campaigning – of mobilising people’s passions in order to topple the dominance of the work ethic. The success of these efforts will be clear when media discussions about automation shift from fearmongering over lost jobs to celebrations of the freedom from drudgery.134
THE REALM OF FREEDOM
A twenty-first-century left must seek to combat the centrality of work to contemporary life. In the end, our choice is between glorifying work and the working class or abolishing them both.135 The former position finds its expression in the folk-political tendency to place value upon work, concrete labour and craftwork. Yet the latter is the only true postcapitalist position. Work must be refused and reduced, building our synthetic freedom in the process.136 As we have set out in this chapter, achieving this will require the realisation of four minimal demands:
1. Full automation
2. The reduction of the working week
3. The provision of a basic income
4. The diminishment of the work ethic
While each of these proposals can be taken as an individual goal in itself, their real power is expressed when they are advanced as an integrated programme. This is not a simple, marginal reform,
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but an entirely new hegemonic formation to compete against the neoliberal and social democratic options. The demand for full automation amplifies the possibility of reducing the working week and heightens the need for a universal basic income. A reduction in the working week helps produce a sustainable economy and leverage class power. And a universal basic income amplifies the potential to reduce the working week and expand class power. It would also accelerate the project of full automation: as worker power rose and as the labour market tightened, the marginal cost of labour would increase as companies turned towards machinery in order to expand.137 These goals resonate with each other, magnifying their combined power. And a new post-work hegemony would be resistant to reversion, having created a mass constituency benefiting from its continuation.138 The ambition here is to take back the future from capitalism and build ourselves the twenty-first-century world we want. It is to provide the time and money that are central to any meaningful conception of freedom. The traditional battle cry of the left, demanding full employment, should therefore be replaced with a battle cry demanding full unemployment. But let us be clear: there is no technocratic solution, and there is no necessary progression into a post-work world. The struggles for full automation, a shorter working week, the end of the work ethic and a universal basic income are primarily political struggles. The post-work imaginary generates a hyperstitional image of progress – one that aims to make the future an active historical force in the present. The struggles that such a project will face require that the left move past its folk-political horizon, rebuild its power and adopt an expansive strategy for change. It is to these issues that we now turn.
This eBook is licensed to some random, random@mailinator.com on 04/01/2016
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The key is to succeed in making ‘common sense’ go in a direction of change.
Pablo Iglesias
A post-work society holds a potentially broad appeal and would materially improve the lives of most – but this is no guarantee of it coming about. Media discussions of basic income and automation today often seem to assume the benevolence of elites, the political neutrality of technology and the inevitability of a post-work society. Yet an array of powerful forces is invested in the continuation of the status quo, and the left has been devastated over the past few decades. Misery remains more likely than luxury. Under current conditions, automation is likely to cause more unemployment, with the benefits of new technologies going to their wealthy owners. Any free time we get will be eliminated with the production of dreary new jobs or the extension of precarious existence. And if a basic income were achieved tomorrow, it would almost certainly be set below poverty levels and simply act as a handout to companies. To achieve a meaningful post-work society therefore requires changing the present political conditions. In turn, this requires the left to face squarely up to the dismal situation before it: trade unions lying in ruin, political parties rendered into neoliberal puppets, and a waning intellectual and cultural hegemony. State and corporate repression of the left has significantly intensified in recent decades, legal changes have made it more difficult to organise, generalised precarity has made us more insecure, and the militarisation of policing has rapidly gathered speed.1 And beyond this lies the fact that our inner lives, our social world and our built environment are organised around work and its continuation. The shift to a post-work society, much like the shift to a decarbonised economy, is not just a matter of overcoming a few elite interests. More fundamentally, it is a matter of transforming society from the ground up. An engagement with the totality of power and capital is inevitable, and we should be under no illusions about the difficulties facing such a project. If full transformational change is not immediately possible, our efforts must be directed towards cracking open those spaces of possibility that do exist and fostering better political conditions over time. We must first reach a space within which more radical demands can be meaningfully articulated, and must therefore prepare for the long term if we wish to alter the terrain of politics substantially.
This ought not to be entirely unexpected. Capitalism did not emerge all at once, but instead percolated to a position of dominance over the course of centuries.2 A large number of components had to be put in place: landless labourers, widespread commodity production, private property, technical sophistication, centralisation of wealth, a bourgeois class, a work ethic, and so on. These historical conditions are the components that enabled the systemic logic of capitalism eventually to gain traction in the world. The lesson here is that, just as capitalism relied upon the accumulation of a particular set of components, so too will postcapitalism. It will neither emerge all at once nor in the wake of some revolutionary moment. The task of the left must be to work out the conditions for postcapitalism and to struggle to build them on a continually expanding scale.
This chapter therefore begins from the premise that the contemporary left is in a dire situation and that any transformative project will take time. We limit our analysis here largely to Western capitalist democracies, with their peculiar apparatuses of political and economic power. We will mostly leave aside the immense (and immensely important) regions of the rest of the world.3 However, it is worth reiterating that the problems of automation and surplus populations are global in nature, and the grounds for post-work are flourishing around the world – as demonstrated by recent experiments with basic incomes in India and Namibia, the surge in industrial automation across the most populous regions of the world, and the spontaneous emergence of movements against work in numerous countries. Though these dynamics are global, any political project to transform this situation will necessarily need to respond to particular conditions on the ground. While certain core principles will be translatable between contexts, they will need to be realised differently under different circumstances. With these qualifications in mind, how can a better future be built? The classic Leninist strategy of building dual power with a revolutionary party and overthrowing the state is obsolete.4 Proponents of the Bolshevik Revolution model appear more useful as historical reenactors than as guides for contemporary politics. Likewise, the recent history of revolutions – from the Iranian Revolution to the Arab Spring – has simply led to some combination of theocratic authoritarianism, military dictatorship and civil war. The electoral reformist approach is equally a failure. The idea of voting in a new world mutated into a convivial elite consensus during the postwar era and became ensconced within neoliberal ideology in recent decades. At its best, such reformism is doomed simply to ameliorate capitalism and act as a type of politically mediated homeostatic system. And as the latest cycle of struggles has shown, the folk-political approach of prioritising various forms of immediacy has failed to transform society. Piecemeal efforts, defensive struggles, withdrawals and prefigurative pockets of activity have been largely incapable of stemming the tide, let alone gaining ground on global capitalism. Equally, it remains insufficient simply to posit that progress will be worked out in practice or that the masses will spontaneously create a better world.5 While there are undoubtedly elements of luck and unpredictability in any struggle, the difficulty of building a new world demands that strategic thought be carried out in advance. Our efforts must be organised strategically along broad lines, rather than dissipating into a series of partial and disconnected achievements. As modernity asserts, progress towards a better future comes on the back of deliberate reflection and conscious action.
Chapter 7
A New Common Sense
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Given the limits of these other approaches, we argue that the best way forward is a counterhegemonic strategy. This is a strategy that is adaptable from positions of weakness, is scalable from the local to the global, and recognises the hold that capitalism has over every aspect of our lives, from our most intimate desires to the most abstract financial flows. A counter-hegemonic strategy entails a project to overturn the dominant neoliberal common sense and rejuvenate the collective imagination. Fundamentally, it is an attempt to install a new common sense – one organised around the crisis of work and its effects on the proletariat. In this, it involves preparatory work for moments when full-scale struggle erupts, transforming our social imagination and reconfiguring our sense of what is possible. It builds up support and a common language for a new world, seeking to alter the balance of power in preparation for when a crisis upsets the legitimacy of society. Unlike forms of folk politics, such a strategy is expansive, long-term, comfortable with abstraction and complexity, and aimed at overthrowing capitalist universalism.6 In this chapter, we examine three possible sites of struggle – over the intellectual, cultural and technological mediums of neoliberal hegemony. The next section will examine hegemony at a theoretical level, while the rest of the chapter will explore illustrations of how a counter-hegemonic project might be put into practice – through utopian
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ENGINEERING CONSENT
The idea of ‘hegemony’ initially emerged as a way of explaining why ordinary people were not revolting against capitalism.7 According to the traditional Marxist narrative, workers would become increasingly aware of the exploitative nature of capitalism and eventually organise to transcend it. Capitalism, it was believed, ought to be producing an ever more polarised world of capitalists versus the working class, in a process that underpinned a political strategy in which the organised working class would win control over the state through revolutionary means. But by the 1920s it was clear that this was not about to happen in western European democratic societies. How was it, then, that capitalism and the interests of the ruling classes were secured in democratic societies largely devoid of overt force? The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci answered that capitalist power was dependent on what he termed hegemony – the engineering of consent according to the dictates of one particular group. A hegemonic project builds a ‘common sense’ that installs the particular worldview of one group as the universal horizon of an entire society. By this means, hegemony enables a group to lead and rule over a society primarily through consent (both active and passive) rather than coercion.8 This consent can be achieved in a variety of ways: the formation of explicit political alliances with other social groups, the dissemination of cultural values supporting a particular way of organising society (for example, the work ethic instilled by the media and through education), the alignment of interests between classes (for example, workers are better off when a capitalist economy is growing, even if this means mass inequality and environmental devastation) and through building technologies and infrastructures in such a way that they silently constrain social conflict (for example, by widening streets to prevent the erection of barricades during insurrections). In a broad and diffuse sense, hegemony enables relatively small groups of capitalists to ‘lead’ society as a whole, even when their material interests are at odds with those of the majority. Finally, as well as securing active and passive consent, hegemonic projects also deploy coercive means, such as imprisonment, police violence and intimidation, to neutralise those groups that cannot otherwise be led.9 Taken together, these measures enable small groups to influence the general direction of a society, sometimes through the achievement and deployment of state power, but also outside the confines of the state.
The latter point is particularly important, because hegemony is not just a strategy of governance for those in power, but also a strategy for the marginal to transform society. A counter-hegemonic project enables marginal and oppressed groups to transform the balance of power in a society and bring about a new common sense. To abjure hegemony therefore implies an abandonment of the basic idea of winning and exercising power, and is to effectively give up on the primary terrain of political struggle.10 While there are some on the left who explicitly endorse such a position,11 to the degree that horizontalist movements have been successful they have tended to operate as a counter-hegemonic force. Occupy’s major success – transforming the public discourse around inequality – is a prime example of this. A counter-hegemonic project will therefore seek to overturn an existing set of alliances, common sense, and rule by consent in order to install a new hegemony.12 Such a project will seek to build the social conditions from which a new post-work world can emerge and will require an expansive approach that goes beyond the temporary and local measures of folk politics. It requires mobilisation across different social groups,13 which means linking together a diversity of individual interests into a common desire for a post-work society. The neoliberal hegemony in the
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United States, for instance, came about by linking together the interests of economic liberals with those of social conservatives. This is a fractious (sometimes even contradictory) alliance, but it is one that finds common interests in the broad neoliberal framework by emphasising individual freedoms.14 In addition, counter-hegemonic projects operate across diverse fields – from the state, to civil society, to the material infrastructure. This means an entire battery of actions are needed, such as seeking to spread media influence, attempting to win state power, controlling key sectors of the economy and designing important infrastructures. This project requires empirical and experimental work to identify the parts of these various fields that are operating to reinforce the present general direction of society. The Mont Pelerin Society is a good example of this. Painstakingly aware of the ways in which Keynesianism was the hegemonic common sense of its time, the MPS undertook the long-term task of taking apart the elements that sustained it. This was a project that took decades to come to full fruition, and during that time the MPS had to undertake counter-hegemonic actions in order to install it. Such long-term thinking is an important corrective to the tendency today to focus on immediate resistance and new daily outrages. However, hegemony is not just an immaterial contestation of ideas and values. Neoliberalism’s ideological hegemony, for example, depends upon a series of material instantiations – paradigmatically in the nexus of government power, media framing and the network of neoliberal think tanks. As we observed in our examination of the rise of neoliberalism, the MPS was particularly adept at creating an intellectual infrastructure, consisting of the institutions and material paths necessary to inculcate, embody and spread their worldview.
The combination of social alliances, strategic thinking, ideological work and institutions builds a capacity to alter public discourse. Crucial here is the idea of the ‘Overton window’ – this is the bandwidth of ideas and options that can be ‘realistically’ discussed by politicians, public intellectuals and news media, and thus accepted by the public.15 The general window of realistic options emerges out of a complex nexus of causes – who controls key nodes in the press and broadcast media, the relative impact of popular culture, the relative balance of power between organised labour and capitalists, who holds executive political power, and so on. Though emerging from the intersection of different elements, the Overton window has a power of its own to shape which future paths are taken by societies and governments. If something is not deemed ‘realistic’, then it will not even be tabled for discussion and its proponents will be silenced as ‘unserious’. We can evaluate the success of neoliberal ideas in terms of this by the degree to which they have framed what is possible over a period of more than thirty years.16 While it has never been possible to convince the majority of the population of the positive merits of key neoliberal policies, active assent is unnecessary. A sequence of neoliberal administrations throughout the world, in conjunction with a network of think tanks and a largely right-leaning media, have been able to transform the range of possible options to exclude even the most moderate of socialist measures.17 Through this, the hegemony of neoliberal ideas has enabled the exercise of power without always requiring executive state power. Providing that the window of possible options can be stretched further to the right, it matters little whether right-wing governments hold power – a reality that the US Republican Party has consistently exploited over the last two decades, often to the surprise of those on the liberal left. Ideological hegemony as we present it here is therefore not about maintaining a strict party line on what can be discussed. Simply bringing leftist issues and categories into positions of prominence would already be a major step forward.
While often understood as something that pertains to ideas, values and other immaterial aspects of society, there is in fact also a material sense to hegemony. The physical infrastructures of our world exert a significant hegemonic force upon societies – imposing a way of life without overt coercion. For instance, with regard to urban infrastructure, David Harvey writes that ‘projects concerning what we want our cities to be are … projects concerning human possibilities, who we want, or perhaps even more pertinently, who we do not want to become’.18 Infrastructure such as suburbs in the United States was built with the explicit intention of isolating and individualising existing solidarity networks, and installing a gendered division between the private and the public in the form of singlefamily households.19 Economic infrastructures also serve to modify and sculpt human behaviours. Indeed, technical infrastructures are often developed for political as well as economic purposes. If we think of global just-in-time supply chains, for example, these are economically efficient under capitalism, but also exceptionally effective in breaking the power of unions. In other words, hegemony, or rule by the engineering of consent, is as much a material force as it is a social one. It is something embedded in human minds, social and political organisations, individual technologies and the built environment that constitutes our world.20 And, whereas the social forces of hegemony must be continually maintained, the materialised aspects of hegemony exert a force of momentum that lasts long past their initial creation.21 Once in place, infrastructures are difficult to dislodge or alter, despite changing political conditions. We are facing up to this problem now, for example, with the infrastructure built up around fossil fuels. Our economies are organised around the production, distribution and consumption of coal, oil and gas, making it immensely difficult to decarbonise the economy. The flipside of that problem, though, is that once a postcapitalist infrastructure is in place, it would be just as difficult to shift away from it, regardless of any reactionary forces. Technology and technological infrastructures therefore pose both significant hurdles for overcoming the capitalist mode of production, as well as significant potentials for securing the longevity of an alternative. This is why, for example, it is insufficient even to have a massive populist movement against the current forms of capitalism. Without a new approach to things like production and distribution technologies, every social movement will find itself forced back into capitalistic practices.
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The left must therefore develop a sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas and ideology, and in the sphere of material infrastructures. The objective of such a strategy, in a very broad sense, is to navigate the present technical, economic, social, political and productive hegemony towards a new point of equilibrium beyond the imposition of wage labour. This will require longterm and experimental praxis on multiple fronts. A hegemonic project therefore implies and responds to society as a complex emergent order, the result of diverse interacting practices.22 Some combinations of social practices will lead to instability, but others will tend towards more stable (if not literally static) outcomes. In this context, hegemonic politics is the work that goes into retaining or navigating towards a new point of relative stability across a variety of societal subsystems, from the national-level politics of the state, to the economic domain, from the battle of ideas and ideologies to different regimes of technology. The order which emerges as a result of the interactions of these different domains is hegemony, which works to constrain certain kinds of action and enable others. In the rest of this chapter, we examine three possible channels through which to undertake this struggle: pluralising economics, creating utopian narratives and repurposing technology. These certainly do not exhaust the points of possible attack, but they do identify potentially productive areas to focus resources on.
REMEMBERING THE FUTURE
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