InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary

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

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INTRODUCTION

1. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963); George Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mark Dery, ‘Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose’, in Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970).

1. For exemplars of this stance, see Franco Berardi, After the Future (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011); T. J. Clark, ‘For a Left with No Future’, New Left Review II/74 (March–April 2012); Fernando Coronil, ‘The Future in Question: History and Utopia in Latin America (1989–2010)’, in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian, eds, Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Or, in the words of one popular recent essay: ‘The future has no future’: The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 23.

1. OUR POLITICAL COMMON SENSE:INTRODUCING FOLK POLITICS

1. Dave Mitchell, ‘Stuff White People Smash,’ Rabble, 26 June 2011, at rabble.ca.

1. It is telling that the main reason for the failure of the ongoing Doha Round negotiations at the WTO is because of divisions between states, rather than any social movement resistance.

1. Insight into some of the internal debates within Occupy around the issue of demands can be found in Astra Taylor and Keith Gessen, eds, Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (London: Verso, 2011). For a detailed critique of the ‘no demands position, see Marco Desiriis and Jodi Dean, ‘A Movement Without Demands?’, Possible Futures, 3 January 2012, at possiblefutures.org.

1. Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, ‘Not Your Academy: Occupation and the Future of Student Struggles’, in A. J. Bauer, Christina Beltran, Rana Jaleel and Andrew Ross, eds, Is This What Democracy Looks Like?, Social Text E-Book, 2012, at whatdemocracy-looks-like.com. For a piece that tracks the diminishing importance of concrete demands over time within a single student occupation at University College London in 2010, see Guy Aitchison, ‘Reform, Rupture, or Re-Imagination: Understanding the Purpose of an Occupation’, Social Movement Studies 10: 4 (2011), pp. 431–9.

1. Hakim Bey’s work is perhaps the most infamous example of this self-sufficiency of the autonomous protest. See Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, 2nd rev. edn. (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2011). See also Jeremy Gilbert, Anti-Capitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2008), pp. 203–9, for a comprehensive critique from within the social movement space of the dangers of ‘the activist imaginary’.

1. Linda Polman, The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).

1. Radix, ‘Fracking Sussex: The Threat of Shale Oil & Gas’, Frack Off, 2013, at frack-off.org.uk. In fact, the most successful force to stop fracking has been the market, with the recent drop in crude oil prices.

1. Eviction Free Zone, ‘Direct Action, Occupy Wall Street, and the Future of Housing Justice: An Interview with Noam Chomsky’, 2013, at libcom.org.

1. Adam Gabbatt, ‘Occupy Wall Street Activists Buy \$15m of Americans’ Personal Debt’, Guardian, 12 November 2013.

1. Paul Mason, Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (London: Vintage, 2008).

Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Science of the Mind–Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). While we want to draw a somewhat loose analogy with the neurophilosophical tradition here, we do not mean to argue that folk politics is in any sense grounded in folk psychology. Rather, our critique of it is similarly focused on the notion that the appearance of phenomena is both necessary and deceptive as to the reality of how a system operates.

1. For a history of these ‘repertoires of contention’, see Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder, CA: Paradigm, 2004).

Notes

1. WHY AREN’T WE WINNING? A CRITIQUE OF TODAY’S LEFT

1. These other positions can be seen in the various denunciations of Occupy for being too liberal. See Mark Bray, ‘Five Liberal Tendencies that Plagued Occupy’, ROAR Magazine, 14 March 2014, at roarmag.org. Similar arguments have also been made in the past. Marx, for example, argued that the peasantry provided an insufficient class basis for revolutionary politics, and that only the industrial working class would have interests in line with communism. Our argument is that, regardless of the class basis of horizontalism, localism and other folk politics, they all remain bound by notions of spatial, temporal and conceptual immediacy.

1. Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy, Protest Camps (London: Zed, 2013), p. 159. We might observe that variants of horizontalism were present in left politics for some time before the early 1970s, with proto-horizontalist commitments clearly visible in nineteenth-century anarchism, as well as much earlier movements.

1. This chapter will leave aside the lengthy history of anarchist thought and practice, in order to focus solely on horizontalism as a contemporary embodiment of some of its principles and practices.

1. John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London/Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2002).

1. A commitment to consensus decision-making is not always an explicit mainstay of horizontalism as such, but is rather a popular contemporary way of procedurally embodying horizontality in practice. Some forms of anarchism, such as South American ‘platformism’, explicitly avoid consensus decision-making.

1. Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto, 2007), p. 20.

1. WHY ARE THEY WINNING?

THE MAKING OF NEOLIBERAL HEGEMONY

1. Jamie Peck, Constructions ofNeoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 40.

1. This standard history is now in the process of being rewritten, and this chapter relies heavily on the pioneers of this research, including the unpublished work of Alex Andrews. See, for example, Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013); Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason; Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (London: Fontana, 1995); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

1. Witness, for instance, the unlikely but immensely productive alliance in the United States between economic neoliberals and radical social conservatives. Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, p. 6; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 49–50.

1. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, transl. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2014).

1. Rob Van Horn, ‘Reinventing Monopoly and the Role of Corporations: The Roots of Chicago Law and Economics’, in Mirowsk and Plehwe, Roadfrom Mont Pelerin, pp. 204–37.

1. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism.

1. Philip Cerny, Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 128.

1. Karl Polanyi is a notable exception, having long ago recognised the role of the state in building markets in labour and land. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); Peck, Constructions ofNeoliberalism Reason, p. 4.

1. This gendering of rights is appropriate for the historical context.

1. It is worth mentioning that this political construction of economies negates the possibility of any simple economism. Thomas Lemke, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neoliberal Governmentality’, Economy and Society 30: 2 (2001), p. 194.

1. Harvey, BriefHistory ofNeoliberalism, p. 2.

1. LEFT MODERNITY

1. This expansionary process has been conceived of in a variety of (not incompatible) ways – for instance, through uneven and combined development, spatial fixes, and expanding cycles of hegemony. In each case, though, the expansionary nature of capitalist universalism is readily apparent. See, respectively, Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (London: Verso, 2010); David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2006); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time (London: Verso, 2009).