InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary

1. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), p. 106.

1. THE FUTURE ISN’T WORKING

1. Two recent manifestos from India and Germany have also attacked the glorification of work: Kamunist Kranti, ‘A Ballad Against Work’, 1997, at libcom.org; and Krisis-Group, ‘Manifesto Against Labour’, 1999, at krisis.org

1. Research suggests that changes in opportunities (provided by moments such as an economic crisis) are far more important than the level of grievances in generating a social movement. In other words, the idea that making things worse will lead to revolution has little empirical support. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Chapter 5.

1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, transl. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), Part 8.

1. Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 14.

1. As Marx writes, ‘“Proletarian” must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than “wage-labourer”, the man who produces and valorises “capital”, and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorisation.’ Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 764 n. 1 (emphasis added).

1. In the case of groups like unpaid domestic labourers, the proletariat can also rely upon the wages of another for its survival, along with all the problematic dependencies this fosters. In this case, the proletariat is indirectly reliant upon waged labour for its survival.

1. Richard Freeman, ‘The Great Doubling: The Challenge of the New Global Labor Market’, in John Edwards, Marion Crain and Arne Kalleberg, eds, Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream (New York: New Press, 2007).

1. Steve Fraser, The Age ofAcquiescence: The Life and Death ofAmerican Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown US, 2015), p. 60.

1. The problem of how to define the surplus population is one which is often assumed away in the literature. But there are important issues here that cannot simply be passed by. If the surplus is defined in terms of waged versus non-waged, then are working prison populations not part of the surplus? What about the vast amounts of informal labour that works for a wage and produces for a market? Other problems arise if one defines the surplus in terms of productive and unproductive labour. In particular, one is led to the conclusion Negri and Hardt draw – that since socially productive labour exists everywhere under conditions of post-Fordism, the term no longer has meaning. (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [New York: Penguin, 2005], p. 131.) We reject that conclusion and attempt to demonstrate here that the concept still has important analytical and explanatory utility. We believe that the surplus can be defined as those who are outside of waged labour under capitalist conditions of production. The latter qualification means that most informal labour (not under capitalist conditions of production) is included in the category. We are particularly influenced here by the work of Kalyan Sanyal.

1. Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 46.

1. In economics this is associated with the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). Hiring workers when unemployment is at this level is thought to raise wages and eventually cause inflation, thereby setting a floor to how low the unemployment rate should go.

1. For classic statements about the political uses of unemployment, see Michał Kalecki, ‘Political Aspects of Full Employment’, Political Quarterly 14: 4 (1943); Samuel Bowles, ‘The Production Process in a Competitive Economy: Walrasian, Neo-Hobbesian, and Marxian Models’, American Economic Review 75: 1 (1985).

1. This emphasis on secular trends, we would argue, is one of the unique characteristics of a Marxist understanding of unemployment.

1. The fear of automation taking jobs has a long history, of which the Luddites were one of the earliest examples. More recently this fear was a major issue in the 1960s with discussions about the idea of cybernation and in the 1980s and 1990s with headlinegrabbing journalistic commentary, and has re-emerged again over the past few years. The large number of relevant texts include: Ad Hoc Committee, ‘The Triple Revolution’, International Socialist Review 24: 3 (1964); Donald Michael, Cybernation: The Silent Conquest (Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1962); Paul Mattick, ‘The Economics of Cybernation’, New Politics 1: 4 (1962); David Noble, Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1995); Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market

1. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (London: Verso, 2010), p. 280.

1. State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide, Gallup, 2013, at ihrim.org, p. 27; John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney and R. Jamil Jonna, ‘The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism’, Monthly Review, November 2011; Neilson and Stubbs, ‘Relative Surplus Population’. The International Labour Organization currently estimates that 5.9 per cent of the working population (201 million people) are unemployed – but this relies on a very stringent definition of unemployment. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook – Trends 2015 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), at ilo.org, p. 16. If one works for an hour mowing a lawn, makes a few dollars selling homemade wares on a street, or has a doctorate and works in a call centre, the ILO counts this as employment. In other words, part-time workers, informal workers and underemployed workers all count as employed. The ILO definition of unemployment also improves when people drop out of the labour force: a smaller workforce means lower unemployment. A more meaningful measure is therefore the level of employment among the working-age population, according to which the ILO estimates that over 40 pe cent of the world’s population is not employed. ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, p. 18. In a similar measure, they estimate that only half the global labour force is in waged or salaried work. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), p. 28. But these measures still overestimate the number of people employed, and so other measures have attempted to overcome these deficiencies. Gallup, for instance, defines ‘employment’ as formal work for thirty hours or more per week – and concludes that 74 per cent of the global labour force fails to meet this definition. State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide, Gallup, 2013, pdf available at ihrim.org, p. 27. Another study, based on ILO data on the unemployed, vulnerably employed and economically inactive, estimates the surplus population at 61 per cent of the total working-age population (calculated from data by Neilson and Stubbs, ‘Relative Surplus Population, p. 444). The conclusion to draw from these alternative measures is simple: the global surplus population is massive, and in fact outnumbers the formal working class.