InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary

1. Susantu Basu and John Fernald, Information and Communications Technology as a General-Purpose Technology: Evidence from U.S. Industry Data (San Francisco: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper, 2006), p. 17, pdf available at frbsf.org.

1. However, emerging research suggests industrial robots have already contributed around 16 per cent of recent labour productivity growth. Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels, Robots at Work (London: Centre for Economic Performance, 2015), p. 21, pdf available at events.crei.cat.

1. Frey and Osborne, Technology at Work, p. 40.

1. Frey and Osborne, Future of Employment, p. 38; Stuart Elliott, ‘Anticipating a Luddite Revival’, Issues in Science and Technology 30: 3 (2014), at issues.org.

1. The standard Marxist response to full automation is to point to its ‘objective’ limits by arguing that capitalism will never eliminate its source of surplus value (i.e. labour). But this argument confuses a systemic outcome with an individual incentive, an internal barrier with an absolute limit, and a political struggle with a theoretical tension. In the first place, the individual imperatives are to increase the productivity of technology in order to gain extra surplus value relative to other capitalists. The systemic outcome of this is detrimental for all capitalists (less surplus value being produced), but still remains beneficial for individual capitalists, and will therefore continue. In the second place, the limits of the capitalist mode of production are mistakenly taken to be the limits of any possible change. If capitalism cannot survive with full automation, it is deemed that full automation must not be possible. Such a position makes capitalism the end-point of history, rejecting in advance any postcapitalist possibility. Finally, the theoretically derived tension between increased productivity, rising organic composition and a reduced rate of profit is taken to present a situation that capital will never allow to occur because of its systemic effects. Missing from this account is a political movement that would struggle to push capitalism beyond itself. In other words, the argument that full automation will never occur simply posits that political struggle is ineffective. In the end, such a line of reasoning gives up on every critical account of capitalism, and accepts it as the final stage of history. As Ramin Ramtin bluntly puts it, ‘The fact that [full automation] would result in explosive socioeconomic and political contradictions does not make it impossible’ (Ramtin, Capitalism and Automation, p. 103). The simple wager of the demand for full automation is that wealth can be produced in non-capitalist ways. For representative critiques of full automation, see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1998), p. 205; George Caffentzis, ‘The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri’, in In Letters ofBlood and Fire (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), p. 78.

1. It should be mentioned that, increasingly, tacit knowledge tasks are being automated through environmental control and machine learning, with more recent innovations eliminating even the need for a controlled environment. Frey and Osborne, Future of Employment, p. 27; Autor, Polanyi’s Paradox; Sarah Yang, ‘New “Deep Learning” Technique Enables Robot Mastery of Skills via Trial and Error’, Phys.org, 21 May 2015, at phys.org.

1. As Marx notes, because of this ‘the field of application for machinery would therefore be entirely different in a communist society from what it is in bourgeois society.’ Marx, Capital, Volume I, p. 515 n. 33.

1. Silvia Federici, ‘Permanent Reproductive Crisis: An Interview’, Mute, 7 March 2013, at metamute.org.

1. For an excellent overview of historical experiences of alternative domestic arrangements, see Dolores Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution: A History ofFeminist Designsfor American Homes, Neighbourhoods and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

1. We mean ‘productivity’ here in the strictly Marxist sense, and not as a suggestion that domestic work is idle.