InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary

Following World War II, the ordoliberals began to move into government positions and implement their ideas, establishing the material and institutional foothold from which to shape economic ideology. The first, and perhaps most historically significant position, was the appointment of Ludwig Erhard to the directorate of economics in the postwar administrative zone of the British and US militaries. With the support of a fellow ordoliberal, Wilhelm Röpke, Erhard simultaneously eliminated all existing price and wage controls, and drastically cut income and capital taxes. This was a radical deregulatory move, and one that compelled the Soviet Union to establish a blockade on Berlin and inaugurate the Cold War.³³ In the decades that followed, ordoliberals would come increasingly to populate significant positions in the German Ministry of Economics, with Erhard himself becoming Chancellor in 1963. But despite their intentions, the ordoliberals lacked a principled distinction between legitimate and illegitimate government interventions – an ambiguity which facilitated the German economy’s transformation into increasingly Keynesian forms. Interventions to maintain competition shaded into interventions to provide welfare, and by the 1970s Germany had become a standard social democratic state. The difficulties encountered in the policy world did not stop neoliberalism from innovating on other terrains, though – in particular, the space of the so-called ‘second-hand dealers’ in ideas.

SECOND-HAND DEALERS

Neoliberals had long emphasised the importance of using a variety of venues to influence elites and construct a new common sense. In the postwar era, this approach spanned academia, the media and the policy world. But one of the primary innovations for neoliberal consolidation of the ideological sphere was the use of think tanks. While they had existed for over a hundred years, the extensive use made of them by the MPS was a novelty. It involved developing policy arguments, building policy solutions and homing in on economic culprits. An informal division of labour was established, with some think tanks focusing on the large philosophical ideas, targeting the very assumptions and rationale of the orthodox Keynesian position – this was the task adopted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MIPR) in the 1970s, for example – while others aimed to produce more immediate public policy proposals. These were explicit attempts to unhinge the dominant worldview in order to subsequently introduce specific policy solutions that were grounded upon the neoliberal view.

The figure of Antony Fisher was vital in the building of neoliberalism’s ideological hegemony.³⁴ One of the founders of the UK’s first neoliberal think tank – the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) – Fisher explicitly argued that the most difficult part of changing ideas lay not in their production, but in their diffusion. As a result of this belief, Fisher would be heavily involved in establishing conservative think tanks not only in the UK, but also in Canada (the Fraser Institute) and the United States (the MIPR). The IEA itself was focused on ‘those whom Hayek had called the “second-hand dealers” in ideas, the journalists, academics, writers, broadcasters, and teachers who dictate the long-term intellectual thinking of the nation’.³⁵ The explicit intention was to change the ideological fabric of the British elite, infiltrating and subtly altering the terms of discourse. This also extended shrewdly to the mission of the IEA itself, which maintained a deceptive position on its own aims, presenting itself as an apolitical organisation focusing on research into markets in general.³⁶ In line with this vision of ideological takeover, the IEA produced short pamphlets intended to be as accessible as possible to a mainstream audience.³⁷ Moreover, these texts were written in a somewhat utopian fashion, without regard for whether a policy was capable of being implemented at that moment.³⁸ The goal, as always, was the long-term redefinition of the possible. Over the course of decades, these various interventions developed a wide-ranging neoliberal worldview. More than just single-issue responses to the fashionable problems of the day, what the IEA and its associates had constructed was a systematic and coherent economic perspective.³⁹ Think tanks instilled this worldview by educating and socialising rising members of political parties. Numerous members of what would become Thatcher’s administration passed through the IEA during the 1960s and 1970s.⁴⁰ The outcome of the IEA’s efforts was not only to subtly transform the economic discourse in Britain, but also to naturalise two particular policies: the necessity of attacking trade union power, and the imperative of monetary stability. The former would purportedly let markets freely adapt to changing economic circumstances, while the latter would provide the basic price stability needed for a healthy capitalist economy.

In the United States, too, think tanks and academic research groups were built to push for a broadly neoliberal agenda, the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute being two of the most notable.⁴¹ The MIPR aimed to redefine political common sense by writing books on neoliberal economics that were intended for a popular audience, some of which eventually sold over 500,000 copies. Other books, such as Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, laid the foundations for the policy shift which today identifies welfare dependency rather than poverty itself as the central social problem. Numerous other widespread policy ideas, such as zero-tolerance policing and workfare, stemmed from the policy factory of the MIPR. Its books succeeded in their objective of changing the common sense of the political classes and the public. The think tank, as an organisational form, was so integral to neoliberalism’s ideological success that the very process of creating think tanks was itself institutionalised. The Atlas Economic Research Foundation, founded in 1981 by Fisher, declared as its explicit aim ‘to institutionalise this process of helping start up new think tanks’. Atlas today boasts of having helped create or connect over 400 neoliberal think tanks in more than eighty countries. The sheer scale of the neoliberal ideological infrastructure is made fully transparent here.

Beyond think tanks, a variety of other mechanisms were used to build up a hegemonic discourse. In working to install the Chicago brand of neoliberalism as the dominant alternative, Milton Friedman wrote extensive op-eds and newspaper columns, and made use of television interviews in a way that was unprecedented for an academic. Businesses funded projects to turn his work into popular television shows, taking the media terrain by storm.⁴² These technological tools were the essential means he used to diffuse his economic vision to policymakers and the public. Newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times paralleled this effort, shaping the public’s perspective by invoking neoliberal policies at every opportunity.⁴³ Business schools and management consultancies also began to adopt and spread neoliberal ideas about corporate forms, and the Chicago School became a global beacon of neoliberal thought.⁴⁴ Such institutions were crucial for the spread of neoliberal hegemony, since they were often the training grounds of the global elite.⁴⁵ Individuals would come to these neoliberal US schools and then return to their own countries with the neoliberal ideology inculcated in them. By the 1970s, therefore, a full-spectrum infrastructure had developed to promulgate neoliberal ideas. Think tanks and utopian proclamations organised long-term thinking; public-facing speeches, pamphlets and media efforts framed the general outlines of the neoliberal common sense; and politicians and policy proposals made tactical interventions into the political terrain.⁴⁶ Yet, despite their increasingly hegemonic potential, a mere decade prior to the arrival in office of Thatcher and Reagan, Keynesianism still reflected the most widely accepted approach to organising states and markets. The ideas of this group of neoliberal intellectuals were still often seen as senseless throwbacks to the failed policies of the pre–Great Depression era. But this would all change by the 1980s – a decade that would leave Keynesianism in disarray and enshrine neoliberalism as the preeminent model for economic modernisation.

GRASPING THE WHEEL

Having made national inroads, neoliberalism first gained serious international prominence in the 1970s, as a response to the combined pressures of high unemployment and high inflation – both of which had originated in oil shocks, general commodity price rises, wage increases and the expansion of credit. The dominant Keynesian approach to the economy had argued that governments should stimulate the economy by putting money into it when unemployment was rising, but, when inflation was rising, take money out of the economy, to slow down price rises. In the 1970s, however, both problems arose simultaneously – rising inflation and rising unemployment, or ‘stagflation’. The traditional Keynesian policy solutions were incapable of dealing with this conjunction, thus seemingly dictating a turn to alternative theories. It is important to be clear that, at this point, multiple interpretations of the economic problem were possible. The production of inflation through wage rigidities and trade union power was not the only possible framing of the problem, and neoliberalism was not the only possible solution. Alternative interpretations were available, alternative answers possible; in the moment, no one knew what the way out would be.⁴⁷ The neoliberal narrative of the crisis, for instance, plays down the role of banking deregulation by UK Chancellor Anthony Barber in the early 1970s and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. These deregulations sparked a surge in the monetary base and a subsequent surge in price inflation, and then wage inflation.⁴⁸ In other words, an alternative narrative was possible in which the problem was not strong unions, but rather deregulated finance.

That the neoliberal story won out is in no small measure because of the ideological infrastructure that adherents to its ideas had constructed over decades. The neoliberals found themselves well placed, since they had routinely argued that inflation was a necessary outcome of the welfare state’s unwillingness to break wage and price rigidities. They had both a diagnosis of the problem and a solution. Government officials who were uncertain about what to do in the face of crisis found a plausible story in neoliberalism.⁴⁹ It was thus the long-term construction of intellectual hegemony by the neoliberal thought collective that left them well positioned to leverage their ideas into power.⁵⁰ As Milton Friedman famously put it, ‘Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.’⁵¹ This programme spells out exactly what happened in the 1970s crisis. If alternative analyses of the crisis had been accepted, it would have entailed a policy response different from that of neoliberalism. Rather than attacking the power of labour, for example, politicians could have responded by re-regulating credit creation. In other words, neoliberalism was not a necessary outcome, but a political construction 52

While Keynesian approaches were eventually able to develop an explanation of stagflation, by then it was too late, and the neoliberal approach had taken over academic economics and the policy world. In short, neoliberalism had become hegemonic. The decade after 1979 saw Margaret Thatcher elected as the British prime minister, Paul Volcker appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Ronald Reagan elected president of the United States. The IMF and World Bank, facing identity crises after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, were rapidly infiltrated and converted into crucibles of the true neoliberal faith by the 1980s. France undertook a neoliberal turn during the Mitterrand administration in the early 1980s, and the major economies of Europe became bound by the neoliberal policies embodied in the constitution of the European Union. In the United States and UK, a wave of systematic attacks were launched against the power of labour. Piece by piece, trade unions were demolished and labour regulations dismantled. Capital controls were loosened, finance was deregulated, and the welfare state began to be scavenged for profitable parts.

Outside Europe and North America, neoliberalism had already been forced on Chile and Argentina in the aftermath of military coups in the 1970s. The developing world debt crisis of the 1980s acted as a key moment to break traditional proto-socialist hegemonies and institute a turn to neoliberalism across the world.⁵³ Moreover, with the breakdown of the USSR, Eastern Europe saw a wave of neoliberalising trends that were spurred on by Western economic advisors. It is estimated that these privatising policies in former Soviet nations led to a million deaths, proving that privatisation could be just as deadly as collectivisation, and that the expansion of neoliberalism was a far from bloodless affair.⁵⁴ Misery, death and dictatorships lay in the wake of its advances across the globe. This was a normative regime that had forced itself into the everyday psychic and bodily reality of the world’s population. By the mid 1990s, with the collapse of the USSR, neoliberalism’s extension via IMF structural adjustment policies, its consolidation in the UK’s New Labour and Clinton’s US administration, and its ubiquity in the academic field of economics, neoliberalism had reached its hegemonic peak. The novel conjunctural moment of the 1970s was quickly forgotten by the public, and neoliberalism took on the universal and natural qualities that Thatcher’s doctrine of ‘there is no alternative’ had espoused. Neoliberalism had become a new common sense, accepted by every party in power. It mattered little whether the left or right won; neoliberalism had stacked the deck.

THE IMPOSSIBLE BECOMES INEVITABLE

As we have seen, neoliberalism propagated its ideology through a division of labour – academics shaping education, think tanks influencing policy, and popularisers manipulating the media. The inculcation of neoliberalism involved a full-spectrum project of constructing a hegemonic worldview. A new common sense was built that came to co-opt and eventually dominate the terminology of ‘modernity’ and ‘freedom’ – terminology that fifty years ago would have had very different connotations. Today, it is nearly impossible to speak these words without immediately invoking the precepts of neoliberal capitalism.

We all know today that ‘modernisation’ translates into job cuts, the slashing of welfare and the privatisation of government services. To modernise, today, simply means to neoliberalise. The term ‘freedom’ has suffered a similar fate, reduced to individual freedom, freedom from the state, and the freedom to choose between consumer goods. Liberal ideas of individual freedom played an important role in the ideological struggle with the USSR, priming the population of the Western world to mobilise behind any ideology that purported to value individual freedoms. With its emphasis on individual freedoms, neoliberalism was able to co-opt elements of movements organised around ‘libertarianism, identity politics, [and] multiculturalism’.⁵⁵ Likewise, by emphasising freedom from the state, neoliberalism was able to appeal to anarcho-capitalists and the movements of desire that exploded in May 1968.⁵⁶ Lastly, with the idea of freedom being limited to a freedom of the market, the ideology could co-opt consumerist desires. At the level of production, neoliberal freedom could also recruit emerging desires among workers for flexible labour – desires that were soon turned against them.⁵⁷ In struggling for and successfully seizing the ideological terrain of modernity and freedom, neoliberalism has managed to wind its way inexorably into our very self-conceptions. In arrogating the meaning of terms such as modernisation and freedom, neoliberalism has proved itself to be the single most successful hegemonic project of the last fifty years.

Neoliberalism has thus become ‘the form of our existence – the way in which we are led to conduct ourselves, to relate to others and to ourselves’.⁵⁸ It is, in other words, not just politicians, business leaders, the media elite and academics who have been enrolled into this vision of the world, but also workers, students, migrants – and everyone else. In other words, neoliberalism creates subjects. Paradigmatically, we are constructed as competitive subjects – a role that encompasses and surpasses industrial capitalism’s productive subject. The imperatives of neoliberalism drive these subjects to constant self-improvement in every aspect of their lives. Perpetual education, the omnipresent requirement to be employable, and the constant need for self-reinvention are all of a piece with this neoliberal subjectivity.⁵⁹ The competitive subject, moreover, straddles the divide between the public and the private. One’s personal life is as bound to competition as one’s work life. Under these conditions, it is no surprise that anxiety proliferates in contemporary societies. Indeed, an entire battery of psychopathologies has been exacerbated under neoliberalism: stress, anxiety, depression and attention deficit disorders are increasingly common psychological responses to the world around us.⁶⁰ Crucially, the construction of everyday neoliberalism has also been a primary source of political passivity. Even if you do not buy into the ideology, its effects nevertheless force you into increasingly precarious situations and increasingly entrepreneurial inclinations. We need money to survive, so we market ourselves, do multiple jobs, stress and worry about how to pay rent, pinch pennies at the grocery store, and turn socialising into networking. Given these effects, political mobilisation becomes a dream that is perpetually postponed, driven away by the anxieties and pressures of everyday life.

At the same time, we should recognise that this production of subjectivity was not simply an external imposition. Hegemony, in all its forms, operates not as an illusion, but as something that builds on the very real desires of the population. Neoliberal hegemony has played upon ideas, yearnings and drives already existing within society, mobilising and promising to fulfil those that could be aligned with its basic agenda. The worship of individual freedom, the value ascribed to hard work, freedom from the rigid work week, individual expression through work, the belief in meritocracy, the bitterness felt at corrupt politicians, unions and bureaucracies – these beliefs and desires pre-exist neoliberalism and find expression in it.⁶¹ Bridging the left–right divide, many people today are simply angry at what they see as others taking advantage of the system. Hatred for the rich tax evader combines easily with disgust for the poor welfare cheat; anger at the oppressive employer becomes indistinguishable from anger at all politicians. This is linked with the spread of middle-class identities and aspirations – desires for home ownership, self-reliance and entrepreneurial spirit were fostered and extended into formerly working-class social spaces.⁶² Neoliberal ideology has a grounding in lived experience and does not exist simply as an academic puzzle.⁶³ Neoliberalism has become parasitical on everyday experience, and any critical analysis that misses this is bound to misrecognise the deep roots of neoliberalism in today’s society. Over the course of decades, neoliberalism has therefore come to shape not only elite opinions and beliefs, but also the normative fabric of everyday life itself. The particular interests of neoliberals have become universalised, which is to say, hegemonic.⁶⁴ Neoliberalism constitutes our collective common sense, making us its subjects whether we believe in it or not.⁶⁵

A MONT PELERIN OF THE LEFT?

It has often been argued that neoliberalism succeeded (and continues to succeed in spite of its failures) because it is supported by a series of overlapping and powerful interests – the transnational elite, the financiers, the major stockholders of the largest corporations. While these interests have certainly assisted the potency of the neoliberal ideology, such an explanation nevertheless leaves certain questions unanswered. If elite support was sufficient for ideological success, and if neoliberalism was clearly beneficial to elites, there would not have been a forty-year delay between the initial formulation of the ideas and their implementation. Instead, the embedded liberalism of Keynesianism remained ideologically dominant even as it constrained powerful interests. In particular, financial interests were sidelined for a long period after the 1929 crash and ensuing Great Depression. The power dynamics maintaining the Keynesian consensus needed to be taken apart piecemeal. Equally, an explanation of neoliberalism’s success that relies solely on its compatibility with particular elite interests also leaves unexplained why other possible responses to the problems of the 1970s were never implemented. An important element of neoliberalism’s eventual ideological success is that there was both a crisis and a readily available solution. The crisis (stagflation) was one that no government knew how to deal with at the time, while the solution was the preconceived neoliberal ideas that had been fermenting for decades in its ideological ecology. It was not that neoliberals presented a better argument for their position (the myth of rational political discourse); rather, an institutional infrastructure was constructed to project their ideas and establish them as the new common sense of the political elite.

In all of this there are important lessons to be learned, which have led some to call for a Mont Pelerin of the left.⁶⁶ On the broadest level, this history of neoliberalism serves to demonstrate that the greatest recent success of the right – installing a neoliberal hegemony on a global scale – was accomplished through non–folk-political means. This means, in the first place, that the neoliberals thought in long-term visions. This was a different temporality from both election cycles and the boomand-bust of individual protests. Instead, what the left can learn from is how the MPS patiently set out explicit objectives and analysed the terrain of their historical conjunction, all in order to propose specific and effective means to alter that terrain. It set its sights on long-term change, waiting forty years for the crisis of Keynesianism and the emergence of Reagan and Thatcher. In taking this approach, the intellectuals of neoliberalism thought abstractly in terms of possibilities: what was impossible during their own time became possible later, partly through their actions and preparations. Secondly, they sought to build a counter-hegemonic project that would overturn the consensus around social democracy and Keynesian policies. They took a full-spectrum approach to changing hegemonic conditions and built up an entire ideological infrastructure that was capable of insinuating itself into every political issue and every fibre of political common sense. It overthrew the hegemonic ideas of its time. As Philip Mirowski writes, their strategic genius was

to appreciate that it is not enough to dangle a utopian vision just beyond reach as eventual motivation for political action; the cadre that triumphs is the side that can simultaneously mount a full set of seemingly unrelated political proposals that deal with the short-, medium-, and long-term horizons of action, combining regimes of knowledge and interim outcomes, so that the end result is the inexorable movement of the polis ever closer to the eventual goal. The shrewd strategy of simultaneously conducting both a short game and a long game, superficially appearing to the uninformed to be in mutual conflict but united behind the scenes by overarching theoretical aims, is probably the single most significant explanation of the triumph of neoliberal policies

during a conjuncture where their opponents had come to expect utter refutation.⁶⁷

The third major lesson for the left to learn is that the loose collective of MPS also thought expansively in spatial terms – aiming to spread the network globally, through key nodes. In the think tank, they found an organisational form adapted to the task of global intellectual hegemony. They established networks between think tanks, politicians, journalists, the media and teachers – building a consistency between these disparate groups that did not require a unity of purpose or organisational form. This entailed an admirable flexibility in their project. While neoliberalism is often denounced as being too empirically disparate to make sense as a coherent project, it is in fact the willingness to modify its ideas in light of conditions on the ground that has made it particularly powerful as an ideology.

The call for a Mont Pelerin of the left should therefore not be taken as an argument to simply copy its mode of operation. The argument is rather that the left can learn from the long-term vision, the methods of global expansion, the pragmatic flexibility and the counter-hegemonic strategy that united an ecology of organisations with a diversity of interests. The demand for a Mont Pelerin of the left is ultimately a call to build anew the hegemony of the left.

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In the present climate, around the world, almost everything that can be proposed as an alternative will appear to be either utopian or trivial. Thus our programmatic thinking is paralysed.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

This chapter marks a turning point. From the negative task of diagnosing the strategic limitations of the contemporary left, this chapter begins the positive project of elaborating an escape route from our current condition. In the following chapters, we argue that the contemporary left should reclaim modernity, build a populist and hegemonic force, and mobilise towards a post-work future. Folkpolitical attempts at prefiguration, direct action and relentless horizontalism are unlikely to achieve this, partly because they misrecognise the nature of their opponent. Capitalism is an aggressively expansive universal, from which efforts to segregate a space of autonomy are bound to fail.¹ Withdrawal, resistance, localism and autonomous spaces represent a defensive game against an uncompromising and incessantly encroaching capitalism. Moreover, particularisms can easily coexist with capitalist universalism. The innumerable cultural and political variants of capitalism do little to stifle the expansion of commodification, the creation of proletariats, and the imperative of accumulation. The much-lamented capacity of capitalism to incorporate resistance more often than not simply reveals that particularisms are, in themselves, incapable of competing against a universalism.² Indeed, given neoliberalism’s inherently expansionary nature, only an alternative expansionary and inclusive universal of some kind will be able to combat and supersede capitalism on a global scale.³ With the dynamics of accumulation at the heart of capital, a non-expansionary capitalism is an oxymoron. An ambitious leftist politics therefore cannot be satisfied with measures to defend localities. It must seek instead to construct a new future-oriented politics capable of challenging capitalism at the largest scales. It must unmask the pseudo-universality of capitalist social relations and recapture the meaning of the future.

This chapter takes a step back from the empirical and historical focus of the earlier chapters, and seeks to elaborate a philosophical ground for the chapters that follow. We argue that a key element of any future-oriented left must be to contest the idea of ‘modernity’. Whereas folk-political approaches lack an enticing vision of the future, struggles over modernity have always been struggles over what the future should look like: from the communist modernism of the early Soviet Union to the scientific socialism of postwar social democracy, and on to the sleek neoliberal efficiency of Thatcher and Reagan.⁴ What it means to be modern is not pre-established, but is instead a highly ‘contested field’.⁵ Yet, in the face of capitalism’s success at universalising itself, this term has been almost fully ceded to the right. ‘Modernisation’ has come to signify simply some dread combination of privatisation, heightened exploitation, rising inequality and inept managerialism.⁶ Likewise, notions of the future tend to revolve around ideas of ecological apocalypse, the dismantling of the welfare state, or corporate-led dystopia, rather than anything bearing the mark of utopia or universal emancipation. For many, therefore, modernity is simply a cultural expression of capitalism.⁷ From this accepted wisdom, the necessary conclusion follows: only the cancellation of modernity can bring about the end of capitalism. The result has been an anti-modern tendency within numerous social movements from the 1970s onward. Yet this mistaken conflation of modernity with the institutions of capitalism overlooks the alternative forms it can take, and the ways in which many anti-capitalist struggles rely upon its ideals.⁸ Modernity presents both a narrative for popular mobilisation and a philosophical framework for understanding the arc of history. As the term that indexes the direction of society, it must be a key discursive battleground for any leftist politics invested in creating a better world.⁹ This chapter sets out the broad philosophical stakes of such a project by examining three factors that would help to elaborate a left modernity: an image of historical progress, a universalist horizon and a commitment to emancipation.

Chapter 4

Left Modernity

In discussing ‘modernity’, we face the immediate problem of clarifying what it means. It can refer to a chronological period, typically filtered through European history with a variety of events having been posited as its origin: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution.¹⁰ For others, modernity is defined by a distinct set of practices and institutions: widespread bureaucratisation, a basic framework of liberal democracy, the differentiation of social functions, the colonisation of the non-European world, and the expansion of capitalist social relations. Yet modernity also refers to a repertoire of conceptual innovations revolving around universal ideals of progress, reason, freedom and democracy. This chapter emphasises these latter aspects: modernity names a set of concepts that have been independently developed in numerous cultures across the world, but which took on a particular resonance in Europe. These are the elements of modernity that cannot be renounced, and that form the well-spring from which more popular discourses around modernisation are generated. The conceptual ideals – such as freedom, democracy and secularism – are the source of both capitalist modernity and the struggles against it. Ideas associated with modernity animated the work of abolitionists, formed the basis of numerous African trade union struggles,¹¹ and continue today in ‘those thousands of campaigns for wages, land rights, basic health, and security, dignity, self-determination, autonomy, and so forth’.¹² In broad terms, then, whether it is explicitly recognised or not, the political struggles of today are struggles within the space of modernity and its ideals. Modernity must be contested, not rejected.¹³

HYPERSTITIONAL PROGRESS

To invoke modernity is ultimately to raise the question of the future. What should the future look like? What courses should we set? What does it mean to be contemporary? And whose future is it? Since the emergence of the term, modernity has been concerned with unravelling a circular or retrospective notion of time and introducing a rupture between the present and the past. With this break, the future is projected as being potentially dif erent from and better than the past.¹⁴ Modernity is tantamount to ‘the discovery of the future’ and has therefore found itself intimately linked with notions such as ‘progress, advance, development, emancipation, liberation, growth, accumulation, Enlightenment, embetterment, [and the] avant-garde’.¹⁵ Suggesting that history can progress through deliberate human action, it is the nature of this progress that competing definitions of modernity have struggled over.¹⁶ Historically, the left has found its natural home in being oriented towards the future. From early communist visions of technological progress, to Soviet space utopias, to the social democratic rhetoric of the ‘white heat of technology’, what set the left apart from the right was its unambiguous embrace of the future. The future was to be an improvement over the present in material, social and political terms. By contrast, the forces of the political right were, with a few notable exceptions, defined by their defence of tradition and their essentially reactionary nature.¹⁷

This situation was reversed during the rise of neoliberalism, with politicians like Thatcher commanding the rhetoric of modernisation and the future to great effect. Co-opting these terms and mobilising them into a new hegemonic common sense, neoliberalism’s vision of modernity has held sway ever since. Consequently, discussions of the left in terms of the future now seem aberrant, even absurd. With the postmodern moment, the seemingly intrinsic links between the future, modernity and emancipation were prized apart. Philosophers like Simon Critchley can now confidently assert that ‘we have to resist the idea and ideology of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of capitalist ideas of progress’.¹⁸ Such folk-political sentiments blindly accept the neoliberal common sense, preferring to shy away from grand visions and replace them with a posturing resistance. From the radical left’s discomfort with technological modernity to the social democratic left’s inability to envision an alternative world, everywhere today the future has largely been ceded to the right. A skill that the left once excelled at – building enticing visions for a better world – has deteriorated after years of neglect.

If the left is to recover a sense of progress, however, it cannot simply adopt the classic images of history headed towards a singular destination. Progress, for these approaches, was not only possible, but in fact woven as a necessity into the very fabric of history. Human societies were thought to travel along a pre-defined pathway towards a single outcome modelled after Europe. The nations of Europe were deemed to have developed capitalist modernity independently, and their historical experiences of development were considered to be both necessary and superior to those of other cultures.¹⁹ Such ideas dominated traditional European philosophy and continued on in the influential modernisation literature of the 1950s and 1960s, with their attempts to naturalise capitalism against a Soviet opponent.²⁰ Partly endorsed by both early Marxism and later Keynesian and neoliberal capitalisms, a one-size-fits-all model of historical progress positioned non-Western societies as lacking and in need of development – a position that served to justify colonial and imperial practices.²¹

From the standpoint of their philosophical critics, these notions of progress were disparaged precisely for their belief in preconceived destinations – whether in the liberal progression towards capitalist democracy or in the Marxist progression towards communism. The complex and often disastrous record of the twentieth century demonstrated conclusively that history could not be relied upon to follow any predetermined course.²² Regression was as likely as progress, genocide as possible as democratisation.²³ In other words, there was nothing inherent in the nature of history, the development of economic systems, or sequences of political struggle that could guarantee any particular outcome. From a broadly left perspective, for example, even those limited but not insignificant political gains that have been achieved – such as welfare provision, women’s rights and worker protections – can be rolled back. Moreover, even in states where nominally communist governments took power, it proved far more difficult than expected to transition from a capitalist system of production to a fully communist one.²⁴ This series of historical experiences fuelled an internal critique of European modernity by way of psychoanalysis, critical theory and poststructuralism. For the thinkers of postmodernism, modernity came to be associated with a credulous naivety.²⁵ In Jean-François Lyotard’s epochal definition, postmodernity was identified as the era that has grown to be suspicious of the grand metanarrative.²⁶ On this account, postmodernity is