InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary

To be sure, these critiques capture something important about the chronological texture of our time. And yet, the announcement of the end of grand narratives has often been viewed by those outside Europe as being absolutely of a piece with modernity.²⁷ Further, with the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, the broader impact of the cultural condition diagnosed by Lyotard has not been the decline of belief in metanarratives per se, but rather a broad disenchantment with those offered by the left. The association between capitalism and modernisation remains, while properly progressive notions of the future have wilted under postmodern critique and been quashed beneath the social wreckage of neoliberalism. Most significantly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalisation, history does appear to have a grand narrative.²⁸ Throughout the world, markets, wage labour, commodities and productivity-enhancing technologies have all expanded under the systemic imperative to accumulate. Capitalism has become the destiny of contemporary societies, happily coexisting with national differences and paying little heed to clashes between civilisations. But we can draw a distinction here between the endpoint (capitalism) and the pathway towards it. Indeed, the mutual entanglement of countries means that the European pathway (heavily reliant on exploiting colonies and slavery) is barred for many of the newly developing countries. While there are broad paradigms of development, each country has had to find its own unique way to respond to the imperatives of global capitalism. The path of capitalist modernisation is therefore instantiated in different cultures, following different trajectories and with different rhythms of development.²⁹ Uneven and combined development is the order of the day.³⁰ Progress is therefore not bound to a single European path, but is instead filtered through a variety of political and cultural constellations, all directed towards instantiating capitalist relations. Today, modernisers simply fight over which variant of capitalism to install.

Recuperating the idea of progress under such circumstances means, first and foremost, contesting the dogma of this inevitable endpoint. Capitalist modernity was never a necessary outcome, but instead a successful project driven by various classes and a systemic imperative towards accumulation and expansion. Various modernities are possible, and new visions of the future are essential for the left. Such images are a necessary supplement to any transformative political project. They give a direction to political struggles and generate a set of criteria to adjudicate which struggles to support, which movements to resist, what to invent, and so on. In the absence of images of progress, there can only be reactivity, defensive battles, local resistance and a bunker mentality – what we have characterised as folk politics. Visions of the future are therefore indispensable for elaborating a movement against capitalism. Contra the earlier thinkers of modernity, there is no necessity to progress, nor a singular pathway from which to adjudicate the extent of development. Instead, progress must be understood as hyperstitional: as a kind of fiction, but one that aims to transform itself into a truth. Hyperstitions operate by catalysing dispersed sentiment into a historical force that brings the future into existence. They have the temporal form of ‘will have been’. Such hyperstitions of progress form orienting narratives with which to navigate forward, rather than being an established or necessary property of the world. Progress is a matter of political struggle, following no pre-plotted trajectory or natural tendency, and with no guarantee of success. If the supplanting of capitalism is impossible from the standpoint of one or even many defensive stances, it is because any form of prospective politics must set out to construct the new. Pathways of progress must be cut and paved, not merely travelled along in some pre-ordained fashion; they are a matter of political

SUBVERSIVE UNIVERSALS

Any elaboration of an alternative image of progress must inevitably face up to the problem of universalism – the idea that certain values, ideas and goals may hold across all cultures.³¹ Capitalism, as we have argued, is an expansionary universal that weaves itself through multiple cultural fabrics, reworking them as it goes along. Anything less than a competing universal will end up being smothered by an all-embracing series of capitalist relations.³² Various particularisms – localised, specific forms of politics and culture – cohabitate with ease in the world of capitalism. The list of possibilities continues to grow as capitalism differentiates into Chinese capitalism, American capitalism, Brazilian capitalism, Indian capitalism, Nigerian capitalism, and so on. If defending a particularism is insufficient, it is because history shows us that the global space of universalism is a space of conflict, with each contender requiring the relative provincialisation of its competitors.³³ If the left is to compete with global capitalism, it needs to rethink the project of universalism.

But to invoke such an idea is to call forth a number of fundamental critiques directed against universalism in recent decades. While a universal politics must move beyond any local struggles, generalising itself at the global scale and across cultural variations, it is for these very reasons that it has been criticised.³⁴ As a matter of historical record, European modernity was inseparable from its ‘dark side’ – a vast network of exploited colonial dominions, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, and the plundering of colonised nations’ resources.³⁵ In this conquest, Europe presented itself as embodying the universal way of life. All other peoples were simply residual particulars that would inevitably come to be subsumed under the European way – even if this required ruthless physical violence and cognitive assault to guarantee the outcome. Linked to this was a belief that the universal was equivalent to the homogeneous. Differences between cultures would therefore be erased in the process of particulars being subsumed under the universal, creating a culture modelled in the image of European civilisation. This was a universalism indistinguishable from pure chauvinism. Throughout this process, Europe dissimulated its own parochial position by deploying a series of mechanisms to efface the subjects who made these claims – white, heterosexual, propertyowning males. Europe and its intellectuals abstracted away from their location and identity, presenting their claims as grounded in a ‘view from nowhere’.³⁶ This perspective was taken to be untarnished by racial, sexual, national or any other particularities, providing the basis for both the alleged universality of Europe’s claims and the illegitimacy of other perspectives. While Europeans could speak and embody the universal, other cultures could only be represented as particular and parochial. Universalism has therefore been central to the worst aspects of modernity’s history.

Given this heritage, it might seem that the simplest response would be to rescind the universal from our conceptual arsenal. But, for all the difficulties with the idea, it nevertheless remains necessary. The problem is partly that one cannot simply reject the concept of the universal without generating other significant problems. Most notably, giving up on the category leaves us with nothing but a series of diverse particulars. There appears no way to build meaningful solidarity in the absence of some common factor. The universal also operates as a transcendent ideal – never satisfied with any particular embodiment, and always open to striving for better.³⁷ It contains the conceptual impulse to undo its own limits. Rejecting this category also risks Orientalising other cultures, transforming them into an exotic Other. If there are only particularisms, and provincial Europe is associated with reason, science, progress and freedom, then the unpleasant implication is that non-Western cultures must be devoid of these. The old Orientalist divides are inadvertently sustained in the name of a misguided anti-universalism. On the other hand, one risks licensing all sorts of oppressions as simply the inevitable consequence of plural cultural forms. All the problems of cultural relativism reappear if there are no criteria to discern which global knowledges, politics and practices support a politics of emancipation. Given all of this, it is unsurprising to see aspects of universalism pop up throughout history and across cultures,³⁸ to see even its critics begrudgingly accept its necessity,³⁹ and to see a variety of attempts to revise the category.⁴⁰

To maintain this necessary conceptual tool, the universal must be identified not with an established set of principles and values, but rather with an empty placeholder that is impossible to fill definitively. Universals emerge when a particular comes to occupy this position through hegemonic struggle:⁴¹ the particular (‘Europe’) comes to represent itself as the universal (‘global’). It is not simply a false universal, though, as there is a mutual contamination: the universal becomes embodied in the particular, while the particular loses some of its specificities in functioning as the universal. Yet there can never be a fully achieved universalism, and universals are therefore always open to contestation from other universals. This is what we will later outline in politico-strategic terms as counter-hegemony – a project aimed at subverting an existing universalism in favour of a new order. This leads us to our second point – as counter-hegemonic, universals can have a subversive and liberating strategic function. On the one hand, a universal makes an unconditional demand – everything must be placed under its rule.⁴² Yet, on the other hand, universalism is never an achieved project (even capitalism remains incomplete). This tension renders any established hegemonic structure open to contestation and enables universals to function as insurrectionary vectors against exclusions. For example, the concept of universal human rights, problematic as it may be, has been put to use by numerous movements, ranging from local housing struggles to international justice for war crimes. Its universal and unconditional demand has been mobilised in order to highlight those who are left out of its protections and rights. Similarly, feminists have criticised certain concepts as exclusionary of women and mobilised universal claims against their constraints, as in the use of the universal idea that ‘all humans are equal’. In such cases, the particular (‘woman’) becomes a way to prosecute a critique against an existing universal (‘humanity’). Meanwhile, the previously established universal (‘humanity’) becomes revealed as a particular (‘man’).⁴³ These examples show that universals can be revitalised by the struggles that both challenge and elucidate them. In this regard, ‘to appeal to universalism as a way of asserting the superiority of Western culture is to betray universality, but to appeal to universalism as a way of dismantling the superiority of the West is to realize it’.⁴⁴ Universalism, on this account, is the product of politics, not a transcendent judge standing above the fray.

We can turn now to one final aspect of universalism, which is its heterogeneous nature.⁴⁵ As capitalism makes clear, universalism does not entail homogeneity – it does not necessarily involve converting diverse things into the same kind of thing. In fact, the power of capitalism is precisely its versatility in the face of changing conditions on the ground and its capacity to accommodate difference. A similar prospect must also hold for any leftist universal – it must be one that integrates difference rather than erasing it. What then does all of this mean for the project of modernity? It means that any particular image of modernity must be open to co-creation, and further transformation and alteration. And in a globalised world where different peoples necessarily co-exist, it means building systems to live in common despite the plurality of ways of life. Contrary to Eurocentric accounts and classic images of universalism, it must recognise the agency of those outside Europe, and the necessity of their voices in building truly planetary and universal futures. The universal, then, is an empty placeholder that hegemonic particulars (specific demands, ideals and collectives) come to occupy. It can operate as a subversive and emancipatory vector of change with respect to established universalisms, and it is heterogeneous and includes differences, rather than eliminating them.

SYNTHETIC FREEDOM

While the left has traditionally been associated with ideals of equality (manifested today in the focus on income and wealth inequalities), we believe that freedom is an equally essential principle of left modernity. This concept has been central to the political battles fought throughout the twentieth century, with the United States routinely posing as ‘the free world’ against a totalitarian enemy (in the figure of the USSR, and then the increasingly incoherent images of ‘Islamofascism’). In these hegemonic battles, capitalism has repeatedly asserted its superiority by upholding an idea of negative freedom.⁴⁶ This is the freedom of individuals from arbitrary interference by other individuals, collectives and institutions (paradigmatically, the state). Negative freedom’s insistence on the absence of interference has made it an ideal tool to wield against purportedly totalitarian opponents, yet it is a woefully emaciated concept of freedom. In practice, it translates into a modicum of political freedom from the state (ever less so in an age of digital spying and the war on terror) and the economic freedoms to sell our labour power and to choose between shiny new consumer goods.⁴⁷ Under negative freedom, the rich and the poor are considered equally free, despite the obvious differences in their capacities to act.⁴⁸ Negative freedom is entirely compatible with mass poverty, starvation, homelessness, unemployment and inequality. It is also entirely compatible with our desires being manufactured and designed by pervasive advertising. Against this limited concept of freedom, we argue for a much more substantial version.

Whereas negative freedom is concerned with assuring the formal right to avoid interference, ‘synthetic freedom’ recognises that a formal right without a material capacity is worthless.⁴⁹ Under a democracy, for example, we are all formally free to run for political leadership. But without the financial and social resources to run a campaign, this is a meaningless freedom. Equally, we are all formally free to not take a job, but most of us are nevertheless practically forced into accepting whatever is on offer.⁵⁰ In either case, various options may be theoretically available, but for all practical purposes are off the table. This reveals the significance of having the means to realise a formal right, and it is this emphasis on the means and capacities to act that is crucial for a leftist approach to freedom. As Marx and Engels wrote, ‘it is possible to achieve real liberation only in the real world and by real means’.⁵¹ Understood in this way, freedom and power become intertwined. If power is the basic capacity to produce intended effects in someone or something else,⁵² then an increase in our ability to carry out our desires is simultaneously an increase in our freedom. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are. One of the biggest indictments of capitalism is that it enables the freedom to act for only a vanishingly small few. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all of humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons.⁵³ Achieving this involves at least three different elements: the provision of the basic necessities of life, the expansion of social resources, and the development of technological capacities.⁵⁴ Taken together, these form a synthetic freedom that is constructed rather than natural, a collective historical achievement rather than the result of simply leaving people be. Emancipation is thus not about detaching from the world and liberating a free soul, but instead a matter of constructing and cultivating the right attachments.

In the first place, synthetic freedom entails the maximal provision of the basic resources needed for a meaningful life: things like income, time, health and education. Without these resources, most people are left formally but not really free. Understood in this way, rising global inequality is revealed as an equally massive disparity in freedom. One initial step in resolving this is the classic social democratic goal of providing the common goods of society, such as healthcare, housing, childcare, education, transport and internet access.⁵⁵ The liberal idea in which these basic necessities of life are supposedly enhanced by freedom of choice in the market ignores the actual (financial and cognitive) burdens involved in making such choices.⁵⁶ In a world of synthetic freedom, high-quality public goods would be provided for us, leaving us to get on with our lives rather than worrying about which healthcare provider to go with. Beyond the social democratic imagination, however, lie two further essentials of existence: time and money. Free time is the basic condition for self-determination and the development of our capacities.⁵⁷ Equally, synthetic freedom demands the provision of a basic income to all in order for them to be fully free.⁵⁸ Such a policy not only provides the monetary resources for living under capitalism, but also makes possible an increase in free time. It provides us with the capacity to choose our lives: we can experiment and build unconventional lives, choosing to foster our cultural, intellectual and physical sensibilities instead of blindly working to survive.⁵⁹ Time and money therefore represent key components of freedom in any substantive sense.

A full image of synthetic freedom must also seek to expand our capacities beyond what is currently possible. If it is to avoid the problem of manipulating people into contentment with the status quo, synthetic freedom must be open to whatever people might desire.⁶⁰ That is to say, freedom cannot simply be equated with making existing options viable, but instead must be open to the largest possible set of options. In this, collective resources are essential.⁶¹ Processes of social reasoning, for instance, can enable common understandings of the world, creating a ‘we’ in the process that has much greater powers to act than individuals alone.⁶² Equally, language is effectively cognitive scaffolding that enables us to leverage symbolic thought to expand our horizons.⁶³ The development, deepening and expansion of knowledge enable us to imagine and achieve capacities that are otherwise unattainable. As we acquire technical knowledge of our built environment and scientific knowledge of the natural world, and come to understand the fluid tendencies of the social world, we gain greater powers to act. As Louis Althusser put it,

Just as knowledge of the laws of light has never prevented men from seeing … so knowledge of the laws that govern the development of societies does not prevent men from living, or take the place of labour, love and struggle. On the contrary: knowledge of the laws of light has produced the glasses which have transformed men’s sight, just as knowledge of the laws of 64 social development has given rise to endeavours which have transformed and enlarged the horizon of human existence.

The anti-intellectualism that permeates the political right, and increasingly infects the critical left, is therefore a retrogression of the worst kind. Healthy scepticism is transformed into an abdication of our commitments to expand freedom. This retrogression in relation to knowledge also occurs in the fantasies of immediate and unbound freedoms in practice. The voluntaristic image that sees mediations, institutions and abstractions as opposed to freedom simply confuses the absence of artifice with the full expression of freedom. Needless to say, this is misguided. Collective action, with its expansion of synthetic freedom, is more often than not carried out through complex divisions of labour, mediated chains of engagement and abstract institutional structures. The social aspect of synthetic freedom is therefore not a return to some human desire for face-to-face sociality and simple cooperation, but instead a call for collective, complex and mediated self-determination.

Finally, if we are to expand our capacities to act, the development of technology must play a central role. As has always been the case, ‘technology is the source of our options [and] options are the basis of a future that keeps us above the level of pawn’.⁶⁵ Our level of freedom is highly dependent upon the historical conditions of scientific and technological development.⁶⁶ The artifices that emerge from these fields both expand existing capacities for action and create entirely new ones in the process. The full development of synthetic freedom therefore requires a reconfiguration of the material world in accordance with the drive to expand our capacities for action. It demands experimentation with collective and technological augmentation, and a spirit that refuses to accept any barrier as natural and inevitable.⁶⁷ Cyborg augmentations, artificial life, synthetic biology and technologically mediated reproduction are all examples of this elaboration.⁶⁸ The overall aim must therefore be picked out as an unrelenting project to unbind the necessities of this world and transform them into materials for the further construction of freedom.⁶⁹ Such an image of emancipation can never be satisfied with or condensed into a static society, but will instead continually strain beyond any limitations. Freedom is a synthetic enterprise, not a natural gift.

Underlying this idea of emancipation is a vision of humanity as a transformative and constructible hypothesis: one that is built through theoretical and practical experimentation and elaboration.⁷⁰ There is no authentic human essence to be realised, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organic wholeness to be achieved. Alienation is a mode of enablement, and humanity is an incomplete vector of transformation. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time. As Sadie Plant puts it,

It’s always been problematic to talk about the liberation of women because that presupposes that we know what women are. If both women and men have been organised into the forms we currently take, then we don’t want to liberate what we are now, if you see what I mean … It’s not a question of liberation so much as a question of evolution – or engineering. There’s a gradual re-engineering of what it can be to be a woman and we don’t yet know what it is. We have to find out.⁷¹

What must therefore be articulated is a humanism that is not defined in advance. This is a project of self-realisation, but one without a pre-established endpoint.⁷² It is only through undergoing the process of revision and construction that humanity can come to know itself. This means revising the human both theoretically and practically, engaging in new modes of being and new forms of sociality as practical ramifications of making ‘the human’ explicit.⁷³ It is to undertake an interventionist approach to the human that is opposed to those humanisms that protect a parochial image of the human at all costs.⁷⁴ These interventions range from individual bodily experimentation to collective political mobilisations against restricted images of the human, and everything in between.⁷⁵ It means liberating ourselves from the decrepit economic image of humanity that capitalist modernity has installed, and inventing a new humanity. Emancipation, under this vision, would therefore mean increasing the capacity of humanity to act according to whatever its desires might become. And universal emancipation would be the insistent and maximal extension of this goal to the entirety of our species. It is in this sense that universal emancipation lies at the heart of a modern left.⁷⁶

We have seen that, without a conception of the future, the left becomes bound to a defence of

tradition, and to protecting bunkers of resistance. What, then, would a left modernity look like? It would be one that offered enticing and expansive visions of a better future. It would operate with a universal horizon, mobilise a substantial concept of freedom, and make use of the most advanced technologies in order to achieve its emancipatory goals. Rather than a Eurocentric view of the future, it would rely upon a global set of voices articulating and negotiating in practice what a common and plural future might be. Whether operating through slave revolts, workers’ struggles, anti-colonial uprisings or women’s movements, the critics of sedimented universalisms have always been essential agents in modernity’s construction of the future; they are the ones who have continually revised, revolted and created a ‘universalism from below’.⁷⁷ Yet to truly enable the liberation of futures in the plural, the current global order premised on waged labour and capitalist accumulation will need to be transcended first. A left modernity will, in other words, require building a postcapitalist and postwork platform upon which multiple ways of living could emerge and flourish. The next two chapters will set out both the necessity and desirability of this particular vision of the future.

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The Future Isn’t Working

It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer, that he is a pauper: a virtual pauper.

Karl Marx

We have so far argued that the contemporary left tends towards a folk politics that is incapable of turning the tide against global capitalism. In its place, the left needs to reclaim the contested legacy of modernity and advance visions for a new future. It is imperative, however, that its vision of a new future be grounded upon actually existing tendencies. This chapter sets out a conjunctural analysis of contemporary capitalism, viewed through the lens of work. On the basis of this analysis, the next chapter will argue for the desirability of a future without work. What does it mean to call for the end of work? By ‘work’, we mean our jobs – or wage labour: the time and effort we sell to someone else in return for an income. This is time that is not under our control, but under our bosses’, managers and employers’ control. A full one-third of our adult lives is spent in submission to them. Work can be framed in contrast to ‘leisure’, typically associated with the weekend and holidays. But leisure should not be confused with idleness, as many of the things we enjoy most involve immense amounts of effort. Learning a musical instrument, reading literature, socialising with friends and playing sports all involve varying degrees of effort – but these are things that we freely choose to do. A post-work world is therefore not a world of idleness; rather, it is a world in which people are no longer bound to their jobs, but free to create their own lives. Such a project draws upon a long line of thinkers – Marxists, Keynesians, feminists, black nationalists and anarchists alike – who have rejected the centrality of work.¹ These thinkers have, each in their own way, sought to liberate humanity from the drudgery of work, the dependence on wage labour, and the submission of our lives to a boss. They have struggled to open up the ‘realm of freedom’ from which humanity can continue its project of emancipation.²

While the broad aims of this project have a long series of precedents, recent developments in capitalism give renewed urgency to these issues. Rapid automation, expanding surplus populations and the continued imposition of austerity all heighten the need to rethink work and prepare for the new crises of capitalism. Just as the Mont Pelerin Society foreshadowed the crisis of Keynesianism and prepared a full-spectrum set of responses, so too should the left prepare for the coming crisis of work and surplus populations. While the effects of the 2008 crisis continue to reverberate throughout the world, it is too late to take advantage of that moment; all around us we can see that capital has recovered and consolidated itself in a renewed and sharpened form. The left must instead prepare for the next opportunity.³

This chapter explains why a post-work world is an increasingly pressing option. The first section outlines the emerging crisis of work – the breakdown of stable jobs in developed countries, the rise of unemployment and surplus populations, and the collapse of ‘work’ as a disciplinary measure holding society together. We then turn to the various symptoms of this crisis as it is manifested not only in unemployment figures, but also in increased precarity, jobless recoveries, growing slums and expanding urban marginality. All around us we can see the effects of this shift bubbling up in new social conflicts and problems. Finally, we look at the various ways in which capitalism’s tendency to produce surplus populations has been managed by the state. Today, the crisis of work threatens to overrun these traditional tools of control, laying the social conditions for the shift to a post-work world.

Chapter 5

VIRTUAL PAUPERS

While work is common to every society, under capitalism it takes on historically unique qualities. In pre-capitalist societies, work was necessary, but people had shared access to land, subsistence farming and the necessary means of survival. Peasants were poor but self-sufficient, and survival was not dependent on working for someone else. Capitalism changed all this. Through the process called primitive accumulation, pre-capitalist workers were uprooted from their land and dispossessed of their means of subsistence.⁴ Peasants struggled against this and continued to survive on the margins of the emerging capitalist world,⁵ and it eventually took violent force and harsh new legal systems to impose wage labour on the population. Peasants, in other words, had to be made into a proletariat. This new figure of the proletariat was defined by its lack of access to the means of production or subsistence, and its requirement for wage labour in order to survive.⁶ This means that the ‘proletariat’ is not just the ‘working class’ nor is it defined by an income level, profession or culture. Rather, the proletariat is simply that group of people who must sell their labour power to live – whether they are employed or not.⁷ And the history of capitalism is the history of the world’s population being transformed into proletarian existence through the advancing dispossession of the peasantry. With the recent integration of post-communist countries and the rise of China and India, the global proletariat has seen a ‘great doubling’, with 1.5 billion more people now reliant upon waged work for survival.⁸ But with the emergence of the proletariat, there also comes a new form of unemployment. In fact, unemployment as we understand it today was an invention of capitalism.⁹ Having been torn away from their means of subsistence, for the first time in history a new ‘surplus population’ emerges that is unable to find waged work.¹⁰ While capitalism may exploit the employed working class, as Joan Robinson once wrote, ‘The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.’¹¹

For the most part, the size of this surplus expands and contracts in tandem with economic cycles. All things being equal, as economies grow, workers are drawn from the surplus and into waged labour, the unemployment level decreases, and the labour market tightens. At a certain point, however, economic demand stalls, wages begin to cut into profitability, or workers become too politically bold. For reasons of profitability, or inflation,¹² or simply to regain political power over the working class, workers are laid off.¹³ The surplus subsequently expands, held in reserve for the next cycle of growth. Yet these cyclical mechanisms only partly explain our current situation, particularly given that wage pressures have been stagnant for decades, inflation has remained stable, and the labour movement has been devastated. The cyclical account based on economic demand certainly accounts for the depth of the 2008 crisis, but it does not explain longer-term changes in the labour market such as the rise in precarity, the emergence of jobless recoveries, and the growth of non-capitalist labour markets. To understand the current conjuncture fully, other tendencies therefore need to be taken into account. These are the mechanisms that produce a secular trend towards a larger and larger surplus population, independently of cyclical boom-and-bust patterns.¹⁴ It is these that pose the biggest threat to the reproduction of capitalist social relations.

Today, the production of surplus populations through technological change has increasingly hypnotised the media’s imagination. While this attention has been focused on fears of an imminent job apocalypse carried out by vast armies of robots,¹⁵ technological developments can also make older processes more productive without automation (for example, advances in agriculture). In either case, productivity enhancements mean that capitalism needs less labour to produce the same output. Automation appears as the most imminent threat, however, with estimates suggesting that anything from 47 to 80 per cent of current jobs are likely to be automatable in the next two decades.¹⁶ But estimates based solely on advances in technology are insufficient to predict growing unemployment. After all, despite continually rising productivity, employment has remained relatively stable throughout the history of capitalism. With some painful delays, new jobs have been created to replace those that were lost. Yet sanguinity based on past experiences overlooks the political and contingent basis of this historical record: government policies, workers’ movements, the gendered division of the labour force, and simultaneous reductions in the work week have all played a role in sustaining employment in the past. As a result, additional qualifications are necessary to understand under what conditions technological change will lead to increased unemployment. A first qualification argues that because increased productivity lowers production prices, unemployment only increases when demand fails to grow enough in response to these lower prices.¹⁷ If the cheaper prices spark more sales, the company may expand rather than cut workers. A similar argument suggests that technological developments often create new industries, and that this potentially creates replacement jobs.¹⁸ Since the introduction of the personal computer, for instance, over 1,500 new job types have emerged.¹⁹ In either of these cases, consumers buy more goods (because they are cheaper or new) and others are kept employed. The same logic holds for services. The rollout of ATMs, for example, led to fewer bank tellers being employed in each branch – but banks responded to the cheaper costs by opening more branches and expanding their market share.²⁰ The result was that the number of bank tellers remained steady (though this may be changing today, as banks move their services online).²¹ In all of these cases, the logic is that even if technology eliminates some jobs, demand grows sufficiently to create new jobs. In a second situation, technological change reaches such a speed that an increasingly large portion of the population becomes unable to keep up with the skills needed.²² In this case, even if new demand can be created, there simply are not enough capable workers to take up these jobs – the supply of labour falters.²³ The speed of technological change and diffusion may render entire segments of the population as an obsolete surplus. In a third situation, labour-saving technologies can be of such general use that they diffuse across the entire economy, dampening the overall demand for labour.²⁴ In this circumstance, even if new industries are created, they will require increasingly less labour because these technologies have a wide range of applicability.²⁵ If any of the above conditions hold, then technological change can lead to increased unemployment. As we will see, there are good reasons to believe a number of these conditions do hold. But while technological unemployment is the most prominent reason today for swelling surplus populations, it is not the only one.

Another mechanism that actively changes the size of the surplus is one we have already noted: primitive accumulation.²⁶ This is not just an origin story of capitalism, but also an ongoing process that involves the transformation of pre-capitalist subsistence economies into capitalist economies. Through various means, a poor but self-sufficient peasantry is forced off its land and made to rely on wage labour to survive. As have seen, with globalisation this process has accelerated and led to a doubling of the proletariat. The supply of rural labour that China can draw upon is dwindling, but the integration of Africa and South Asia means the worldwide supply of labour continues to increase at a rapid pace.²⁷ The outcome of this is a vast new global labour force, dependent upon the creation of equally vast numbers of new jobs. Therefore, independently of any technological changes in capitalist production, surplus population have increased because of this new labour supply. In addition to this, a third mechanism involves the active exclusion of a particular population from capitalist wage labour. Both in the past and present, this has predominantly involved the exclusion of women and racial minorities from the job market.²⁸ While the problems of slavery, racism and sexism are not reducible to capitalist imperatives – indeed, they have separate logics of domination – these phenomena have also indirectly served capitalist goals.²⁹ Unfree labour in the form of slavery is well documented as a key element of capitalism’s origins (and continues today),³⁰ and the unpaid labour of many women and racialised prison populations continues to act as a source of hyper-exploitation.³¹ On a more modest level, unemployment continues to be distributed unevenly across distinctions of race, gender and geography (witness the devastation of post-industrial cities, for instance). Certain groups are more likely to be the last hired during a boom, and the first fired during a recession.³² The vulnerabilities that surplus populations face are therefore differentiated between sexes and races; an economic logic of exploitation and expulsion intersecting with other logics of oppression. But in all of these cases, surplus populations are concentrated within a particular group as a result of political, legal and social structures. It is not, in other words, technological change or primitive accumulation that is responsible for their difficulties in finding waged labour. But these mechanisms often intersect with each other: some people are more likely to be affected by technological change,³³ and the incorporation of new surplus populations usually involves racial coding.³⁴ In a myriad of ways, these mechanisms – technological change, primitive accumulation and active exclusion – generate an expanding number of proletariat outside the formal workforce.