InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary

What, then, is the composition of the surplus population today? Broadly, we can divide it into four different strata: the capitalist segment, the non-capitalist segment, the latent segment and the inactive segment.³⁵ The first segment we are all familiar with: the unemployed and underemployed, situated within the normal capitalist labour market. This group has access to at least some minimal state welfare, is actively seeking a(nother) job, and therefore exerts pressure on the wages of the employed. Yet, for most of the world, being ‘unemployed’ is a relative luxury.³⁶ In the absence of any social safety net, most people must constantly work to survive, and are therefore forced into creating new subsistence economies alongside capitalism.³⁷ This is the non-capitalist segment of the surplus population, filled with people who have been dispossessed of their means of subsistence³⁸ but have few social safety nets (either community- or state-based) to allow them to go without work for long. These subsistence economies produce goods for the market – small trinkets, for example – but they are organised as non-capitalist forms of production in that they do not seek to accumulate.³⁹ These types of economies increasingly dominate the labour market of the developing world, ranging from 30 to 80 per cent of the working population in any given country.⁴⁰ A third latent group exists primarily in pre-capitalist economic formations that can be readily mobilised into the capitalist labour market. This includes the reservoir of proto-proletarians (including peasants), but this group also includes unwaged domestic labourers, as well as salaried professionals who are under threat of being returned to the proletariat, often through deskilling (for example, medical professionals, lawyers and academics).⁴¹ The importance of this group is that it forms an additional reservoir of labour for capitalism when existing labour markets are tight.⁴² Finally, in addition to the other strata, a vast number of people are considered economically inactive (including the discouraged, the disabled and students).⁴³ Overall, determining the precise size and nature of the global surplus population is difficult with existing data, and subject to fluctuations as individuals move in and out of categories, but a variety of measures converge to suggest it significantly outnumbers the active working class.⁴⁴

This is the crisis of work that capitalism faces in the coming years and decades: a lack of formal or decent jobs for the growing numbers of the proletarian population. In an earlier generation, the identification of surplus populations as a problem was an idea that was often derided. During the ‘golden age’ of capitalism, low unemployment, stable jobs, rising wages and rising living standards meant the idea that capitalism produced a surplus humanity enjoyed little material support. Yet, while most leftist thinkers turned to the economic problems of growth for capitalism, an occluded intellectual tradition has instead emphasised the social reproduction problem of surplus populations. It is no surprise that it was often those outside the functioning capitalist order who saw the potential in this surplus class.⁴⁵ Writing from Algiers in the 1970s, Eldridge Cleaver presciently argued that ‘When workers become permanently unemployed, displaced by the streamlining of production, they revert back to their basic [proletarian] condition’ and that ‘the real revolutionary element of our era is the [proletariat]’.⁴⁶ From the capitalist core, Paul Mattick called it ‘the most important of all capitalistic contradictions’.⁴⁷ And more recently, communisation theorists have made important contributions to analysing the crisis of wage labour, and Fredric Jameson has argued that Capital ‘is not a book about politics, and not even a book about labour: it is a book about unemployment’.⁴⁸ Indeed, it is often forgotten that Marx argued that the expulsion of surplus populations was part of ‘the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation’.⁴⁹ In the wake of the 2008 crisis and continued sluggishness in the labour market, it is no surprise that the issue of surplus populations should emerge again. With technological change proceeding apace, the already large numbers of surplus humanity look set to swell. The very social basis of capitalism as an economic system – the relationship between the proletariat and employers, with waged work mediating between them – is crumbling.

THE MISERY OF NOT BEING EXPLOITED

As we have seen, very little of the global labour force is employed in formal wage labour, and this number has only decreased in the wake of the 2008 crisis. The most obvious symptoms of this rising surplus population are embodied in the long-term changes in unemployment statistics. In the immediate postwar era, unemployment as low as 1 to 2 per cent was once considered a viable goal of developed economies: during the 1950s and 1960s, the UK and the United States saw unemployment hover around 2 per cent, while Germany even saw unemployment dip below 1 per cent.⁵⁰ Each decade since has seen a ratcheting up of the acceptable level of unemployment, combined with decreases in employment growth.⁵¹ Today, the Federal Reserve considers 5.5 per cent to be the optimal long-term unemployment rate – more than doubling the postwar levels.⁵² In the United States the percentage of men not working has tripled since the late 1960s, and the percentage of women has also increased, despite starting at a much higher level.⁵³ The proportion of people employed has dropped precipitously, and the overall surplus population has been growing consistently in recent decades.⁵⁴ At a global level, the unemployment rate has continued to rise after the 2008 crisis, both in absolute and relative terms.⁵⁵ The global rate of job creation has remained significantly lower, has largely generated part-time jobs, and is forecast to continue its sluggish trend.⁵⁶ Meanwhile, labour force participation rates have been declining globally for decades, and are set to continue falling for decades more.⁵⁷ Yet these statistics are only the tip of the iceberg. The crisis of work and the effects of surplus populations are expressed not only in these direct measures, but also through a series of more subtle and indirect effects.

One of these – increased precarity – has come to exemplify the neoliberal labour market in developed economies.⁵⁸ Relative to the stable and well-paying careers of earlier generations, today’s jobs typically involve more casual working hours, low and stagnant wages, decreasing job protections and widespread insecurity.⁵⁹ This trend towards precarity has a number of causes, but one of the primary functions of a surplus population is that it enables capitalists to place extra pressure on the lucky few who have found a job.⁶⁰ As the surplus grows and the labour market slackens, more workers seek after fewer jobs, and power passes over to the employers. The threat of moving a factory, for instance, is only possible with a global labour glut. The result is that employers gain strength over workers and the quality of jobs decreases (supplementing the quantity measured by unemployment statistics). This is exactly what we have seen in the past few decades. Throughout Europe the intensity of work, in terms of both speed and demands, has increased.⁶¹ The shift to justin-time supply chains has exacerbated the demands of work, while new surveillance technologies are being forced upon labourers (in some cases, even monitoring them outside of work hours).⁶² The decline in the quality of jobs can also be seen in the cutting of work hours, rather than the outright elimination of jobs. We can see this in the small but growing number of part-time, flexible and freelance jobs over the past thirty years.⁶³ For instance, the relatively low unemployment levels of the UK after the 2008 crisis are largely a result of more self-employed people living off poverty wage s.⁶⁴ In the United States, more than 6.5 million people are forced to work part-time despite desiring full time work.⁶⁵ This casualisation also involves innovations such as crowd-sourced tasks, temporary staffing agencies and zero-hours contracts, along with the harsh working conditions and lack of benefits that accompany them. In the UK, for example, it is estimated that nearly 5 per cent of the working population is presently on zero-hours contracts.⁶⁶ Surplus populations have also put downward pressure on wages. Estimates suggest that every 1 per cent increase in labour market slack is associated with a 1.6 per cent increase in income inequality.⁶⁷ The stagnation of real wages and the declining share of income going to labour are both tied to an excess supply of labour,⁶⁸ and most economists believe automation and the globalisation of the proletariat are central reasons why wages have been stagnant in recent decades.⁶⁹ All of these trends have continued since the 2008 crisis as well, with slow real wage growth across the G20, and outright decline in the UK.⁷⁰ The slow growth of wages leads precarity to also be expressed in the anxiety over high levels of consumer debt and low levels of personal savings.⁷¹ In the United States, for example, a full 34 per cent of fulltime workers live paycheque-to-paycheque, while in the UK, 35 per cent of people could not live off their savings for more than a month.⁷² And at its most vicious, precarity is indicated by a rise in depression, anxiety and suicides – an ‘excess’ that goes uncounted in traditional economic measures.⁷³ Indeed, unemployment is associated with a fifth of all global suicides, and this has only worsened in the wake of the financial crisis.⁷⁴

In addition to precarity, surplus populations and technological automation help to make sense of a recent labour market phenomenon: the emergence of ‘jobless recoveries’, in which economic growth returns after a crisis but job growth remains anaemic.⁷⁵ Such recoveries have become standard for the US economy,⁷⁶ and since the 1990s the trend has been towards longer and longer jobless recoveries.⁷⁷ The current crisis is no exception, with more than a million full-time jobs yet to return, and forecasts suggesting that US unemployment will remain above pre-crisis levels until 2024.⁷⁸ This is a global phenomenon as well, with the world economy creating jobs so slowly that the number of jobs will remain significantly below pre-crisis levels for at least a decade.⁷⁹ While their cause is ultimately still a mystery, jobless recoveries appear to be closely related to automation.⁸⁰ In fact, the only occupations that have experienced jobless recoveries are those that have been under threat from automation in recent decades – semi-skilled, routine jobs.⁸¹ Moreover, these job losses have occurred almost entirely during and in the wake of recessions.⁸² In other words, crisis periods are when automatable jobs disappear, never to be heard from again. If automation accelerates over the coming decades, these problems are likely to intensify – with capital using periods of crisis to permanently eliminate such jobs.⁸³ The slow return ofjobs also expresses itself as a rise in long-term unemployment, whereby entire groups of people become increasingly segregated from the normal labour market. Since the most recent crisis, the average length of unemployment has doubled and remained stubbornly high.⁸⁴ These extended periods of unemployment suggest that a structural problem is responsible – that is to say, a problem that takes longer for unemployed workers to adapt to, such as retraining for an entirely new skill set. Workers laid off from an area like retail will find it difficult to immediately step into a job in growth sectors like programming. Meanwhile, when the long-term unemployed do find a job, they are more likely to enter at the margins of the labour market, with lower pay and more temporary work.⁸⁵ Jobless recoveries, in other words, exacerbate the problems of precarity, and increasingly segregate out a portion of the population as permanently underemployed. Ultimately, unemployment and the threat of it are becoming the norms for the labour force.

In some urban areas, joblessness and segregation from the normal labour market have long been features of everyday existence. In the banlieues of Paris, the ghettos of the United States and the rising spaces of suburban poverty, entire communities have been economically separated from broader economic trends, stagnating even during periods of growth.⁸⁶ More often than not, these segregated spaces are also divided along racial lines, with deliberate neglect and outright exclusion transforming these communities into increasingly harsh areas of poor social cohesion, inadequate housing and high unemployment.⁸⁷ The historical origin of these spaces is well known: racism, slavery and the active exclusion carried out by policy choices, physical violence and white migration.⁸⁸ In early-twentiethcentury America, for example, the mechanisation of agriculture led the rural black population to migrate and concentrate in urban areas. Yet jobs were hard to come by, as continued racism excluded them from working in textiles or manufacturing. (The racialisation of the surplus population also enabled owners to manipulate the white working class, keeping wages low and preventing unionisation.)⁸⁹ As capitalism grew in the postwar era, manufacturing jobs eventually opened up to the black population, and by the mid 1950s rates of black and white youth unemployment were broadly similar.⁹⁰ But then the globalisation of the labour supply wreaked havoc on low-skilled black workers. With manufacturing jobs shipped overseas or subject to automation, these workers were disproportionately affected by deindustrialisation.⁹¹ Industrial jobs left the urban centres and were replaced by service work often located in distant suburban areas.⁹² The urban ghettos were left to rot, becoming concentrated hubs of long-term joblessness.⁹³ They became poverty traps, devoid ofjobs, with little community support and a proliferation of underground economies.⁹⁴ Entire communities were cast aside from the machinery of capitalism and left to fend for themselves with whatever means could be scraped together. People seeking an income were forced into off-the-books work, new businesses turned to loan sharks after being denied by white-owned banks, and increasing desperation led to outright illicit activities.⁹⁵

Mirroring the concentration ofjoblessness in the urban margins, developing economies have had to deal with the expansion and concentration of surplus populations in slums, favelas and shantytowns. Globally, these have swelled to unprecedented levels as the urban workforce is tossed aside into the informal and marginal economies.⁹⁶ As one UN report puts it, ‘the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade’.⁹⁷ The primary cause behind this expansion of slums has been primitive accumulation. Spurred on, first by colonialism and then by structural adjustment policies, the peasantry in many developing countries has been forced off their lands via global competition, rapid industrialisation and rampaging climate change. Like the earlier European experience of industrialisation, dispossessed rural workers have migrated to urban areas to find jobs. And in Europe, too, this process sometimes led to slum-dwelling and destitution for the new urban proletariat.⁹⁸ But this is where the similarities end, as in Europe the transition involved creating sufficient numbers of jobs, the emergence of a strong industrial working class, and the eventual provision of housing for migrants.⁹⁹ Under conditions of postcolonial development, this narrative has been broken. Rather than a scarcity of labour, recent industrialisation has occurred in the context of a large and global labour force.¹⁰⁰ The result has been little development of anything resembling a traditional working class, continually weak job prospects and a lack of adequate housing.¹⁰¹ New urban migrants have been left in a permanent state of transition between peasantry and proletarianisation, and sometimes in seasonal circulation between rural existence and urban poverty.¹⁰² Slums and other improvised housing therefore represent a dual expulsion from the land and from the formal economy.¹⁰³ This surplus humanity, having been deprived of its traditional means of subsistence yet left without employment, has been forced to create its own non-capitalist subsistence economies. Much of the labour performed here is informal: low-paid, insecure, irregular and without state support. In these economies, production is typically organised in non-capitalist forms but remains directed towards commodity production – to selling goods on the market, rather than for individual use. Mediation by the market distinguishes these postcolonial subsistence economies from pre-capitalist subsistence economies,¹⁰⁴ even though they both function as a desperate means of survival.¹⁰⁵

But while primitive accumulation is responsible for the origins of these slums, it is ‘premature deindustrialisation’ that looks set to consolidate their existence. If previous periods of industrialisation at least had the benefit of providing enough factory jobs for the new proletariat, premature deindustrialisation threatens to eliminate this traditional pathway entirely. Technological and economic developments now enable countries to virtually leapfrog the industrialisation phase, which means that developing economies are now deindustrialising at much lower rates of per capita income and with much lower shares of manufacturing employment.¹⁰⁶ China is a good example of this, with manufacturing employment in decline,¹⁰⁷ labour struggles becoming more confident,¹⁰⁸ real wages surging 109 and demographic limits leading to a focus on ‘technological upgrading [and] productivity enhancements’ in order to maintain growth.¹¹⁰ The automation of factories is at the leading edge of this deindustrialisation trend, with China already the biggest purchaser of industrial robots, and expected to soon have more industrial robots in operation than either Europe or North America.¹¹¹ The factory of the world is going robotic. Deindustrialisation can also be seen in ‘reshoring’, where manufacturing returns to developed economies in jobless, automated forms.¹¹² These deindustrialisation trends are taking hold across the developing economies of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and most of Asia.¹¹³ Even in countries where manufacturing employment has increased in absolute terms, there have been significant decreases in the labour-intensity of the process.¹¹⁴ The result of all of this is not only an incomplete transition to a significant working class, but also the stymying of the expected employment path for the workforce. Premature deindustrialisation is leaving most of the world’s urban proletariat dispossessed of its agricultural livelihood and without the opportunity to be hired for manufacturing jobs. Some hold out the hope that an emerging service sector will absorb the surplus populations, yet this appears increasingly unlikely. Even in India, the centre of service and high-tech outsourcing, only a small portion of the labour force works in the information and communication technology sector.¹¹⁵ More importantly, the potential of service jobs is constrained by the newest wave of automation, which is likely to eliminate the lowskilled, low-wage service jobs that have traditionally been outsourced – clerical work, call-centre work or data entry, for example.¹¹⁶ As this non-routine cognitive labour is increasingly automated, what may occur is a premature shift away from a service-based economy – on top of premature deindustrialisation. What this means is that the maintenance of large portions of humanity within slums and informal, non-capitalist economies is likely to be consolidated by emerging technological trends. In the end, while unemployment measures give us some sense of the size of the surplus population problem, it is precarity, jobless recoveries and mass urban marginality that truly express the squeeze on the global labour market.

REVENGE OF THE SURPLUS

Larger surpluses of labour are, on the one hand, beneficial to capitalist interests. They serve as a disciplinary tool against the working class (particularly when filtered through racism, nationalism and sexism) and as a reserve to call upon in times of growth. They reduce wages, sow competition among workers and shackle the ambitions of the proletariat. These are among the reasons behind a gradual drive to incorporate the world’s population into a global labour force, fostered by imperialism and globalisation.¹¹⁷ On the other hand, capital requires a particular type of surplus population: cheap, docile and pliable.¹¹⁸ Without these characteristics, this excess of humanity becomes a problem for capital. Not content to lie down and accept its disposability, it makes itself heard through riots, mass migration, criminality, and all sorts of actions that disrupt the existing order. Capitalism therefore has simultaneously to produce a disciplined surplus and deploy violence and coercion against those who resist.

One of the principal ways to manage the unruly surplus has been to champion the social democratic ideal of full employment, whereby every physically capable (male) worker has a job. In support of this ideal, economic policies aim to reincorporate the surplus into capitalism as disciplined and waged workers, secured by a hegemonic consensus between the representatives of labour and capital. The apogee of this approach was the postwar period, when working-class struggle and conservative concern with social order positioned full employment as a necessary economic goal.¹¹⁹ In this brief ‘golden age’ of capitalism, unemployment was kept to a minimum, and capital had to seek out pre-capitalist populations around the world in order to expand and accumulate.¹²⁰ For the most part, job growth was achieved through healthy economic growth that increased the demand for labour.¹²¹ Historically, growth of the national economy has often been important in warding off the effects of technological unemployment – either by increasing the output of existing industries or by inventing new industries to employ the displaced workers. For instance, during the latter half of the 1800s, the rise in capital goods output created jobs that offset the surplus population newly released from the agricultural sector.¹²² In the prewar and postwar eras, growth in manufacturing jobs was sustained by the rise of mass consumerism and surges in government military spending.¹²³ Today, we can see similar attempts at creating new markets through accumulation by dispossession – turning public or common goods into privatised (and monetised) commodities. If increases in labour demand are to be successful, however, they require the right supply of labour – which means an increasingly high-skilled workforce. Education has been the primary way to achieve this, with, for example, secondary education having its origins in efforts to produce more skilled workers. The demand to educate workers for jobs held wide support during the high unemployment period of the Great Depression,¹²⁴ and early neoliberals went so far as to argue that education was necessary only to adapt human beings to the constant changes in the economy.¹²⁵ Today, the growth areas of the labour market tend to be in high-skilled, non-routine and cognitive jobs.¹²⁶ This means any attempt at full employment increasingly requires new skills from workers – a demand that helps explain the aggressive efforts to reduce higher education to glorified job training.¹²⁷ The overall societal aim becomes the production of competitive subjects undergoing constant self-improvement in an endless effort to be deemed ‘employable’.¹²⁸ The demands that workers be constantly retraining and that policies support healthy economic growth are necessary components to the drive for full employment.¹²⁹

But while calls for more jobs remain ideologically pervasive, the practical viability of full employment has largely disappeared. With tight labour markets in the postwar era, the ensuing strength of the working class increasingly became a problem for capitalism. The crisis of stagflation in the 1970s, in particular, presented an opportunity to reverse the priority given to employment. Class pressure and its effects – work stoppages, wage inflation, declining profits – were a major factor in central banks’ decisions to raise interest rates, in the hope of reducing aggregate demand and increasing unemployment.¹³⁰ Indeed, Thatcher’s chief economic advisor eventually admitted that the war against inflation was in fact a proxy war against the working class.¹³¹ The tight monetary policy of the early 1980s was therefore precisely an effort to undermine the power of the working class, increase unemployment to a level acceptable for capital, and end the dream of full employment. Yet even if full employment had not been attacked, it requires strong economic growth – a condition that looks increasingly unlikely for the global economy. In recent years, global growth has remained significantly lower than during the pre-crisis period.¹³² Across the political spectrum, economists are warning that fundamental changes to the economy mean growth may have settled into a permanently lower state.¹³³ Moreover, firms that are leading growth sectors – such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – simply do not create jobs on the scale of classic firms like Ford and GM.¹³⁴ In fact, new industries currently only employ 0.5 per cent of the American workforce – hardly an inspiring record of job creation.¹³⁵ And after a steady decline, the average new business creates 40 per cent fewer jobs than it did twenty years ago.¹³⁶ The old social democratic plan to encourage employment in new industries falters in the face of low labour-intensity firms and sputtering economic growth. Still, it might be imagined that, with the right political pressure and policies, a return to full employment could be an option.¹³⁷ But, given that the height of the social democratic era required the exclusion of women from the waged workforce, we should in fact wonder whether full employment has ever been possible.

If full employment remains operative only as an ideological mystification, its normalisation of work still extends to the unemployed. The transformation of welfare and the rise of workfare – forcing people to work in order to receive benefits – represent an increasingly insidious example of this. Mirroring the changing fortunes of full employment, unemployment has long been governed according to different ideas.¹³⁸ Initial approaches saw unemployment as an individual accident – something to be mitigated by insurance-like solutions. But the mass unemployment of the Great Depression overwhelmed this approach, and unemployment subsequently came to be seen as a structural (and male) problem. The labour movement became an employment movement, and governments adopted welfare and full employment policies partly in response. Today, many of the transformations that the welfare state is undergoing can be understood as an attempt to revive the disciplinary function of the unemployed. Their free labour, in the form of workfare, acts to repress wages and threaten the jobs of the employed; the figure of the ‘jobseeker’ imposes a norm of work on everyone; and attacks on disability benefits turn even those outside the labour force into a reserve army of potential workers.¹³⁹ The unemployed have to fulfil an increasingly long list of conditions in order to gain even minimal benefits: attending training, constantly applying for jobs, listening to advice, and even working for free. The increase in surveillance and control is designed to produce not only an obedient, skilled and flexible surplus population, but also one that exerts pressure on the employed. It therefore makes little difference whether these schemes actually reduce unemployment or not, since their purpose lies else-where.¹⁴⁰ Increasingly, the welfare state is becoming little more than an institution designed to deploy the surplus against the working class.

The management of surplus populations does not just revolve around the production of disciplined workers and pliable jobseekers. Increasingly, domination and punitive measures are becoming the norm in dealing with the excess to capital. For instance, the size and composition of this group is heavily regulated through immigration policies. For the surplus, migrating to countries with better job prospects is a common response to high unemployment and has been the historical norm. In the nineteenth century, as the mechanisation of agriculture transformed the countryside, the dominant outlet was mass emigration to the New World.¹⁴¹ Yet today the option to migrate is increasingly closed off for the developing world. While there are a variety of reasons voiced to justify tighter immigration controls, reducing the potentially unruly excess labour supply has often been a dominant one.¹⁴² Today, we see the militarisation of America’s border with Mexico and the rise of Fortress Europe in response to mistaken fears about jobs being taken by foreigners. Yet the desperation of immigrants to find a decent job is such that, even when faced with the threat of death, they still make the perilous trip to a new country. The result is that the past fifteen years have seen over 22,000 migrants die trying to get into Europe, more than 6,000 die trying to cross the Mexico–US border, and over 1,500 die trying to get to Australia.¹⁴³ These lethal barriers to migration are one of the primary mechanisms used today to segregate and manage global surplus populations. And inextricable from this treatment of migrants is racialised coding: these immigrants are not simply other individuals, but other races. Whether ‘foreign hordes’ threatening the sanctity of the European border, or immigrant textile workers in Thailand being subject to hyper-exploitation and abuse, racial hierarchies are an essential component of the control of surplus populations.¹⁴⁴

When the co-optation of the surplus into a disciplined excess workforce has failed, the state can always resort to simply locking up, excluding and brutalising large sections of the surplus population. Across the world, mass incarceration has been increasing as the size of prison populations rise in both absolute and relative terms.¹⁴⁵ Moreover, there is a significant racial component to this – most notably in the mass incarceration of the US black population, but also of Muslims in much of Europe, Aboriginals in Canada, and the detention and deportation of foreign migrants around the world.¹⁴⁶ These systems of mass incarceration must be understood to extend beyond prisons, as they encompass an entire network of laws, courts, policies, habits and rules that work to subjugate a group of people.¹⁴⁷ Mass incarceration is a system of social control aimed primarily at surplus populations rather than at crime. For example, increases in manufacturing unemployment are associated globally with increases in police employment.¹⁴⁸ As the reserve army grows, so too does the state’s punitive apparatus. Likewise, the expansion of immigrant detention centres responds to the demise of subsistence economies and the formation of a mobile proletariat.¹⁴⁹ Those who are unwilling to be forced into slums seek better opportunities elsewhere, only to be locked up or left for dead on the Mediterranean. The American system is perhaps the clearest example of how surplus populations and police enforcement intertwine. The well-documented surge in mass incarceration over the past few decades was not a response to rising crime rates,¹⁵⁰ but rather to the proliferation ofjobless ghettos and the advances made by the civil rights movement. The racialised nature of this system is well known, but the patterns of incarceration cannot be fully understood without reference to class and surplus populations. For instance, middle-class and upper-class black populations are largely left alone,¹⁵¹ and the vast majority of the prison population consists of the ‘working or workless poor’.¹⁵² Likewise, the disparities in incarceration between races are outpaced by the disparities in terms of class,¹⁵³ and the rise of mass black incarceration coincides with the decline in employment for that same population.¹⁵⁴ In fact, the racial nature of mass incarceration in America stems ‘exclusively’ from the wildly disproportionate locking up of lower-class black populations.¹⁵⁵ Mass incarceration has therefore become a means to manage and control this surplus that has been excluded from the labour market and left in poverty. Spatially concentrated in inner-city ghettos, these groups became an easy target of state control. This intersects with race, of course, as the origins ofjobless ghettos lie in the active exclusion of the black population of the United States. And in many ways, the carceral system perpetuates the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghettos – replacing many of their functions with a new system of exclusion.¹⁵⁶ But class enables us to see a distinction: whereas those previous systems of social control exploited free labour and attempted to transform black populations into a disciplined workforce, the modern prison system is designed largely to exclude and control the surplus population.¹⁵⁷ Given the effects of having a criminal record, the carceral system brings about a triple exclusion: from cultural and educational capital, from political participation and from public aid.¹⁵⁸ The end result is that incarceration initiates a vicious circle with the urban poor left unemployed and unable to find a job, thereby endlessly reproducing these groups as outside of capital.¹⁵⁹ Rather than trying to reform, educate and reintegrate prisoners into capitalist society, convoluted systems are set up to keep them out and to prevent their re-entry into normal wage labour after prison. At its extreme, these populations become simply disposable, situated outside of normal society and subject to gratuitous violence. The end result is a system that produces and reproduces permanent exclusion from the formal economy. These populations are deemed dispensable, and subjected to all the police brutality and state violence that can be mustered against them. We have, therefore, an entire range of mechanisms that the state and capital use to manage surplus populations, ranging from disciplined integration to violent exclusion.

THE CRISIS OF WORK

As we have seen, there is a growing population of people that are situated outside formal, waged work, making do with minimal welfare benefits, informal subsistence work, or by illegal means. In all cases, the lives of these people are characterised by poverty, precarity and insecurity. Increasingly, there are simply not enough jobs to employ everyone. As the hegemonic order predicated upon decent and stable jobs breaks down, social control is likely to revert to increasingly coercive measures: harsher workfare, heightened antagonisms over immigration, stricter controls on the movement of peoples, and mass incarceration for those who resist being cast aside. This is the crisis of work facing neoliberalism and the surplus populations who make up most of the world’s labour force.

With the potential for extensive automation of work – a topic that will be discussed further in the next chapter – it is likely that we will see the following trends in the years to come:

1. The precarity of the developed economies’ working class will intensify due to the surplus global labour supply (resulting from both globalisation and automation).

1. Jobless recoveries will continue to deepen and lengthen, predominantly affecting those whose jobs can be automated at the time.

1. Slum populations will continue to grow due to the automation of low-skilled service work, and will be exacerbated by premature deindustrialisation.

1. Urban marginality in the developed economies will grow in size as low-skilled, low-wage jobs are automated.

1. The transformation of higher education into job training will be hastened in a desperate attempt to increase the supply of highskilled workers.

1. Growth will remain slow and make the expansion of replacement jobs unlikely.

1. The changes to workfare, immigration controls and mass incarceration will deepen as those without jobs are increasingly subjected to coercive controls and survival economies.

Of course, none of these outcomes is inevitable. But this analysis is based on the current tendencies of capitalism, and on the problems that are likely to arise as surplus populations continue to grow. These trends portend a crisis of work, and a crisis of any society based upon the institution of wage labour. Under capitalism, jobs have been pivotal to our social lives and sense of who we are, as well as being the sole source of income for most people. What the next two decades portend is a future in which the global economy is increasingly unable to produce enough jobs (let alone good jobs), yet where we remain dependent upon jobs for our living. Political parties and trade unions appear ignorant of this crisis, struggling to manage its symptoms even as automation promises to toss more and more workers aside. In the face of these tensions, the political project for the twenty-first-century left must be to build an economy in which people are no longer dependent upon wage labour for survival.

As we will argue in the next few chapters, this struggle can and should span an array of different approaches: it means creating hegemonic ideas about the obsolescence of drudgery, shifting the goals of trade unions from resisting automation to job-sharing and reduced working weeks,¹⁶⁰ government