InventingtheFuturePostcapitalismandaWorldWithoutWorkNickSrnicekAlexWilliamsZLibrary

Today, one of the most pervasive and subtle aspects of hegemony is the limitations it imposes upon our collective imagination. The mantra ‘there is no alternative’ continues to ring true, even as more and more people strive against it. This marks a significant change from the long twentieth century, when utopian imaginaries and grandiose plans for the future flourished. Images of space flight, for instance, were constant ciphers for humanity’s desire to control its destiny.²³ In pre-Soviet Russia, there was remarkably widespread fascination with space exploration. Though aviation was still a novelty, the dreams of space flight promised ‘total liberation from the signifiers of the past: social injustice, imperfection, gravity, and ultimately, the Earth’.²⁴ The utopian inclinations of the time made sense of the rapidly changing world, gave credence to the belief that humanity could channel history in a rational direction and cultivated anticipations for a future society. In the more mystical formulations, cosmists argued with admirable ambition that geoengineering and space exploration were only partial steps towards the real goal: resurrecting the entirety of the dead.²⁵ Meanwhile, more secular approaches outlined detailed plans for fully automated economies, mass economic democracy, the end of class society and the flourishing of humanity.²⁶ Such was the level of enthusiasm and belief in imminent space travel that in 1924 a riot nearly erupted when rumours circulated about a possible rocket flight to the moon.²⁷ Popular culture was saturated with these images and with stories in which technological and social revolution intertwined. But these were not simply matters of extraterrestrial fantasy, as they had concrete effects on people’s ways of living. In the post-revolutionary period, this culture of ambition fostered a series of social experiments with new ways of communal living, domestic arrangements and political formations.²⁸ These experiments gave credence to the idea that anything was achievable in a time of rapid modernisation, lending support to the Bolsheviks and the people. While utopian ambitions were largely forced underground during the Stalinist era, they re-emerged in the 1950s with the growth of newfound economic confidence and the resources to make good on some of the earlier dreams.²⁹ The greatest moments of the Soviet experiment – the launch of Sputnik and the economic dominance that it appeared on the verge of attaining in the 1950s – were ultimately inseparable from a popular culture imbued with utopian desires.³⁰ A similar period of utopian ambition also held sway in the early years of the United States. Fuelled by a widespread belief that the new industrial capitalism was temporary and that a better world would soon emerge, workers militantly struggled for this new world. In a climate far more hostile than our own, labour was able to create an array of strong organisations and exert significant pressure.³¹ The successes of this time were inseparable from a broader utopian culture.

By contrast, today’s world remains firmly confined within the parameters of capitalist realism.³² The future has been cancelled. We are more prone to believing that ecological collapse is imminent, increased militarisation inevitable, and rising inequality unstoppable. Contemporary science fiction is dominated by a dystopian mindset, more intent on charting the decline of the world than the possibilities for a better one.³³ Utopias, when they are proposed, have to be rigorously justified in instrumental terms, rather than allowed to exist in excess of any calculation. Meanwhile, in the halls of academia the utopian impulse has been castigated as naive and futile. Browbeaten by decades of failure, the left has consistently retreated from its traditionally grand ambitions. To give but one example: whereas the 1970s saw radical feminism and queer manifestos calling for a fundamentally new society, by the 1990s these had been reduced to a more moderate identity politics; and by the 2000s discussions were dominated by even milder demands to have same-sex marriage recognised and for women to have equal opportunities to become CEOs.³⁴ Today, the space of radical hope has come to be occupied by a supposedly sceptical maturity and a widespread cynical reason.³⁵ And the goals of an ambitious left, which once aimed at the total transformation of society, have been reduced down to minor tinkering at the edges of society.

We believe that an ambitious left is essential to a post-work programme, and that to achieve this, the future must be remembered and rebuilt.³⁶ Utopias are the embodiment of the hyperstitions of progress. They demand that the future be realised, they form an impossible but necessary object of desire, and they give us a language of hope and aspiration for a better world. The denunciations of utopia’s fantasies overlook the fact that it is precisely the element of imagination that makes utopias essential to any process of political change. If we want to escape from the present, we must first dismiss the settled parameters of the future and wrench open a new horizon of possibility. Without the belief in a different future, radical political thinking will be excluded from the beginning.³⁷ Indeed, utopian ideas have been central to every major moment of liberation – from early liberalism, to socialisms of all stripes, to feminism and anti-colonial nationalism. Cosmism, afro-futurism, dreams of immortality, and space exploration – all of these signal a universal impulse towards utopian thinking. Even the neoliberal revolution cultivated the desire for an alternative liberal utopia in the face of a dominant Keynesian consensus. But any competing left utopias have gone sorely underresourced since the collapse of the Soviet Union. We therefore argue that the left must release the utopian impulse from its neoliberal shackles in order to expand the space of the possible, mobilise a critical perspective on the present moment and cultivate new desires.

First, utopian thought rigorously analyses the current conjuncture and projects its tendencies out into the future.³⁸ Whereas scientific approaches attempt to reduce discussions of the future to fit within a probabilistic framework, utopian thought recognises that the future is radically open. What may appear impossible today might become eminently possible. At their best, utopias include tensions and dynamism within themselves, rather than presenting a static image of a perfected society. While irreducible to instrumental concerns, utopias also foster the imagination of ideas that might be implemented when conditions change. For example, the nineteenth-century Russian cosmists were among the first to think seriously about the social implications and potentials of space flight. Initially considered ineffectual dreamers, they ended up heavily influencing the future science of rocketry.³⁹ Likewise, early science fiction dealing with space exploration and cosmist utopias went on to influence state policy towards science and technology in the wake of the Russian Revolution.⁴⁰ The creation of alternatives also makes it possible to recognise that another world is possible in the first place.⁴¹ As the flawed but significant global alternative posed by the USSR disappears from living memory, such images of a different world become increasingly important, widening the Overton window and experimenting with ideas about what might be achieved under different conditions.

In elaborating an image of the future, utopian thought also generates a viewpoint from which the present becomes open to critique.⁴² It suspends the appearance of the present as inevitable and brings to light aspects of the world that would otherwise go unnoticed, raising questions that must be constitutively excluded.⁴³ Recent US science fiction, for instance, has often been written in response to contemporary issues of race, gender and class, while early Russian utopias imagined worlds that overcame the problems posed by rapid urbanisation and conflicting ethnicities.⁴⁴ These worlds not only model solutions, but illuminate problems. As Slavoj Žižek notes in his discussion of Thomas Piketty, the seemingly modest demand to implement a global tax actually implies a radical reorganisation of the entire global political structure.⁴⁵ Implicit within this small claim is a utopian impulse, since the conditions for making it possible require such a fundamental reconfiguration of existing circumstances. Likewise, the demand for a universal basic income provides a perspective from which the social nature of work, its invisible domestic aspect and its extension to every area of our lives become more readily apparent. The ways we organise our work lives, families and communities are given a fresh appearance when viewed from the perspective of a post-work world. Why do we devote one-third of our lives in submission to someone else? Why do we insist that domestic work (performed primarily by women) go unpaid? Why are our cities organised around lengthy, dreary commutes from the suburbs? The utopian demand from the future therefore implores us to question the givens of our world. In these ways, utopias can be both a negation of the present and an affirmation of a possible future.⁴⁶

Finally, in affirming the future, utopia functions as an affective modulator: it manipulates and modifies our desires and feelings, at both conscious and pre-conscious levels. In all its variations, utopia ultimately concerns the ‘education of desire’.⁴⁷ It provides a frame for us, telling us both how and what to desire, while unleashing these libidinal elements from the bounds of the reasonable. Utopias give us something to aim for – something beyond the stale repetition of the same offered by the eternal present of capitalism. In cracking open the present and providing an image of a better future, the space between the present and the future becomes the space for hope and the desire for more.⁴⁸ By generating and channelling these affects, utopian thinking can become a spur to action, a catalyst for change; it disrupts habits and breaks down consent to the existing order.⁴⁹ Futural thinking, extended by communications mechanisms,⁵⁰ generates collective affects of hope that mobilise people to act on behalf of a better future – affects that are necessary to any political project.⁵¹ While utopian thinking rejects the melancholy and transcendental miserabilism found in some parts of the contemporary left, it also invokes its own negative affect.⁵² The obverse of hope is disappointment (an affect that is today embodied in figures like the young ‘graduate with no future’).⁵³ Whereas anger has traditionally been the dominant affect of the militant left, disappointment invokes a more productive relation – not merely a willed transformation of the status quo, but also a desire for what-might-be. Disappointment indexes a yearning for a lost future.

If the left is to counter the common sense of neoliberalism (‘there’s not enough money’, ‘everyone must work’, ‘government is inefficient’), utopian thinking will be essential. We need to think big. The natural habitat of the left has always been the future, and this terrain must be reclaimed. In our neoliberal era, the drive for a better world has largely been whittled away under the pressures and demands of everyday existence. In this repression, what has been lost is that ambition to produce ‘a world that exceeds – existentially, aesthetically, as well as politically – the miserable confines of bourgeois culture’.⁵⁴ But as an apparently universal and irrepressible characteristic of human cultures, utopian thinking can surge forth under even the most repressive conditions.⁵⁵ Utopian inclinations play out across the human spectrum of feelings and affects – embodied in popular culture, high culture, fashion, city planning, and even quotidian daydreaming.⁵⁶ The popular desire for space exploration, for instance, points to a curiosity and ambition that lies beyond the profit motive.⁵⁷ The like-minded trend of afro-futurism offers not only a highly stylised image of a better future, but also ties it to a radical critique of existing structures of oppression and a remembrance of past struggles. The post-work imaginary also contains numerous historical precedents in utopian writing, pointing to a constant striving to move beyond the constraints of wage labour. Cultural movements and aesthetic production have essential roles to play in reigniting the desire for utopia and inspiring visions of a

NAVIGATING NEOLIBERALISM

While utopias seek to transform the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism, education forms a key institution for transforming intellectual hegemony. It is the educational apparatus that indoctrinates new generations in the dominant values of a particular society, reproducing its ideology through the decades. In the education system, children learn the basic ideas of a society, respect for (in fact, submission to) the existing order, and the skills necessary to distribute them along different segments of the labour market.⁵⁸ Transforming the educational system of intellectuals is therefore a key task in building a new hegemony.⁵⁹ It is not for nothing that the Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Samuelson wrote that: ‘I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws, or crafts its advanced treatises, if I can write its economics textbooks.’ Projects focused on changing this institutional element of society could focus on three broad goals: pluralising the teaching of economics, reinvigorating the study of leftist economics and expanding popular economic literacy.

It is often forgotten, so deeply are we embedded in neoliberalism, that economics was once a relatively pluralist discipline. The interwar period was a time of healthy competition between a variety of formalist and non-formalist approaches.⁶⁰ In academic journals, it was not unusual to see discussions of economic planning, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and other standard categories of Marxist economics. In the 1960s, the Cambridge capital controversy brought together heterodox and mainstream thinkers in a seminal debate about the foundations of the discipline – one that everyone admits the heterodox thinkers won.⁶¹ As late as the 1970s, one of the founders of modern economics was discussing exploitation, the labour theory of value and the transformation problem in a leading economics journal.⁶² Such an event is difficult to imagine today. While neoclassical economics is a large tent that contains a variety of approaches, it is nevertheless a fundamentally limited perspective on what counts as real economic knowledge. This problem is compounded by the particular methodological demands of the most preeminent journals, with formal modelling taking precedence over more sociological analyses and qualitative understandings.

If the broad cultural and academic ideas of how to run economies are to change, at a minimum it will require more pluralism in the education of students. Here, there are glimmers of hope for a pluralist revival. Work is being done across the world to bring alternative economics to mainstream universities, and groups of students and professionals alike are beginning to mobilise around this issue. Since 2000, numerous universities have seen students vocally demand pluralism in their economics education.⁶³ More recent years have seen students openly protesting the defenders of mainstream economics, and the emergence of groups like the Post-Crash Economic Society and Rethinking Economics that are making concerted efforts to change the curriculum.⁶⁴ Essential to a project of pluralising economics, however, is the development of a research programme and textbooks. Part of the reason for the rise of formalist approaches is precisely their fit with institutional requirements of higher education: they provided theories for researchers to spend time testing, textbooks and PhDs to continue a lineage of thought, and clear and transmissible principles.⁶⁵ Today, the field has come to be dominated by neoclassical textbooks, and the result is that, even if professors want to pluralise the discipline, they do not have many accessible resources to hand.⁶⁶ Indications that this might be changing include the creation of a heterodox textbook by two proponents of modern monetary theory.⁶⁷ But more work needs to be done on this front in order to broaden the parochial horizons of mainstream economics.

To support this process, there should be a movement to rejuvenate leftist economics. The dearth of economic analysis on the left could be seen in the wake of the 2008 crisis, when the most prominent critical response was a makeshift Keynesianism. The left was largely without a meaningful and desirable economic programme, having focused primarily on the critique of capitalism rather than the elaboration of alternatives. This is a crisis of utopian imagination, but also of cognitive limits. A series of emerging contemporary phenomena must be thought through carefully: for instance, the causes and effects of secular stagnation; the transformations invoked by the shift to an informational, post-scarcity economy; the changes wrought by the introduction of full automation and a universal basic income; the possible approaches to collectivising automated manufacturing and services; the progressive potentials of alternative approaches to quantitative easing; the most effective ways to decarbonise the means of production; the implications of dark pools for financial instability – and so on. Equally, research should be revived on what postcapitalism might look like in practice. Beyond a few outdated classics, very little research has been done to think through an alternative economic system – even less so in the wake of emerging technologies like additive manufacturing, self-driving vehicles and soft AI.⁶⁸ What role, for instance, could non-state cryptocurrencies have? How does one measure value if not by abstract or concrete labour? How can ecological concerns be fully accounted for in a postcapitalist economic framework? What mechanism can replace the market and overcome the socialist calculation problem?⁶⁹ And what are the likely effects of the possible tendency for the rate of profit to fall?⁷⁰ Building a postcapitalist world is as much a technical task as a political one, and in order to begin thinking about it, the left needs to overcome its general aversion to formal modelling and mathematics. There is no small amount of irony in the fact that the same people who criticise the abstraction of mathematical modelling often adhere to the most abstract dialectical readings of capitalism. This recognition of the uses of quantitative methods does not mean simply adopting neoclassical models or slavishly following the dictates of numbers, but the rigour and computational elaboration that can come with formal modelling are essential for grappling with the complexity of the economy.⁷¹ However, from modern monetary theory to complexity economics, from ecological to participatory economics, trajectories of innovative thought are being launched – even if they remain marginal for now. Equally, organisations like the New Economics Foundation are leading the way in creating models of the economy that can inform leftist political goals, as well as fostering public literacy in economic matters.

The latter point is particularly important, as increasing economic literacy means not only transforming the practice of academic economists, but also making the economy intelligible to nonspecialists. Sophisticated analyses of economic trends need to be connected to the intuitive insights of everyday lives. While, for the near future, the revival of leftist economics is likely to be centred in academia, the aim should be to spread such economics education far beyond the confines of universities. Unions could use their resources to educate their members about the changing nature of the contemporary economy. Through internal education programmes, rank-and-file workers can begin to situate the problems of their workplaces and communities within a larger economic context. Similar approaches can be – and in many cases already are – achieved through the training of activists. Open schools provide another medium for education, giving the public a chance to learn about ideas that are too often made impenetrable by academic jargon, and from which they are excluded by exorbitant tuition and publisher fees. There is a long tradition in the UK of working-class education, which can be drawn upon to learn from. For example, the Workers’ Educational Association already provides low-cost adult education to local communities.⁷² Such institutions provide ways in which abstract economic understandings can be linked up with the on-the-ground knowledge of workers, activists and community members, each mutually shaping the other. Working systematically to develop pluralism, economic research and public education will play a significant role in strengthening the utopian narratives outlined in the previous section, and providing the necessary navigational tools to chart a course out of capitalism.

REPURPOSING TECHNOLOGY

As we argued above, hegemony is embedded not only in the ideas of a society, but also in the built environment and technologies that surround us. These objects carry a politics within them: they facilitate particular uses and actions, while simultaneously constraining others. For instance, our current infrastructure tends to shape our societies into individualistic, carbon-based, competitive forms, regardless of what individuals or collectives may want. The significance of these politicised infrastructures is only increasing as technology expands into the smallest nano-scales and out to the largest post-planetary formations. No aspect of our lives remains untouched by technology, and indeed, many would argue that humanity is intrinsically technological.⁷³ In response to this materialised hegemony – one thoroughly constructed by and implicated in capitalism – a few different options present themselves. A first position argues we must destroy this built environment in order to ever liberate ourselves.⁷⁴ While this argument reaches its zenith in primitivism and its demand to be done with civilisation, similar inclinations permeate the left today. Given the devastation such a project would bring about, and the theoretical ineptitude behind these claims, we consider this position little more than an academic curiosity. A second position instead argues that technology is the basis for a postcapitalist order, but that any meaningful focus on changing our technology should wait until after the political project of post-capitalism is achieved.⁷⁵ This would undoubtedly make our task simpler, but, given the pervasive entanglement of technology with politics, and given the latent potentials in current technology, we believe the far more prudent option is to look at how developments can be redirected today, and existing technology repurposed immediately. A third approach therefore focuses on invention and emphasises that the choice of which technologies to develop and how they are designed is primarily a political matter.⁷⁶ The direction of technological development is determined not only by technical and economic considerations, but also by political intentions. More than just seizing the means of production, this approach declares the need to invent new means of production. A final approach focuses on how existing technology contains occluded potentials that strain at our current horizon and how they might be repurposed.⁷⁷ Under capitalism, technology’s potential is drastically constrained – reduced to a mere vehicle for generating profit and controlling workers. Yet potentials continue to exist in excess of these current uses.⁷⁸ The task before us is to uncover the hidden potentials and link them up to scalable processes of change. This is ultimately a utopian intervention, insofar as repurposing aims to ignite collective imagination about what can be done with the resources to hand.⁷⁹

We have, therefore, two effective strategies in approaching the question of technological hegemony. In the first approach, the focus is on the invention and adoption of new technologies, emphasising that we can create tools of change. In this vein, some have called for greater democratic control over the design and implementation of infrastructures and technologies.⁸⁰ In the workplace, this means struggling over which technologies are brought in and how they are used. Given that technologies are rarely, if ever, introduced all at once, there is a lengthy period of time in which to leverage power to gain control over how technologies are being developed and implemented. The rejection of surveillance measures is one of the most obvious goals, but workplace struggle also means resisting technologies which simply intensify, speed up and worsen working conditions.⁸¹ At the level of the state, there is an equally strong case to be made for democratic control over technology development, given that most significant innovations come from public-sector financing rather than the private sector. It is the state that leads significant technological revolutions – from the internet to green technology, nanotechnology, the algorithm at the heart of Google’s search engine, and all of the major components of Apple’s iPhone and iPad.⁸² The microprocessor, the touchscreen, the GPS, the batteries, the hard drive and SIRI are just a few of the components that emerged from government investment.⁸³ The fact of the matter is that capitalist markets tend towards short-term views and low-risk investments. It is governments that provide the long-term resources that enable major innovative changes to develop and flourish, whereas contemporary venture capital increasingly tends towards the generation of short-term profit.⁸⁴ It is governments that make investments in highrisk developments that are likely to fail – but for that reason are also likely to lead to major changes. Given government’s role in technological development and consumer product innovation, public funding should be under democratic control. This would mean that governments have a role to play not only in the rate of technological development, but more importantly in its direction.⁸⁵ Particularly significant here are what have been called ‘mission-oriented’ projects.⁸⁶ These do not aim at product differentiation and marginal improvements to existing goods, but are instead concerned with largescale inventive projects such as space travel and the internet. This is revolutionary development, aimed at creating entirely new paths of technology and open to the possibility of unexpected innovations emerging in the process. Under democratic control, it could respond to the biggest social problems of the day and foster large-scale thinking by, for instance, using state investment banks to shape the social value of projects through funding decisions.⁸⁷ A forward-thinking government could support mission-oriented projects such as decarbonising the economy, fully automating work, expanding cheap renewable energy,⁸⁸ exploring synthetic biology, developing cheap medicine, supporting space exploration and building artificial intelligence. The challenge is to develop institutional mechanisms that will enable popular control over the direction of technological creation.

Public control over how government funds are spent for development was also at the heart of a series of worker-based struggles in the 1970s. In now largely forgotten experiments, workers in the UK and Japan (and later across Brazil, India and Argentina) sought to channel technological development towards the production of ‘socially useful goods’.⁸⁹ These were goods that responded to social needs and were produced in such a way as to minimise waste, be ecologically sustainable, and respect workers and their skills.⁹⁰ The most influential of these projects occurred at Lucas Aerospace in the UK – a company that focused on producing high-tech components, predominantly for the military, and received significant government funding.⁹¹ Faced with rising structural unemployment and impending redundancies, workers at Lucas Aerospace came together to develop an alternative proposal for how to run the company and maintain jobs. Their basic argument was that, given the public funds being channelled into the corporation, society should have a say in, and benefit from, how these resources were being used. This was an argument that entailed channelling resources away from military armaments and into useful products. In order to develop the proposal for socially useful goods, the workers compiled a list of the skills and equipment available to them, took on the perspective of planners, sought product suggestions from workers and their communities, and collectively decided how these technologies and skills could be repurposed to different ends.⁹² Rather than high-tech military equipment, the existing capacities were to be repurposed to design and produce medical technologies, renewable energy, safety improvements, and heating technology for social housing.⁹³ The final plan ran to over 1,200 pages and included detailed proposals for 150 products.⁹⁴ In order for it to achieve its political goals against an intransigent management, the strategy undertaken was in many ways a counter-hegemonic project, with workers explicitly aiming to ‘inflame the imaginations of others’ and revise what people thought production was for.⁹⁵

Notably, the Lucas Plan refused to remain a temporary space of prefigurative politics, and instead aimed to mobilise the resources of unions and governments in an effort to create a new hegemonic order. In this endeavour, the plan resonated with peace activists, environmentalists, feminists and other labour movements, leading to the building of international connections and a wave of workerled action.⁹⁶ Ultimately, however, the stagnation of the Labour Party and national trade unions, combined with the rising turn to neoliberalism, meant that the Lucas Plan fell short of its goals. But the successes it had – slowing job losses – were largely the result of moving beyond defensive approaches and towards creating an alternative.⁹⁷ Despite these failures, the Lucas Plan demonstrates a clear example of how repurposing the productive forces of society might be used to transform the technological direction of society. This was not an attempt simply to build a worker-controlled factory in the middle of a profit-orientated economy; more radically, it was an attempt to reorganise technological development away from marginal weapon improvements and towards socially useful goods.⁹⁸ It is an ideal model of how technical knowledge, political awareness and collective power can be combined to achieve a radical repurposing of the material world.

An even more ambitious project of repurposing occurred in Chile in the early 1970s. The newly elected government of Salvador Allende sought to transform Chile into a socialist nation through gradualist change, implemented through the existing economic and political institutions. A crucial part of this process was the development of Cybersyn, an innovative attempt at decentralised economic planning that sought to connect firms throughout the country to government and bureaucratic functions. The project involved transforming cybernetics from what has often been excoriated as a system of control⁹⁹ into an infrastructure of democratic socialism. The Cybersyn system was designed not for an omnipotent and external central government, but as a partial and internal modulator of ongoing economic flows.¹⁰⁰ It was intended to give workers a say in the planning process and enable factories to self-manage, all while giving a rational orientation to the national economy. To achieve these goals, Cybersyn was to include a proto-internet connecting factories, an economic simulator to test out policies, a statistical forecaster to predict problems, and an operations room taken straight from science fiction. But US hostility to the country made it virtually impossible to purchase new computers, and attempted deals with France only came to fruition after Allende had been overthrown.¹⁰¹ The result was that Chile’s effort to build a cybernetic socialism largely had to repurpose existing technologies in order to stand any chance at being successful. It was a sort of bricolage approach, using what was available and cobbling together something new. At the time, Chile possessed only four mainframe computers (only one of which was available to Cybersyn)¹⁰² and fifty computers around the nation – so the proto-internet was pared down, and based instead on more widely available telex machines. The ambition for a system of democratic, worker-managed enterprises was ultimately cut short by the US-backed coup that ended Allende’s regime in 1973. But while the project was never fully realised, parts of Cybersyn nevertheless demonstrated their potential in one notable experience. Faced with rising opposition from the economic elite, in 1972 the government had to deal with a strike by over 40,000 truck owners.¹⁰³ The petite bourgeoisie sought to undermine the government by preventing shipping of essential materials for factory production. But workers took over factories and continued to drive trucks wherever possible, while the national government deployed the telex network of Cybersyn in order to coordinate around the blockades and the strike. Effectively, as the preeminent historian of Cybersyn writes, ‘the network offered a communications infrastructure to link the revolution from above, led by Allende, to the revolution from below, led by Chilean workers and members of grassroots organisations’.¹⁰⁴ In other words, the strike showed the potential of Cybersyn for repurposing the infrastructure of society towards democratic and socialist ends. It enabled a historically unique and promising vision of what an alternative future might have looked like. In the end, therefore, the experiment provides an imaginative and utopian example of the repurposing of cybernetic principles, existing Chilean technology and cutting-edge software.¹⁰⁵

While the previous examples suggest how repurposing could be the focus of immediate political projects, more speculative propositions can also be imagined for a postcapitalist future. As a central source of productivity and the expansion of our capacities to act, technological innovations form an essential part of any mode of production beyond capitalism. A new world will have to be built, not on the ruins of the old, but on the most advanced elements of the present. Today we see the occluded potentials of this approach everywhere, in the fact that the technologies for achieving classic leftist goals (reduced work, increased abundance, greater democratic control) are more available than ever before. The problem is that they remain encased within social relations that obscure these potentials and render them impotent. In this context, the demand to reflect upon and repurpose technologies operates to reignite a utopian imagination in the heart of a stale capitalism. An entire array of possibilities already exists. The last chapter examined automation technologies as a key hinge between capitalism and postcapitalism, but repurposing extends much further than just the automation of the productive forces. Similar arguments have been mobilised around logistics networks, around repurposing cities for ecological reasons and around deploying the latest computing technology for postcapitalist ends.¹⁰⁶ Pinpointing these sorts of technologies can help to focus energy on political struggles over their development and use. Logistics provides a particularly significant example, insofar as it simultaneously exploits wage differentials, enables global production and is at the leading edge of automation. Without denying the significance of logistics to the project of exploiting cheap labour across the world, it is possible to see that logistics would be useful to postcapitalism in a variety of ways.¹⁰⁷ Its uses, in other words, go far beyond just capitalist ones. First, any postcapitalist economy will require flexibility in both production (for example, additive manufacturing) and distribution (for example, just-in-time logistics). This enables an economy to be responsive to changes in individual consumption, unlike the grand and inflexible planning efforts of the Soviet era. Without these technologies, postcapitalism would risk repeating all the economic problems already seen in the first communist experiment.¹⁰⁸ Second, global logistics makes possible the use of a wide array of comparative advantages – not simply wage differentials. To cite one example: research has found that it is more environmentally friendly for certain agricultural goods to be produced in New Zealand and shipped to the UK, as opposed to being produced and consumed in the UK.¹⁰⁹ Even after being shipped across the world, they still have a smaller carbon footprint. The simple reason for this is that reproducing the appropriate climate in the UK would involve intense energy consumption. Such environmental comparative advantages only exist where there is an efficient and global logistics network. Finally, logistics is at the forefront of the automation of work, and therefore represents a prime example of what a postcapitalist world might look like: machines humming along and handling the difficult labour that humans would otherwise be forced to do. It is worth recalling that before the logistics revolution, transporting goods was a physically demolishing task for the bodies of workers. The automation of this labour is something to be applauded, not held back for parochial reasons. For all these reasons, logistics therefore presents an important transition technology between capitalism and postcapitalism.

But there are important limits to repurposing. The Soviets, for example, believed that capitalist technologies and techniques could simply be taken over and turned towards communist ends,¹¹⁰ but these technologies were biased towards maximal efficiency and rigorous control by management.¹¹¹ Given their wholesale adoption of capitalist machinery and management techniques, it was no surprise that the system tended towards capitalist modes of operation. Workers became – once again – mere cogs in the machine, deprived of autonomy and coerced into working harder. The ambitious plan to conquer the capitalist means of production ran aground on the reality that power relationships are embedded within technologies, which cannot therefore be infinitely bent towards purposes that oppose their very functioning.¹¹² Numerical control technologies, for example, have been used to set the pace of production, forcing workers to keep up with a machine – rendering the power of management more indirect and invisible.¹¹³ In this way, machines can conceal power relations by making them appear as simple mechanical processes. Yet repurposing remains possible in spite of these limits because there is often a significant untapped reservoir of potentials lying dormant within a technology. The difficult point to understand is that, in the words of one historian, ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’¹¹⁴ Any given technology is political but flexible, as it always exists in excess of the purposes for which it may have been designed.¹¹⁵ Rather, the design, meaning and impact of a technology are constantly shifting, altering as users transform it and as its environment changes.¹¹⁶ Paraphrasing Spinoza, we can say that we know not what a sociotechnical body can do. Who among us fully recognises what untapped potentials await discovery in the technologies that have already been developed? What sorts of postcapitalist communities could be built upon the material we already have? Our wager is that the true transformative potentials of much of our technological and scientific research remain unexplored.

How, then, can we distinguish between technologies that are bound by their limits and technologies whose properties offer potential affordances for a postcapitalist future? There is no a priori way to determine the potentials of a technology, but we can still establish broad parameters to adjudicate on the potentials of a technology, and to apply these in thinking through the specific aspects of individual technologies.¹¹⁷ In terms of criteria, one approach is to determine what functions constitute necessary and/or exhaustive aspects of a technology. For example, if a technology’s only role is that of exploiting workers, or if such a role is absolutely necessary to its deployment, then it can have no place in a postcapitalist future. Taylorism, based necessarily on the control and heightened exploitation of workers, would be rejected according to these criteria. Nuclear weapons, requiring the capacity to inflict mass destruction, would likewise have no place in a postcapitalist world.¹¹⁸ For the most part, however, technologies will be more ambiguous than that. If technology designed to reduce skilled labour permits domination by a managerial class, it also opens up spaces for job-sharing and the reduction of work. If technology that reduces production costs reduces the percentage of people employed, it also reduces the need for people to work. If a technology that centralises decision-making over infrastructures facilitates private control, it also provides a nodal point for collective decision-making. These technologies embody both potentials at the same time, and the task of repurposing is simply one of how to alter the balance between them. One goal of any future-orientated left could be to outline these broad parameters of adjudication, and to pursue further research and analysis in determining how specific technologies can be repurposed and mobilised towards a postcapitalist project. This is particularly crucial for workers involved in the technology sector who are, through their design choices, building the terrain of future politics.¹¹⁹ Let us be clear, though: without a simultaneous shift in the hegemonic ideas of society, new technologies will continue to be developed along capitalist lines, and old technologies will remain beholden to capitalist values.