A World Beyond Work?

Labour, Money and the Capitalist State Between Crisis and Utopia

Emerald, January 2021, with Ana Dinerstein

***Save 30% with promo code WORK30 at http://bit.ly/WorldBeyondWork***

Endorsements

‘A World Beyond Work? is one of the great books of our generation. The future of work and the notion of basic income are topics on which every active citizen must form a view. Too often, these topics are discussed by referring to money and the state in an untheorised and, ultimately, naive way. Dinerstein and Pitts avoid these pitfalls by drawing on the work of Marx. Political issues and issues in the social sciences compete for attention and, sometimes, have an ephemeral feel. A World Beyond Work? is different. It is a landmark. We shall be consulting Dinerstein and Pitts for years.’ Richard Gunn, co-founder of open Marxism

‘Dinerstein and Pitts's book is a fundamental contribution to the debate on post-capitalist utopias. The Coronavirus crisis has accelerated the morbid symptoms of austerity-driven capitalism, and we must develop new strategies to escape the increasingly authoritarian trends of nation-states. A World Beyond Work offers a blueprint ready to develop a future against and beyond capitalism. This will be an essential read for the next decade.’ Mònica Clua Lozada, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

‘As we look towards building the economic order of the 21st century, post-capitalist and post-work visions capture the interest of many across the left and beyond. Dinerstein and Pitts undertake the necessary work of taking this stance seriously, offering a balanced, dense, thoughtful and enriching critique.’ Alessandro Gandini, University of Milan

‘With an insightful combination of theoretical debates on political economy, the State and social change, this book offers a perceptive debunking of political practice today for a new radical horizon, this book is a must read in these dire times.’ Mariano Feliz, National University of La Plata

‘This is a timely and important book. In it, Dinerstein and Pitts carefully dissect loose arguments that automation and basic income necessarily promise a better future. Their theoretical and empirical rigour offer a vital corrective to misplaced and uncritical hope and invite scholars and activists to think carefully about the demands they are making, how, and why’. Neil Howard, University of Bath

This is a ground-breaking contribution to debates about the future of work, mechanisation and social reproduction. Anyone interested in these themes – and particularly the highly topical issue of universal basic income – should read Dinerstein’s and Pitts’ powerful critique. The authors offer a vital antidote to the technological utopianism widespread on the left today. Adrian Wilding, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin

‘Discussing the world to come is essential, but even more important is where we stand to enter this important debate. This book offers an open Marxist critique of the post-capitalist UBI and automation-based utopia by placing ‘uncomfortable’ categories (value, money, state, and class struggle) at the center of the analysis to comprehend the contradictory dynamics and emancipatory power of concrete struggles (utopias) against the world of money.’ Luciana Ghiotto, University of San Martin

‘This book offers a scholarly contribution to studies of value, work, (un)employment, and social movements in the 21st Century. This is also a book about hope and creativity at a time of narrow horizons and bleak pessimism. It brings to us a world with new possibilities of freedom. Dinerstein and Pitts point to new pathways to this world – pathways broader than postwar social democracy, more radical than the traditional communist parties, and carefully attuned to our own times of overlapping crises of profitability, living standards, health and the environment. A must!’ Alfredo Saad-Filho, King’s College London

The book provides a sustained critique of the notion that we are on the verge of a postwork society,where the travails of wage labour will be overcome by a fully automated production process, underpinned by a universal basic income. Grounded in Karl Marx’s value theory of labour, the authors argue human emancipation cannot be dependent on state handouts; but, rather, on the everyday prefigurative struggles of grassroots social movements. Study this book. Mike Neary, University of Lincoln

‘A World Beyond Work? is a spirited and rigorous counter argument to the pro UBI Post-Work Prospectus school. The careful ways in which Dinerstein and Pitts have mobilised open Marxist theory, contemporary left politics and case studies of social movements within and outside the UK makes this book both intellectually and politically powerful. Written in pre COVID times, it will be a must read for Marxist and non-Marxist scholars of work in years to come.’ Dr Maud Perrier, University of Bristol

Reviews

British Journal of Industrial Relations

Capital & Class

Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

Work, Employment & Society

Chapter Synopses

Chapter 1 Post-work, post-capitalism, post-what? An Introduction

A free sample of the opening introductory chapter is available here: http://bit.ly/3qaQ0nW

Chapter 2 Futures Past and Present: On Automation

This chapter places in historical, political economic and geographical context the current popular and mainstream claims about automation that underpin a lot of radical thinking on the revolutionary possibilities inherent in contemporary capitalism. Evaluating the methodological and empirical debates raging between different models of the levels of automation anticipated to effect the labour market in the coming years, a combination of Marxist critique of political economy and critical organisation studies highlights the economic and practical reasons why imminent ‘full automation’ is far from likely, and therefore a very weak basis upon which to establish a left political programme for transformative social change. This does not stop it compelling the contemporary left however, and in the chapters that  follow we use a series of key concepts within our ‘open’ Marxist theoretical approach to frame and illuminate what we perceive as key issues to address in the radical left ‘post-work prospectus’ of automation and the basic income.

Chapter 3 The Post-Work Prospectus: On Labour

In this chapter we examine claims about the impacts of automation upon the future of work, before considering how this has been taken up by the left in envisioning a post-work society, identifying a possible issue in the extent to which technology is granted an autonomous quality accomplishing social transformation in and of itself. We trace the attraction of such a determinist reading of technological development back to Marx’s Fragment on Machines, and specifically the way its insights were appropriated in Italian postoperaismo and subsequently in contemporary post-work and post-capitalist thinking. Marx’s Fragment associates the decline of direct labour-time in production and the expansion of scientific knowledge attendant upon automation as the harbinger of a crisis in capitalist that constructs the foundations of a new society in the shell of the old. However, we suggest that this deploys an overly Ricardian understanding of value theory that Marx himself would later surpass, associating value with concrete labour rather than the category pivotal to our analysis, which is instead abstract labour, a social abstraction central to value that is mediated in money. We then explain our approach to work and labour in capitalist society and how this differs from the way these categories are typically understood within Marxism and, by extension, much of the post-work and post-capitalist thinking. Ultimately, we argue, the association of the transcendence of capitalist social relations with the transcendence of work misses what is specific about capitalism, which is not the kind of productive activity it features but the social conditions that underpin a society where we must work to live in the first place and the specific social forms the results of production assume in the market and society as a whole. By only addressing the escape from work and not the escape from the social relations and social forms that make work what it is in capitalist society - namely labour as a specific form of mediation assumed by the human intercourse with nature - the post-work prospectus leaves fixed in place what its transitional measures to a postcapitalist society purport to overcome. Considering the tendencies through which automated technologies are already impacting upon the practice and experience of work, we suggest that this incomplete revolution could actually create a less dignified and more impoverished mode of existence than the one we already have.

Chapter 4 Productivist Mandates: On Value

In this chapter we consider the extent to which, in posing itself against production, the post-work literature unwittingly reproduces a productivist standpoint that, centring work in its understanding of capitalism, places demands upon capital to redistribute the wealth work creates and reward and recompense workers for the expanse of value they produce in new forms of immaterial and ‘free’ labour. Specifically, we address how postoperaist arguments for a basic income rest upon such ‘productivist mandates’, as Weeks puts it, that apportion value to specific kinds of productive activity for which the basic income is posed as the only viable means of payment. We place against this an alternative understanding of value as something related not to the direct expenditure of concrete labour but something summoned up in the exchange of commodities and services for money. Value is here not a positive category to be laid claim to or redistributed, but a negative category of social domination from which humans must be freed in order to break with capitalism - as hard as this might be to foresee occurring. The fairly-traditional Ricardian labour theory of value that postoperaismo, despite appearances otherwise, persists in holding to, meanwhile, bestows upon the workers the power to produce value and the rightful inheritance of it in another set of social relations. The post-operaist view of value also enables the ascription to contemporary capitalism of a condition of crisis sparked by the circumstances described in Marx’s Fragment on Machines and the impact that changes in the immediate character of labour wield upon the form of value in which concrete labour is abstracted from through its mediation as money. We refute the suggestion that capitalism faces such a crisis, and that basic income in any way potentiates the development of another society out of the ruins of the present one. We explore historical parallels between the populist ‘Share Our Wealth’ movement that confronted the Roosevelt administration in the United States in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and the alternative policy agenda represented in the New Deal, which, whilst as beholden to the state and to money in much the same way as the basic income today, charted a different path through the contradictions of life and labour in capitalist society by keeping open the space for the working through of antagonisms that we go on to conceptualise in more detail in later chapters.

Chapter 5 Pennies From Heaven: On Money

In this chapter we consider how an understanding money as a form of social mediation in capitalist society within which is implied and concealed the class antagonism complicates appeals to a basic income as a solution to poverty and inequality and as a transitional measure opening the path, via the post-work society, to a postcapitalist future. Outlining the centrality of the critique of money to the Open Marxist approach we utilise in the book, we juxtapose how post-work and postcapitalist advocacy of a basic income presents money as a neutral category of account and exchange, rather than a social form within which capitalist social relations are mediated. The danger inherent in such an approach, we suggest, is that the power of money is expanded through its association with a premature universality and identification solely with the capacity of the state to provide and police society, closing off the routes through which workers can struggle and bargain over a wage in which the antagonistic stakes between the buyer and seller of labour power enable room to move through the play of mediation.

Chapter 6 Basic Income in One Country: On the State

In this chapter we interrogate in more depth the nation state’s character as a capitalist state, rather than simply as a neutral instrument wielded in capitalist society by different actors, interests and groups. We suggest that the state underpins many of the transitional measures proposed in the post-work prospectus without the latter sufficiently theorising the limitations this places upon the capacity to translate these measures into a viable postcapitalist alternative. However, recognising that it is necessary to work ‘in, against and beyond’ the state in pursuit of any realistic project of social transformation, we evaluate the strategic orientation struck by of the post-work left in the development of the basic income as a ‘directional demand’ addressed to the possibilities opened by the realities of contemporary capitalist restructuring in the wake of recent crises. Whilst this is pragmatic, it runs the risk of reinforcing the character of the capitalist state at a time where the reproduction of capitalist social relations is increasingly best guaranteed by an authoritarian post-neoliberal mode of governance. Using the Modi governments consideration of the implementation of the basic income in India as an example, we speculate over the possible directions measures such as the basic income might take in the context of authoritarian national populism and the interventionist way that it seeks to wield state power in support of projects of national renewal and identitarian exclusion.

Chapter 7 Liquidating Labour Struggles? On Social Reproduction

In this chapter we draw upon Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory to illuminate the implications of the concept of labour-power for how we understand life under capitalism and the struggles - by turns defensive and offensive - necessary to create an alternative. Where some advocates see the basic income offering workers greater capacity to bargain and barter for better wages and conditions, the world into which basic income steps as a measure suggests that such hopes will die hard. The measure effectively replaces conflict at the workplace and in wider society with a direct relationship of superintendence between citizens and the state. We suggest that it is important that transitional measures keep open the space for labour struggles - conceived here expansively to include both production and social reproduction - to move freely to transform society from the bottom up.

Chapter 8 Hope and Prefigurative Translation: On Utopia

In this chapter we use Ernst Bloch’s critical delineation of ‘concrete utopias’ to outline an empirical example of where work was remediated in a different set of institutional structures that translated social movement practices into state policy whilst keeping open a radical remainder, a space of excess, in which antagonisms and contradictions could play out. This is the Unemployed Workers Organisations in Argentina. Whilst imperfect and unstable, we suggest that these experiments hold lessons for how we reimagine work and its futures through new mediations in other contexts too, such as in the UK and Europe, where nascent networks of cooperatives for unorganised, unrepresented groups like the precariously self-employed have sprung up in the recent years. The crucial question for interventions into the futures of work is how to maintain an autonomous space of society standing between workers and the capitalist state that governs them, navigating the terrain of social and political contestation, without succumbing to the easy answers offered by the transitional programme of post-work and postcapitalist thought, which runs the risk of reinforcing social domination at the hands of the impersonal abstract forms power assumes in capitalist society rather than providing grounds for emancipation from them. We discuss an alternative approach that involves the prefigurative translation of grassroot innovations into new mediations. We suggest that any alternative to the present state of things would need to move through real abstractions and capitalist mediations in order to establish new ones, rather than seek an immediacy whose impossibility makes its fruitless pursuit politically dangerous.