How does contemporary left-wing thought respond to the situation we have now? Often, its response is fairly weak. It emphasises things like higher taxation (or moving against tax avoidance/evasion), in order to
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build better public services. But the arguments I have made so far in this book suggest that this sort of measure is likely to remain inadequate tinkering, which does not really get to grips with the central fact of our societies: the dominance of capital over labour and government.
A more radical idea which is gaining traction (on the right as well as on the left) is universal basic income (UBI). In other words, paying everyone in the country (not just the poorest) a set amount as an absolute minimum right. On the left, UBI is presented as a response to technological change. The assumption is that technology will lead to jobs being phased out. In this sense UBI can present itself as a fairly pragmatic solution. It recognises that affluent high-skilled workers are also threatened by technology, and supposes, reasonably, that future labour markets may demand more shifts between jobs and more need to develop transferable skills. Under UBI, so its proponents argue, people could have periods outside of work in order to develop new skills without losing the ability to support themselves.
Put this way, it is a fairly intuitive prospect. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams,1 for instance, argue that the left should propose a two-pronged movement: the acceleration of the replacement of jobs through technology on one hand, and UBI on the other. We could thus move towards a system as envisioned by Marxists such as Braverman: less work is needed all round, but this is not a problem since those without work have other forms of support. In this sense, UBI could be a means of partially liberating the individual from the imperatives imposed by capitalist processes.
But there are problems with this idea. Jane Lethbridge, perhaps suspicious of the adoption of UBI by some writers on the right, raises a number of concerns.2 For one thing, UBI can never replace proper public services, such as healthcare which is free at the point of delivery, or proper children’s services, or libraries, or socialised support for the sick or disabled. Hence there is, in some quarters, a rather sinister idea that consent can be bought for the dismantling of these things through UBI – as in: ‘here’s a basic monthly cash handout, go and shop around for all those public services you once expected as a right’. In this sense, for all its apparent radicalism, UBI might one day turn out to be a fairly cheap way of securing continued capitalist stability while public services are retrenched further and further. The level of UBI and the conditions attached to it would, in all likelihood, be set by central government and
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in this sense be no more independent of capitalist imperatives than the NHS is (see Chapter 5).
Lethbridge’s other critique is arguably even more important consid-ering the argument we have made so far in this book. The idea that UBI can be a panacea completely sets aside the problem of work. The left version of UBI rests on the idea that it will diminish people’s need to work, and in this sense will be a liberation. I have a lot of sympathy for this view, of course, given the amount of pointless drudgery within capitalist workplaces. Quite conceivably, UBI might strengthen workers’
positions by making the prospect of unemployment less frightening. But this point alone cannot compensate for properly questioning the way work is conducted in capitalist societies. Why does labour have to be separated from the means of production? Why is it only able to work insofar as it provides surplus value? UBI cannot answer this.
Clearly, capitalist work relations are going to persist. Currently, it is fashionable to raise the idea of ‘post-capitalism’ and ‘post-work’, among some people on the political left.3 The basic version of this argument goes as follows: increasingly, societies are able to produce material progress outside of the traditional capitalist work relationship, and in a way which capitalists are fundamentally unable to grasp or control.
High-tech innovations are produced in flashes of inspiration or through constructive group interactions, and so cannot be controlled or legislated for by management as if on a construction line. Individuals control their expertise and inspiration, not capitalists. At the same time, new techno-logical platforms (such as Wikipedia, or else other forms of open-source software and data-sharing technology) create scope for things to be done in a more collaborative way outside of the marketplace and outside of the control of capitalists. Therefore, we are already moving towards a society in which decentralised networks of citizens create things and govern the world around them without the input of capital. Broad societal fixes like UBI are the central prescriptions following from this argument, moving our focus away from the problem of control and exploitation within the workplace itself.
This kind of discussion is far too optimistic, mainly because it fails to recognise how important capitalist work relations still are, and will continue to be. Paul Thompson and Kendra Briken have punctured these arguments quite effectively.4 For one thing, they point to the naivety of supposing that ‘knowledge workers’ cannot be controlled by capital in the same way as factory workers. Chapter 4 offers support for this argument.
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High-tech firms such as Apple, Thompson and Briken argue, however much intangible ‘inspiration’ goes into their end product, still pursue a business model dominated by an obsession with cutting labour costs, leading to exploitative and highly controlled circumstances for workers right through their supply chains. ‘Collaborative’ digital platforms such as Uber are actually intensely hierarchical business models, where those that supply the labour power are under intense control, and contribute massively to the profits of company elites. As I argued in Chapter 7, new online ‘means of evaluation’ are pervading forms of control that are more opaque from the worker’s perspective than Taylorist methods and thus, arguably, even more alienating and unfair. It is true that not all ‘platforms’
are like this, but such companies are not outliers of the new digital age:
they constantly ‘invade and seek to dominate’ the marketplace, and in this effort they are leaving ‘collaborative, peer-to-peer production’ in the dirt.
Hence these more sunny prognoses about the potential to surpass capitalism buy into the PR of high-tech firms far too readily. When
‘sharing economy’ companies claim that they are non-hierarchical networks, it is obviously a mistake to believe them. Those who see a new ‘post-capitalist’ world emerging fetishise the ideas of ‘decentralisa-tion’ and ‘the network’. The emphasis is on small groups who collaborate in the production of innovative technologies which are then diffused through sharing technology, all the while in the absence of government and through breaking down corporate monopolies. The emphasis is perhaps as much to do with a desire not to be associated with failures of the past (i.e. statist Communism) as it is a genuine enthusiasm for these ideas in themselves. Besides, these kinds of highly decentralised partic-ipatory networks are good primarily for the cliques that participate in them.5 They are never going to be strong enough to counterbalance state and capital, and so this fetishisation of decentralisation is misplaced.
Better to have one strong, organised and centralised labour movement than a hundred decentralised peer-to-peer networks.
Ultimately, capital itself has to be challenged. People who act as labour need to start asking: why can’t we start to organise things ourselves? Not through fetishising small-scale networks, but by demanding greater and greater control over the large organisations that dominate our society.
The productive facilities that make things, the logistical networks that move things around the country, sophisticated information and commu-nications systems. These things could be in public hands. They could be
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used not for private profit, but as a means of creating and distributing the things that society actually needs and wants. There would be no alien power of competition forcing people to work harder in exchange for less, or forcing governments to compromise on the quality of public services. People would not be forced to spend much of their lives in an alienating and conflictual labour–capital relationship. Technology which saves labour could be welcomed.
The election of 2017 was shortly followed by the disastrous Grenfell Tower fire. Today, the first principles of our society are private property and private profit, and anything else – such as providing safe living conditions for poor people – is only possible insofar as it conforms to those first principles. But we could operate differently: one of our first principles could be that everyone should have a home, and ‘the economy’
might have to bend itself to achieve that goal rather than vice versa.
We could say the same about health or education. It is the centrality of capital accumulation as the motor of our economy that so distorts these priorities.