the emphasis of Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism’ with the utopian narratives of Paul Mason and Aaron Bastani. M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There an Alternative?, Zero Books, 2009. P. Mason, PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Penguin, 2015. A. Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, Verso, 2019.2 2. The ‘Mardyke’ has since been demolished and rebuilt as ‘Orchard Village’ and became a national example of dodgy new-build housing regeneration; see J. Harris, ‘Leaking sewage and rotten floorboards: life on a “flagship” housing estate’, The Guardian, 6 February 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/feb/06/life-flagship-housing-estate-orchard-village-east-london.
3 3. The respected Electoral Calculus website overestimated Labour’s national support yet calculated a Tory majority of 5,923 votes in Dagenham and Rainham.
1 Work and the Modern World
Politics and Belonging
Political instability threatens the foundations of liberal democracy. We cannot assume democracy will prevail. It requires us to rethink the purpose of politics.
Politics demands thought and action. Thought in asking philosophical questions, such as: how do we wish to live, what provides meaning in our lives, where and to what do we belong? How we answer these questions has helped shape competing theories of justice; visions of how society should be organized. Action in terms of the practice of politics, understood to refer to the way power is exercised on behalf of the people.1 A practice in which different political traditions contest the governance of a specific community or territory; a competition between groups and shared interests to shape the collective ‘we’.
The two elements, thought and action, are linked by the ways the practical contest is often, not always, shaped by these alternative philosophical approaches to justice, grounded within different traditions of thought. Politics addresses our beliefs and attachment to the communities within which we live and might think we belong.
However, today’s political instability could reflect a declining attachment to physical communities in the modern world, disrupted by technological change and the processes of globalization. The popular Marxist thinker David Harvey has talked of ‘time-space compression’ and ‘a speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us’.2 It could also mean the opposite. Such change might threaten our attachments but reassert new, more disruptive forms of community and nation.
Political instability might reflect a declining philosophical attachment to the idea of a political community. Are we attached, for example, to a specific rather than global community? Or in terms recently popularized, are we citizens of somewhere rather than anywhere?3 Do our concerns tend towards the parochial rather than the cosmopolitan? These questions are difficult ones for practising politicians who seek mandates from specific territories – a constituency or nation – rather than global electorates. Do these politicians have specific moral obligations to their constituents over and above global responsibilities to all inhabitants of the planet?
These practical and philosophical questions challenge a sense of politics grounded within geographical boundaries and emerge at a period of political instability. Do they help account for such political unease or are they symptoms of it? Across the globe democratic politics appears endangered. Just a few years ago mainstream politics assumed it had reached a high point of human evolution achieved through the dominance of the market. A specific form of liberal democratic politics – dominant in the era we now recognize as neo-liberalism – announced it had secured the ‘end of history’ yet is now upended by the forces of authoritarianism and populism.
The terms of political debate are being redrawn. This book engages with these technological, philosophical and practical political debates through the study of the work we do.4 We discuss the purpose of work in our lives, if this is changing and how this might affect the lives we wish to live. For instance, if work retains personal significance, what consequences follow when it is threatened and is unable to provide what we wish it would? How do these threats find political expression and how might society respond? We discuss the political implications of alternative ways to understand the physical and mental labour we perform.
Identities based on work are transforming in an age for many characterized by precariousness, declining material reward and flatlining social mobility, digitalization, job rotation and meaningless labour. Many now question the future of work itself. These shifts might alter our views about work and how we understand our own lives, and be expressed in how we live together.
I should make clear from the outset that personally I believe work can be a vocation, a calling, and create significant landmarks in life which provide identity and belonging.5 The practice of belonging, or dwelling, involves sacrifice and is rewarded in the creation of community. Yet this orthodox approach is unfashionable today, especially on the left. The issues we will address therefore stretch beyond conventional political concerns to maximize utility – of material justice – and direct us towards questions of personal character and attachment.
Degradation
Work is important beyond providing us with material subsistence. It can both contribute to and undermine our overall sense of worth; our human wellbeing. This suggests a basic paradox. Work can be a source of human dignity; it can provide meaning and purpose in our lives and confer a certain standing in the eyes of others. Yet it is not guaranteed to deliver these things. Work can be degrading. This paradox of labour links to another recurring theme of the book: the contrast between what we want from life and what modern capitalism provides. This simple juxtaposition, between how we might wish to live and how we inhabit the world, found political expression on the streets of Dagenham and in the turbulence engulfing liberal democracy even before the virus struck.
One recent short book has addressed the paradoxical quality of labour in an accessible way. James Bloodworth’s popular book Hired has helped stimulate public debate about the realities of modern work in places often patronized as ‘left behind’.6 It is a compelling account of life and employment revealed through personal experiences working in a warehouse, at a call centre, as a care worker and as an uber driver. He finds insecurity, ruthless discipline, surveillance, atomization, underpayment and underemployment.
Hired is uplifting in the way it gives voice to the experiences of these workers, yet unsettling when it reveals the collapsing personal esteem associated with the jobs people are hired to do. The book also captures a deeper story. It subtly exposes the changing character of contemporary capitalism by inspecting how employers, unscrupulous agencies and landlords compete to drain dignity from the lives of our fellow citizens. Bloodworth reminds us that work is a contested, deeply political subject. But why should we need reminding of such an obvious point?
The simple answer is that work has been decoupled from politics. Much literature on work sidesteps political questions regarding the deployment of labour.7 Over recent years the type of the work we do and why we do it have come to be understood as personal choices, a trade-off between work and leisure, rather than political ones. We will discuss below how and why work has been stripped of its political significance and been replaced by a largely ahistorical technical discussion of labour market statistical outcomes. This process speaks to the dominance of liberal economics and the defeat and intellectual weakness of the left with its withdrawal from theoretical and political interrogation of the character of work within modern capitalism.
Recent renewed interest in the organization of work and automation on the left has sought to correct
