Work, welfare and the automated hamster

Having recently escaped waged employment, I have found myself increasingly drawn to questions of work and labour, the prospects for a life full of work, but freed of labour and the constraints of the wage. Not surprisingly, the question of what work constitutes is one I will probably be accused of avoiding; the definition is too often a function of this dichotomy, fixing in our minds a concept of work/labour which makes it quite difficult to explain why work is perhaps unnecessary, and the work ethic an over-rated, paternalistic constraint on our lives. What escape can therefore be afforded, and how? 


Labour, this mass of individuals who have nothing to sell but their time and bodies, whose role in the capitalist system is so fixed that they are identified by their work, is subject to all well known pressures - automation, threats of out-sourcing, the spectre of the unemployed mass undercutting wages; they need not be dwelt upon here. Labour, as commodified work-time, has for a time now been a commodity of diminishing value, and nowhere is this as obvious as in the once powerful institution of the strike; where factories were once closed and profits seriously hurt, today's strikes are usually consensual affairs, with due regard given to 'dignity at work' directives protecting scab labour and helpfully providing the last nail in the coffin of organised labour with a public display of impotence. However, the diminishing need for human labour brings with it the potentially exciting prospect of liberating us from labour and allowing us to do real work, for ourselves, geared towards the realisation of personal and collective identities. This is certainly a possibility that Peter Frase is entertaining and one closely connected to the concept of a basic income guaranteed to all citizens, a break between poverty and labour.


A basic income may sound fantastical, but is increasingly seen as a practicable solution, entertained as a policy both in South Africa and Brazil (still the eternal land of the future?) and, perhaps surprisingly, in gun-wielding, survivalist Alaska. While the orthodox critique of this proposal will undoubtedly come up with studies of how a guaranteed income reduces work output (I believe the going rate is -5%, so two hours off a 40-hour week), this misses the point entirely and is a testament to the persistency of a high-capitalist obsession with productivity and hard work. As Frase correctly points out, a great proportion of human labour is in fact undesirable or unnecessary, created artificially to perpetuate the myth of full-employment and the false ethic of work. Who really wants to work night-shifts at a 7-11? Who really enjoys sitting at the Tesco till on a sunny Saturday afternoon? Who really want to shuffle paper in a neon-lit benefits office? And yes, all these jobs would either disappear, or could be usefully automated at a cost that is not prohibitive. So why not do it?

Quite immediately, I see two problems with the basic or guaranteed income and agree with Žižek in his appraisal of the idea - the first being that it fits far too snugly into the incipient rentier phase of capitalism. Just as the former owners of the means of production shift to an income stream from rents (be it for intellectual property, use of networks of communication, supply of resources etc.), so the guaranteed income is in a way a rent paid to citizens for being citizens and supplying demand (and some content).


More importantly, automation coupled with a basic income is not a paradigm to surpass the most basic logic of capitalism. Robots, as we may term automation of labour with a nod to vintage naïveté, can and will increasingly take on unwanted labour, allowing (rent-receiving?) housewives to put their feet up and read the latest issue of Top Gear magazine. Indeed, technology is not a guarantor of social change and as Frase points out in speculating about four possible futures (well worth a read), technological change can accomodate a range of socioeconomic relations. Be that as it may, I find it difficult to do away with Žižek's contention that a basic income is nothing but a welfare state brought to a maximum, a universality which makes the proletariat into a consumtariat. He correctly states that this is not a new regime capable of overcoming capitalism, but rather a guarantor of its survival. 


This in turn brings us to another concept related to work, labour and technology - netocracy, a concept developed by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, referring to an elite whose power rests on their ability to network and exchange information in a superior way. Presumably, in a world emancipated from the necessity to exchange labour for survival, symbolic capital accrued by deft users of networks ensures their position, displacing some of the importance attached to wealth. Bard and Söderqvist take this concept to an elevated position of 'alternative-to-capitalism', but upon closer examination, netocracy is rather a process of a lower order either dependent on the capitalist mode of production, or a feature of a post-capitalist order (I owe the debunking of their claim again to Mr. Ž.) In any case, this dents the belief in the value and sustainability of the self-unemployed netocracy's work. Thus, what is the work of designers, students, photographers, magazine editors and others? Certainly, one answer is that it is to be found in their ability to abstract information, to discern, to popularize, to circulate it and, on a more banal note, to wield an iPhone and out-do each other in instagrammation or hipstamatization of their impressionistic flow of thought. And my intention is not to denigrate this effort, now termed work, but rather to ask how a basic income, a rent paid for the purpose of liberating man from labour, would result either in a post-capitalist system (since it is not inherently opposed to it), or how it would liberate man from the dreariness of consumption (since only a tiny fraction of people need or want to produce, but consumption would remain a necessity). A robotic hamster would indeed relieve the rodent of a pointless running exercise, but the wheel keeps spinning. With the relations of exploitation left intact, such a liberation is nothing if not disappointing.