The left must withdraw from capitalist politics in order to avoid the inevitable destruction of the biosphere by capitalism—the permutation merely furthers a contradiction of capitalism, damning the alternative

The political problem posed by the question of technology for anti-capitalist struggle is perhaps the most difficult to confront. On the one hand we know all too well that the evolution of technologies, marked as it is by a good deal of autonomous 'combinatorial' logic of the sort that Arthur describes, is a form of big business in which class struggle and inter-capitalist and interstate competition have played leading roles for the 'human purpose' of sustaining military dominance, class power and perpetual accumulation of capital. We also see that capital's actions are steering closer and closer to the abyss of the loss of social labour as an underlying regulatory principle that prevents the descent of capital into lawlessness. On the other hand we also know that any struggle to combat worldwide. environmental degradation, social inequalities and impoverishment, perverse population dynamics, deficits in global health, education and nutrition, and military and geopolitical tensions will entail the mobilisation of many of our currently available technologies to achieve non-capitalistic social, ecological and political ends. The existing bundle of technologies, saturated as they are in the mentalities and practices of capital's search for class domination, contains emancipatory potentialities that somehow have to be mobilised in anti-capitalist struggle. In the short term, of course, the left is bound to defend jobs and skills under threat. But, as the miserable history of the noble rearguard action fought against deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 198os demonstrates, this will likely be a losing battle against a newly emerging technological configuration from the very beginning. An anti-capitalist movement has in the current conjuncture to reorganise its thinking around the idea that social labour is becoming less and less significant to how the economic engine of capitalism functions. Many of the service, administrative and professional jobs the left currently seeks to defend are on the way out. Most of the world's population is becoming disposable and irrelevant from the standpoint of capital, which will increasingly rely upon the circulation of Technology, Work and Human Disposability fictitious forms of capital and fetishistic constructs of value centred on the money form and within the credit system. As is to be expected, some populations are held to be more disposable than others, with the result that women and people of colour bear most of the current burden and will probably do so even more in the foreseeable future. 13 Martin Ford correctly poses the question: how will the resultant disposable and redundant population live (let alone provide a market) under such conditions? A viable long-term and imaginative answer to this question has to be devised by any anti-capitalist movement. Commensurate organised action and planning to meet the new eventualities and the provision of sufficient use values must be thought through and gradually implemented. This has to be done at the same time as the left has also to mount a rearguard action against the technologies of increasingly predatory practices of accumulation by dispossession, further bouts of deskilling, the advent of permanent joblessness, ever-increasing social inequality and accelerating environmental degradation. The contradiction that faces capital morphs into a contradiction that necessarily gets internalised within anti-capitalist politics.