Post work is a death sentence given climate change

(Anton Jäger is is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, working on the history of populism in the United States. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/post-work-labor-ubi-coercion-capitalism)

DH The anti-work or post-work people make several arguments, which I think are empirically flimsy, but one is that jobs are disappearing, and since they are disappearing, we might as well just go with it and make that our program. I first noticed this in the late nineties among people like Jeremy Rifkin and Stanley Aronowitz, who were making this argument. But you see it now with Paul Mason and others: “The robots are taking over and there’s no more jobs anyways, so we might as well make the best of it.” What’s your reaction to that line of argument? AJ Well, I’m highly, highly skeptical. I mean, I’m not a trained economist myself, so I have to rely on secondary accounts here. But I think what we need to realize first, historically, is that these kind of automation panics are really a cyclical thing, even in the postwar period. So, they occur every fifteen years, where you have this outpouring of literature on how work’s disappearing. And, surprise, surprise, ten years later work still hasn’t disappeared, it’s become more brutal and more coercive. But at the same time, work itself, the employment relationship, has not disappeared. There are two arguments to be made here. The first is a sort of descriptive refutation. The other is a normative refutation. Descriptively, what we are seeing is that the global workforce, or the proletarian workforce, has never been bigger in history. At the same time, there are now tricky arguments of whether there’s a growing surplus population or a permanent surplus population, which means that now we have a section of the planetary proletariat that’s pushed out of the wage relationship altogether. But even if this descriptive statement holds true, the normative question of whether we can have postcapitalism without labor is just hugely improbable to me. Just think about something like decarbonizing an economy. If we need to actually save humanity from climate apocalypse, you will have to think about how you retrain and how you create all the kinds of industries that actually allow us to survive beyond our current carbon economy. If you want to do that without labor and without full automation, I think you’re going to run into huge logistical difficulties to even ensure survival for the human species. In that sense, I find it normatively quite irresponsible to just say, “Oh, we’re working for a post-work, post-coercive labor future.” Because, I mean, I think it really is quite threatening in the light of what’s actually come at us in the coming fifty years.