Post work has no strategy for transition

(Mikael Lyngaas, https://mronline.org/2020/07/24/beyond-work-the-shortcomings-of-post-work-politics/ , 7-24)

In 1845, Karl Marx wrote that in a communist society, workers would be freed from the monotony of a single draining job to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner”. Since then, there have been many new ideas theorizing the nature of work and how capitalism exploits labor. These ideas have convinced a number of leftists to push for the emancipation of the working class through the abolition of work as a whole. This corner of the left argues that rising automation and movements for a universal basic income will eventually neutralize the contradictions of capitalism or abolish it altogether. “Post-work” theories, like other political groupings on the left, arise from the failures of the 19th-century socialist revolutions. Rather than a novel form of emancipatory politics, post-work is better understood as a return to the utopian socialist tradition of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon, all of which Marx and Engels furiously polemicized against. Engels writes in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that “One thing is common to all three [Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon]. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat… Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from that of the French philosophers”. A different, but similar kind of “kingdom of reason” is brought forward by contemporary post-work theoreticians. Instead of tackling the difficult questions of the transition from class society to a classless society and its revolutionary and strategic implications, the post-work theoreticians leap over these immensely difficult questions by favoring fantasies of technological futures free from labor and struggle. In this process, labor becomes something distorted from its material reality and takes on the form of the supposed core of capitalism, the root of class society, and all its evils.