Since the Industrial Revolution at least, but especially in the wake of post-industrial computerization, labor and technology have often been set against one another. Capitalism uses labor and technology as substitutes, and capitalists often use replacement-by-technology as a threat to the ambitions of labor. When labor fights back, capitalists present them as backwards obstacles to “progress”, which is rhetorically the progress of technology, but really the progress of the pursuit of profits. Indeed, this is the source of our word “Luddite”, where laborers, lead by the mythical Ned Ludd, would destroy the machines which were replacing them. The capitalist press was unable to comprehend why laborers would destroy those symbols of progress, and came to use “Luddite” to refer to an irrational hatred of technology. However, though a hatred of technology itself might certainly have been part of the early Luddite movement, the real center of their anger was economic. The Luddites were skilled artisans who were being replaced by machines operated by low-skilled workers, and had destroyed machinery to protest against this loss of livelihood and gain a better bargaining position with employers.
In our contemporary neo-liberal moment, we see similar antagonisms. Besides the offshoring of manufacturing, take, for example, the “sharing economy” and “gig economy”, which are designed to circumvent labor protections and shift costs of production from the owners to the workers. Liberals are unable to see the downsides of this, or, at best, consider them a necessary evil for the march of “progress”.
Sometimes, these tensions are further displaced, away from the capitalist system, its organization, and technology, on to hate for the new, low-paid, workers who replace the previous workers. This is the forge from which racism, and thus fascism, is built.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Leftists (and indeed, even some liberals in the mid-20th century, such as John Maynard Keynes) have envisioned a world where technology and labor would move hand in hand, where automating a job away would allow for fewer work hours and indeed jobless people who, however, could live fulfilling lives and not be impoverished. If a machine could provide for the needs of 100 people, why not?
Perhaps the most evocative image of this vision was Project Cybersyn, a computer system designed in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende, a democratically-elected socialist who was far more committed to a genuinely Leftist vision than the social-democratic parties of Europe and North America at the time. Cybersyn was designed to provide easy access to data that could be used to adjust the economic plan and predict future economic results, and to increase worker participation in economic-decision making. Here, a cybernetic system was designed to propel labor, not to crush it. Unfortunately, Cybersyn was destroyed after the US-backed coup d’état of September 11, 1973, when Allende was ousted by Augusto Pinochet, who would rule over the country as a fascist dictator for 17 years, advised by Milton Friedman.
Indeed, from the late 1970s onwards, this vision was undermined and killed in general, partially by a resurgence of the Protestant work ethic (which was racialised: see the myth of the “welfare queen”, which relies on anti-black misogyny): that one’s worth was a consequence of selling one’s labor-power, as well as the valorization of discipline and frugality, and partially by the destruction of the apparatus which had promised to form a base for the achievement of this vision: the post-war social-democratic welfare-state. Why?
The vision of a happy marriage between automation and labor relies on the abolition of the primacy of wage labor. Indeed, one could say that the two go hand in hand. For if wage labor is still the prime way for people to achieve sustenance, then automation, which decreases the demand for labor, can do nothing but hurt labor. But the primacy of wage labor is a pillar of capitalism.
The killing of this vision was a part of the neoliberal counter-revolution. The social-democratic welfare-state had produced a problem for capital accumulation in the 1970s. Not only that, but in the wake of the aborted revolutions of 1968, even the established Left and liberals were moving leftwards: take, for example, the Löntagarfonderna, or Worker’s Fund, a proposal in the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) council to slowly buy out the owners of corporations by creating a rule in which new stock shares were distributed to workers. As a response, capital sought to destroy barriers to capital accumulation and to accumulate more capital through dispossession–things that, if done in earlier times, would be considered primitive accumulation. As a part of this process, attempts to reduce the primacy of wage labor were destroyed. Again, take the myth of the “welfare queen”, which would eventually contribute to PRWORA, the 1996 act which “destroyed welfare as we know it”. In order to legitimate this rightward turn, it was necessary to assert, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, that “there is no alternative”. This would be impossible to accomplish without the consent of the “left” parties, and indeed, by the late 1980s, this was accomplished.
Of course, it wasn’t quite accurate that all alternatives were extinguished. Chauvinist liberalism (what’s often called “conservatism” or “social conservatism”), the egg from which fascism would hatch, was kept alive, and indeed, often promoted. This was for two reasons. The first reason is that chauvinism provided an easy scapegoat for the problems capital causes. It’s all too easy to blame the loss of prosperity in the Rust Belt on migrants and not on the structures of capitalism as a whole. The second reason is that chauvinism provided an effective contrast for neoliberal cosmopolitanism. Whenever an election was held, the liberals had effectively held the vulnerable elements of their coalition at gunpoint: what can you do other than submit? Will you support the chauvinists? This contrast gave the appearance of choice, masking the fundamental lack of choice in the system. We aren’t allowed to choose anything except the neoliberal cosmopolitan agenda, which is framed as a positive choice against chauvinism as opposed to the coercion that it really is.
We’ve seen how this story ends: eventually, people are so disgusted by their disenfranchisement that they refuse to vote. Chauvinism appeals to others who are willing to scapegoat minorities when the alternative is a narrative of inevitable decline caused by technology and the economy. We must thus refuse liberalism, and its constriction of the political imagination. But this will not be easy. Despite their recent defeat, the liberals are regrouping and once again firing left, working to extinguish the political formations outside of the center and Right, and working to extinguish the political imagination outside of liberalism. In order to eventually move further, we must not cede any more ground to them, and thus must refuse to be led under their banner.
A better world awaits, but only if we allow ourselves to imagine it, and have the courage to fight for it.
Yash's Blog 