 | |
| Authors | Nick Srnicek &Alex Williams |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Michael Oswell |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Politics,economics |
| Published | 2015, London |
| Publisher | Verso Books |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (paperback), ebook |
| Pages | 245 |
| ISBN | 978-1-7847-8096-8 |
| Website | https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/148-inventing-the-future |
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work is a 2015monograph byNick Srnicek andAlex Williams, published byVerso Books. Positing that the dominant form ofleft-wing politics has been unable to deal withcapitalism, Srnicek and Williams argue for a change in strategy and apost-scarcity economy based onautomation, reduced working hours, anduniversal basic income.
The book expands upon Srnicek and Wiliams' "Manifesto for anAccelerationist Politics", which established left-wing accelerationism in 2013. However, the term "accelerationism" was dropped, with Srnicek stating "It's been too popularised. And we don't just want everything to go faster, anyway. Arguing for a shorter working week is arguing for people's lives to slow down.[1]
The book begins (chapters 1–2) by critiquing dominantleft-wing thinking in the West, suggesting that since the cultural upheavals of the 1960s it has been characterised by a "folk politics" which aims to bring politics down to the "human scale". By emphasising temporal, spatial, and conceptual immediacy, folk politics tends to privilege reacting to change (through protest and resistance) over imagining new long-term goals; the immediate and tangible over the abstract; personal involvement in direct action over institutional responses; single issues over complex strategies; horizontal organising over hierarchical; and the local over the large-scale. While arguing that these approaches are important and can at times be effective, Srnicek and Williams argue that they are insufficient to tackle global capitalism and specificallyneoliberalism.
In chapter 3, Srnicek and Williams contrast left-wing folk politics with the success ofneoliberalism in achieving globalcultural hegemony. This is illustrated by the long-term, top-down strategising characterised by theWalter Lippmann Colloquium andMont Pelerin Society, the development of networks of think-tanks, and positioning of neoliberal ideas and thinkers in government andmedia. This strategy enabled neoliberals to offer a set of ready-made policies to leaders looking for new ideas in the wake of thecollapse of the Bretton Woods system and the 1970soil shocks. Srnicek and Williams suggest that the Left needs to adopt similar strategies. Accordingly, in chapter 4 they argue that the Left needs to offer a positive vision of a new modernity, embracing the importance of dismantling hierarchies of gender and race while also accepting that promotinguniversal human values is necessary to achieve a progressive vision of the future andpositive freedom.
Chapter 5, 'The Future isn't Working', identifies a crisis in capitalism's ability (and willingness) toemploy all members of society, arguing that "there is a growing population ofpeople that are situated outside formal, waged work, making do with minimal welfare benefits, informal subsistence work, or by illegal means".[2] Chapter 6 looks towards apost-scarcity economy and argues that a 'Mont Pelerin of the Left' should press for:
Srnicek and Williams argue that it is necessary to raise the costs of labour in order to incentivise investment in labour-saving technologies, envisaging apositive feedback loop between a tighter supply of labour and technological advancement. Chapter 7 argues that to achieve these goals, the Left must invest in establishing a new hegemonic status for these ideas, building on the successes of capitalism,repurposing its structures, and investing in scholarly research and the modelling of emergent policies.
The final chapter argues that an 'anti-work' or 'post-work' politics—providing a clear vision of a future where people work less—should appeal to a broad enough range of different interest groups to be the basis for apopulist movement. The chapter sketches how this populism needs to be harnessed to get post-work politics into mainstream media, intellectual life, trade unions, and political parties, and how the pressure points wheredirect action can be targeted have changed as capitalism has undermined the power oforganised labour to disrupt production.
In November 2015, the book was the subject of a symposium, involving its authors and a number of other thinkers who presented critical responses to the book. The proceedings were published in blog format at the academic International Relations blogThe Disorder of Things.[4] In 2018,Jon Cruddas characterised the book as "a genuinely audacious, supremely confident intervention in terms of its intellectualism and its presentation of a highly specific future for the left. It has caught a wave and helped to re-populate the left's post-crash void and jettison late New Labour managerialism." However, he also argued thatInventing the Future andPaul Mason'sPostCapitalism dispensed with ideas ofhumanism that, he claimed, should be central to a left-wing project: "these books have been treated uncritically despite the reappearance of anti-humanist thinking within the left. Humanism needs to be defended; or, as Orwell wrote, "the job of the thinking person is not to reject socialism but to make up his mind to humanise it"".[5] In April 2020 a movie using the book as a basis was released.[6]