Beyond Work? The Shortcomings of Post-Work Politics

Mikael Lyngaas argues that post-work theorists ranging from Bob Black to Srnicek and Williams are utopian socialism for the current era.

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.

The state of the modern left

To understand the origin and nature of the post-work debate we must start by studying recent history. The last hundred years have led to both major victories and defeats for leftist movements. From the Russian Revolution to the May 68 uprisings, there have been periods of both great confusion and great optimism among the working class. The fall of the Soviet Union and the sharp turn towards capitalism in China led many leftists and progressives into a culture of defeatism. If two of the biggest socialist nations in the world couldn’t unite and abolish capitalism, then is it even possible? Such pessimistic sentiments sometimes lead to nihilism, especially since there seemed to be nothing but short-term, minor victories in sight. The slogan “Socialism in our lifetime!” became a shadow of the past.

The turn toward reformism and class-compromise infected the European communist parties from May 68 onwards through the “Eurocommunist” trend of the 70s and 80s, which broke up many of these parties and disillusioned a generation of revolutionaries. As their membership numbers dwindled, huge swathes of working-class youth were left without proper representation and consequently strayed into the swamp of microsects and political isolation. There was a time when the left was more unified, and when theory and practice were more connected than today. Many of the so-called “New Left” movements of the 60s and 70s have steadily deemphasized Marxism, intending to overcome capitalism without falling prey to the authoritarianism of previous Stalinist projects. The antithesis to the Stalinist dogmas for these new leftists wasn’t a return to Marxism, but a return to philosophy and academia, as well as a retreat into emerging underground youth culture. The anarchist tendencies within many of these subcultures saw Marxism as an outdated and inherently authoritarian ideology.

Although defeatism is still present today, countless struggles continue all over the world, and the deadlock of defeat seems to be lifting. Still, there remains skepticism towards the “old” left strategies of class struggle through party and union organizing.

This is where the post-work theorists come in, by creating new radical alternatives to present political ideologies, including Marxism. Some post-work theories come from anarchist or left-communist traditions. These stem directly from the rejection of the “Leninist” party model (i.e. democratic centralism), and are most influential in the contemporary left as well as in academia. But if we’re going to ponder the question of abolishing work, we must start by looking into what constitutes work and why it is a debated term.

What is Work?

There are many types of work: Housework, creative work, wage labor, schoolwork, etc. But what do they all have in common? Work is best understood in terms of what Marx called labor-power, defined as “[the] mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description”.¹² Labor-power, although an unquantifiable abstraction, is central to humans and our nature. The concept of a use-value is the usefulness or utility of a given action or an object. Mental and physical capacity is, for Marx, what essentially separates humans from other animals and lays most of the foundation for historical development in general. The work performed, whether it be unskilled or skilled, emotional, or physical, is usually performed in return for an economic reward, such as the means of subsistence of oneself or others in tight-knit communities. In the early phases of human development, after reaching the needed labor for subsistence, excess work was shared and contributed to improving the community.

Work is essentially the most vital expression of human development, in which we realize our labor through the objectification of our surroundings. Under capitalism this process of realization is taken away from the producers in what Marx describes as a “loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation”.³ The theory of alienation is vital to understanding both how modern work-relations operate and the need to form new modes of work void of alienation.

Through the given social forms within society, work became increasingly alienating as it separated humans from their work through brutal exploitation. From the expropriation of crops by feudal lords to capitalist exploitation through wage labor, the workers have been put into a division of labor, where human needs are constantly disregarded in the quest for cheaper labor and profits.⁴ In The German Ideology, Marx writes that “man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him”.⁵ This lack of control doesn’t necessarily entail that all work is alienating to the core, but it is only a privileged few who can work off their creative projects or with small businesses, and ultimately they too must compete in the market. Capitalism ensures that even the best hobby becomes a mundane job.

For many, work can be both the object of great amounts of dignity and pride, as well as suffering and misery. The organized diminution of work might mean many things. Work-hours get longer to increase the surplus value produced by workers, not because there is a need within society for more of this or that product, but because of capitalisms’ need for constantly increasing profit. The solution to these problems for post-work theoreticians could be summed up by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams as the goal of a “world in which people are no longer bound by their jobs, but free to create their own lives”.⁶

The other part of this equation in need of address is leisure time. Leisure is often described as a period of time when we are recovering from work. There are, of course, a million ways to go about one’s leisure time— but that is beside the point. Under capitalism, leisure is capitalized on heavily as it is the time when we usually consume the most, whether it be television advertisements, food, or shopping. It’s the time when the wages paid to the worker are put back into the market, both out of the necessity of subsistence as well as heavily manipulated consumption for consumption’s sake.

There is also the psychological problem of leisure as breaking the “flow” of organized work. The choice to never work could lead to new forms of isolation and social pathologies.⁷ American anarchist and essayist Bob Black, taking influence from Fourier, writes in his 1985 essay The Abolition of Work that nonwork, or play, is favorable to work. This he argues by claiming that the arts, sciences, and political organization are more meaningful and fulfilling even though they stand outside modern work-life. Play, or the nonwork of life, is not passive leisure and should be understood as the “libidinization of life” as Black put it, or rather as a time to indulge in culture. An actor, painter, or musician does not necessarily produce a commodity for market purposes, but they perform labor and provide people with entertainment. Although contradictory, it may seem that “nonwork” is just work that is not waged labor. Black’s terms remain an undefined confusion, for how are we to separate “play” from “nonwork” and “wage labor”? And what kind of labor are we willing to allow? Artisanal, artistic, and culinary forms of labor are essential for all human societies, but the post-work theorists have the tendency to dismiss these in favor of philosophical jargon.

Black puts this argument of libidinization forward not as a political task of any group or mass of people but rather as the self-emancipation of the individual. Even Marx’s son in law, Paul Lafargue, wrote about the supposed cultured and virtuous importance of laziness and leisure in the 1883 essay The Right to be Lazy. This would go on to garner much disdain from workerists who stressed the importance of labor struggle for advancing socialism.⁸ We might find the starting point of post-work theories in Laufarague’s essay. The idealized notion of laziness and “non-work” might be seen as revolutionary in the face of precarious labor, long hours, and exploitation at every level of management and much of the work that is being done today is not only totally unnecessary but also detrimental to the wellbeing of the producers and the ecosystem globally. Yet at the same time, work is something inherently human which can bring about immense collective improvement as well as great personal fulfillment. It remains obvious that any revolutionary movement elevating laziness and vague jargon will eventually fizzle out into obscurity.

French communizer Gilles Dauvé also pointed out that work and its character under capitalism are so highly alienating and exploitative that it will impact every socialist attempt to change it. Dauvé describes it as “if social life revolves around this measure, whatever the mode of association, sooner or later the value will reappear”.⁹ Value for Dauvé is the process through which capital emerges, and must be stamped out completely if a communist revolution is to succeed. Yet the process of creating a new system away from capital however is, as Marx put it, “[born] with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.¹⁰ For Marx, the new society will emerge from a period of transition that is tainted by elements of the old mode of production. Dauvé points to the Soviet Union as an example of this approach to argue instead for the immediate abolition of work and value through the process of communization. Yet the failure of the Soviet Union was not inevitable due to a failure to immediately abolish work. The failures of the October Revolution to spread internationally meant the continuation of a state ‘socialism’ based entirely around bureaucratic party leadership. For the Soviet Union, work became intensified as it tried to out-compete the US in terms of military-might and productive output. Because of this, the political pragmatism of the Soviet politburo eliminated any notion of higher stages of communism or even world revolution as a whole. Although Dauvé’s criticism of the Soviet Union and similar states raises valid points they do not necessitate his solutions.

“Parasites and do-nothings, whoever doesn’t work for themselves disturbs the work of others. From Soviet Union, 1920.

How do we end work?

For Italian anarchist Alfredo M. Bonanno the problem at hand was the transformation of wage labor from “obligatory doing into free action”, similar to Black.¹¹ This, of course, presupposes that a post-scarcity economy is already achieved and that society is moving further towards a higher stage of communism. Bonanno emphasizes the importance of creativity in order to “destroy work”, and, like other writers on the topic, criticizes the notion of non-activity. Like Black, Bonanno offers vague statements to avoid the implications that the destruction of work might have.

Unlike Black and the other utopians, Bonanno and Dauvé both represent (in different ways) a more uncompromising and insurrectionary utopianism. Bonanno emphasizes the revolutionary nature of “destroying work”, as a sort of self-realization without wage labor leading to collective experimentation, which in turn ends capitalism.¹² Here lies a strain of individualism that rejects party organization and political strategy in favor of individual expressions and creativity in direct action. The focus on direct action and insurrection is also found in the works of Dauvé who, like the anarchists, rejects a transitional period to communism in favor of the total abolition of the value-form. This means the total abolition of any economic framework for a transitional period as a whole, leaving an enormous gap in the transition over from capitalism to communism. This world revolution is set forward more like a biblical reckoning rather than a long-term political goal carried forward by a mass proletarian movement.¹³ The theoretical difference here is that Dauvé does not abandon Marxism or the history of communism, though he draws on anarchists and the autonomists of the 60s and 70s for inspiration. Although Dauvé offers a valuable critique of bureaucratization and top-down leadership, his theory of communization remains an obscure tendency with its lack of a proper political and economic strategy. This again is sacrificing a viable strategy for non-flexible principles.

It is obvious that the struggle for socialism has to be fought out openly by the broad masses against the bourgeoisie, and that this has historically been effectively done through the proletarian party. The resistance faced by revolutionaries shows clearly that socialism can not be established in a blink of an eye but rather through the organized fight against bourgeois reaction.

Universal Basic Income

Another approach that has been popularized in later years is the universal basic income (UBI) which emerged as a somewhat broad public policy in the 70s before vanishing. It was popular among both liberals and conservatives as a way to replace public services. But the rise of neoliberalism secured the position of the ruling class and allowed enormous cuts in social welfare, rendering the liberal UBI useless. For Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, the UBI is, among other demands, a part of what they call, ironically enough, “non-reformist reforms”. These are obviously just reforms. Although these reforms are intended to abolish capitalism, they often look more like steps towards an uncertain technocratic utopia. Instead of understanding UBI as an obscure neoliberal project long since cast aside, Srnicek and Williams reproduce a “progressive” approach to what is inherently neoliberalism. Their emphasis on think tanks as a means to put forward their theories also echoes the logic of the bourgeoisie, who seek to externalize political on-the-ground activity as much as possible to keep it out of mind. Srnicek and Williams do not look to the socialist tradition or the labor movement for inspiration and instead gaze at the ivory tower.

Immediate goals are traditionally theorized as tools for raising class-consciousness which will then lead to a mass revolutionary movement, but Srnicek and William instead aim at long-term technocratic reforms. Through technology and extensive labor struggles for shorter work weeks, full automation, and a universal basic income, Srnicek and Williams argue that we can achieve a post-work society. They envision this as a stage of capitalism, or a process of transformation away from capitalism in which the reserve labor army is abolished and work becomes voluntary, creating a society where labor makes the rules and capital obey.¹⁴ In this scenario class-consciousness would surely arise from the immense struggle against capital, and the new social relations formed with the abolishment of unemployment and poverty. This is supposed to lay some of the groundwork for a communist society where work is flexible, and few people are tied to one profession or company their entire life.¹⁵ Neoliberalism and its hegemony would slowly be undermined, not only by the masses of workers receiving a UBI but also through academia creating new approaches to problems of socialist calculation.

Srnicek and William’s theoretical proposals for socialism break with more traditional Marxist ideas of revolution. What they get right is that an emphasis on “utopianism” and long-term goals is necessary to counteract the global left’s defeatism and nihilism in the face of the old questions of emancipation. If everything always remains in the scope of 5, 10 years, or as long as a lifetime, very few emancipatory projects seem worthwhile. Yet a post-work society achieved through automation and UBI would face a myriad of difficult political tasks that are immediate. For Srnicek and Williams, many of these core demands can only be looked at as prefigurative politics aiming at slowly changing social relations for the better.¹⁶ Even in a society with a UBI and full automation the contradictions between the interests of capital and the interests of labor will come to a breaking point because the capitalist class cannot allow an ever-expanding UBI as profits decline. To even reach this point would be a long, arduous, and massive political task which makes it a vital necessity for post-work theories to create applicable radical politics. After all, Srnicek and Williams fail to even consider the end of alienating work by transforming the nature of work itsef. UBI becomes not a means to an end but an end in and of itself.

What then, is Srnicek and William’s strategy for such a political project? Their strategy is what they call an “ecology of organizations”— a myriad of left groupings such as trade unions, interest groups, parties etc. A good example of this would probably be the recent Yellow vest movement or Occupy which consisted of many different groups but held no central leadership or demands.There is little description on how these collections of organizations might function without any form of non-spontaneous centralization.¹⁷ Creating hegemony and insisting on influencing cultural and political spaces usually leads to what Srnicek and Williams call “folk politics”, that is, the politics of loose and spontaneous groupings with few consistent aims such as the Occupy movement.¹⁸ Srnicek and Williams heavily critique folk politics but, ironically, their project also falls prey to utopian folk politics by relying on spontaneity and unity between vastly different, often hostile groups for establishing a hegemony. This theory echoes Dauvé by being an obvious response to state socialism and subsequent reliance on spontaneous struggle. For Dauvé, this struggle is revolutionary, but not for Srnicek and Williams. For them, it might not even be emancipatory at all, admitting that a post-work society may entail colonialism, racism, and patriarchy if it is not global. A future beyond neoliberal wage labor may therefore not only be co-opted by capital, but also be used to further imperialistic expansion.¹⁹

For example, automation may also work to the disadvantage of workers as more and more people are placed into the reserve army of labor. In response to this, many have pointed to the possibility that new technology will create demand for new skilled workers. Yet, as pointed out by Lukas Schlogl and Andy Sumner, automation remains a problem for the low-skilled workers in periphery states.²⁰ This shines a light on the fact that the project of automation and UBI, when isolated to a single country, could easily be co-opted by liberals, conservatives, and fascists alike. Absent an internationalist perspective, the ideas of post-work theory can morph into variants concerned not with how to bring about socialism or a more egalitarian society, but rather how to push capitalism into complete self-destruction. This is the politics of accelerationism, a theory which presupposes an intensification of capitalism to bring about a new horizon of possibilities through rapid technological invention. This theory, inspired by Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, is plastered across many popular leftist works, such as Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism. It has also been combined with neo-Nazi race theory and reactionary ideology by figures such as Nick Land who seek to accelerate the demise of the globalized world order into a “patchwork” of “techno-feudalist” city-states. However, since the early 00s, accelerationism has fallen out of favor everywhere except small corners leftwing academia, becoming more of a bizarre internet subculture. Just like in the late 30s when many believed they were witnessing the death of capitalism, we cannot wait for capitalism to defeat itself. This would be equivalent to, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg, waiting “until the sun burns out”. Instead, the working-class needs to consciously organize itself for its own emancipation with a clear goal of communism, not by vague prospects of a new technological paradigm.

Another approach to the topic of UBI and post-work society can be found in the work of Feminist Theoretician Kathi Weeks, whose book The Problem with Work stresses the principled demand for the wages of domestic workers as a means to obtain a UBI.²¹ Weeks argues that the utopianism in post-work imaginaries cuts through the traditional dichotomy between reform and revolution. This is done by re-thinking the transformation away from capitalism as a struggle that is won on a day-to-day basis through strikes, protests, and electoral victories to produce “new forms of relations”.²² Vagueness aside, does this approach really break with the dichotomy of reform or revolution? Reformism entails a firm stance against revolutionary action but the revolutionary position supports fighting immediate reformist demands, including many championed by Weeks, Srnicek, and Williams, in addition to the goal of seizing power and abolishing capitalism. Theoretically, the emphasis on creating something new seems to outweigh the project of actually creating coherent politics. The rejection of classical Marxism without a coherent alternative means that post-work theories are stuck within various political science and philosophy departments, instead of being a force in fighting capitalism. Utopian socialism has changed a lot since the 18th century, but it remains stuck in visions of the future without making so much as a single step into that future. The long-term strategy of organization, agitation, and education forces us to deal with the material conditions of the proletariat as well as the current political situation. Envisioning the future and theorizing other social relations can very well be a means of drawing people into the socialist left, but as we’ve explored, they offer very little in terms of actual strategy. If we are to take socialism seriously, we must critique this trend wherever it occurs.

Poster from East Germany, says “Less work for all!”

Conclusion

The struggle for domestic workers’ right to wages, a global UBI, and full automation are all important topics for any contemporary radical looking to end the alienation of labor. Envisioning a possible future and what it might look like is important for creating the possibility for socialism. The imagination of post-work may inspire class struggle but it is also useless without a well-thought-out and systematic approach to enact their demands. The common lack of a clear political strategy and semantic games about the correct meaning of the word “work” place most post-work theories into the camp of pseudo-academic phrase-mongers rather than serious revolutionaries. Slogans such as “End all work!” might seem appealing, but if we take it together with the most common definitions of labor it would quickly lead down the rabbit hole of meaninglessness and despair. There is already a myriad of working-class demands that are worth fighting for without having to delve into the jargon-filled language of academic philosophers. As capitalism creates work that is mundane and meaningless, the post-work theoreticians respond by trying to regain some notion of working-class agency. Yet this agency is mistaken and only exists in theory.

Technology might bring an end to neoliberalism, or even capitalism, but only under the control of the producers through intensive struggle. It is not the task of serious Marxists to create prophecies about the future but rather to deal with the current situation as well as the vast history of communism and the working class. There will be no grand acceleration of capitalism, but rather a continuing economic decline together with an enormous environmental collapse. Post-work theories are then revealed to rely heavily on predictions and technological optimism for the future without dealing with the present or the past. Marx says in the Eighteenth Brumaire that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”. Without properly connecting theory to history and political practice it might never break out of the sphere of philosophy and speculation. We already have over a hundred years of working-class struggle to learn from and thousands of pages of valuable theory that directly corresponds with the lived reality of the masses. Although we should not fetishize the past, we should avoid doing the same to the possible future.

There is naturally a great need to go beyond wage labor and abolish it with more socialized forms of labor aimed at bettering the quality of life for all. This emancipatory project can however simply not be reduced down to a revolutionary imagination or vague hyperbolic demands. The notion of new theory for a new time might be appealing but we do not need to reinvent the wheel. We need to take up the study of Marxism and fight for the immediate goals of the working class as well as the long-term goal of communism. Post-work doesn’t help us do this, they simply create new vocabularies that lead down avenues of vagueness and confusion.

2019.10.042019.10.05

Incels, Housewives, and the Workers’ Republic

Rosa Janis responds to Amber A’Lee Frost’s recent article “Andrew Yang and the Failson Mystique,” arguing for a socialist vision that looks beyond UBI liberalism or social-democratic communitarianism in favor of a Workers’ Republic that can address sexual alienation.

Jacobin has been on a roll in terms of publishing insultingly stupid articles, singlehandedly pioneering the new clickbait genre of “this boring consumer product is actually socialist” with mind-numbingly beautiful article titles like “A Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich Under Socialism” and “Socialism, a Queer Eye Makeover for the Masses.” Amber A’Lee Frost’s “Andrew Yang and the Failson Mystique” continues this losing streak in a bold new way. She begins by assaulting the reader with her special brand of smugness, chattering on about her Brooklyn socialite friends and using dated lingo to relay a baffling comparison between being a UBI NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and a housewife. This comparison miserably falls flat on its face, given that raising a family is one of the monotonous and difficult forms of labor under capitalism. Frost acknowledges this, but somehow entertains the notion that they have plenty of excess free time, a claim that seems utterly laughable to anyone who’s ever talked to a full-time housewife. Being a housewife is brutal, specifically because you do a great deal of work (domestic labor) that is never acknowledged as valuable. It’s simply expected of you, and you’ll never be paid for it. It is quite obvious how this is different from the “NEET” fantasy of living alone and not having to work.

However, behind the smugness and bad comparisons, the article touches upon an actually interesting debate between pseudo-radical liberalism and social-democratic communitarianism. This debate is found in many conversations surrounding UBI, FALC (fully automated luxury communism), and the welfare socialism of the neo–social democrats. We need to overcome both frameworks by returning to a republican tradition within Marxism that values labor, redefines freedom, and pushes for radical social progress that unites humanity.

The Value of Work

Frost is correct that UBI and FALC are boring fantasies because the only freedom they offer is the freedom to consume. It’s a fantasy all about being able to sit around smoking weed and binge-watching Netflix, all day every day, without any meaningful limits. It’s the same kind of freedom that economists like Milton Friedman (an advocate of UBI) go nuts over, the freedom to pick between thousands of consumer options. It’s not meaningful freedom because, as Frost rightfully points out, there is no power behind it. Recipients of UBI are at the whim of the government and its impersonal bureaucracy. A more apt comparison would have compared it to being a spoiled child or a wealthy wife who doesn’t work. There’s a classic Roman play in which a slave taunts the audience with how free he is in comparison to people in the audience. This was meant to be a joke because the audience would instinctively understand that even though the slavemaster was kind, the slave was was still a slave.¹

Frost does not elaborate on how work will be made meaningful under her vision of socialism. It is simply taken for granted that work is more meaningful under socialism than it is under capitalism. It could be true that under a social-democratic/socialist regime labor would be freer, in that one would be directly involved in the decision-making behind one’s work through economic democracy. However, this alone would not make the work meaningful as there would still be bureaucrats and specialists ruling over the workers. She also neglects to talk about reducing work hours, something Marxists have been advocating for years now.

What separates labor under a communist society from that of a social-democratic society is that under communism specialists/bureaucrats are minimized through a variety of measures such as term limits, living conditions equal to that of workers and a free education system, preventing them from constituting a caste ruling over the workers. Alongside these measures, hours of work would be drastically reduced through everything from increased automation to full employment. This is the point of a famous quote in The German Ideology where Marx describes labor in a future communist society:

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.²

The above subject’s freedom is not located in the absence of labor. In fact, they do all kinds of labor, even hard labor. Yet, they are no longer wage slaves because they are free to perform any number of different forms of labor without being relegated to one job, and they live in a society unburdened by the domination of specialists and bureaucrats. Additionally, because the overall amount of labor needed for the continuation of society has been reduced, the subject has free time to invest in intellectual and artistic pursuits. This goal of removing the mental/manual division of labor is a key aspect of the divergence between Marx’s vision and the social-democratic vision.

“Freedom” vs “The Community”

The conception of freedom that is at the heart of both UBI and FALC fantasies is a liberal one that can be traced back to the writings of Jeremy Bentham. This conception of freedom, to put it in the most simplistic way possible, is based on non-interference, meaning you are free so long as no one gets in the way of what you want to do. While there are more complex conceptions of freedom within the liberal tradition, this hyper-simplistic political philosophy proved to be useful in rationalizing the destructive tendencies of capital. In this philosophy, everything in society from welfare to basic social values (such as having empathy towards the poor), interferes with the freedom of individuals. Thus, in periods of capitalist offensive such as the Gilded Age and the age of neoliberalism this liberal conception of freedom proved to be ideologically hegemonic among almost all political actors. While UBI and FALC supporters (we will call them FALCists) see themselves as outside-the-mainstream, their conception of freedom is fundamentally tied to the dominant ideology of capitalist liberalism. They both desire a world in which there is little that impedes the freedom of consumers, whether it be the welfare state for UBI or the limits of actually existing capitalism for FALCists.

What separates your average UBI supporter and FALCists is that FALCists believe UBI is only a stepping stone towards realizing a fantasy world in which work is automated away, a story found in the work of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Unfortunately, like all good stories, this is never going to be reality. The capitalist class is not going to hand over power through the non-reformist reforms that FALC left accelerationists want to pass. If FALCists manage to do anything beyond putting out mediocre literature for the bargain bin of Verso books then they will be useful idiots for neo-liberal wonks looking to find technocratic solutions to tweak a collapsing system without expanding welfare bureaucracies. Furthermore, the communism of FALC is a “communism of consumers”, where freedom is defined as the free pursuit of limitless consumption, Milton Friedman’s “freedom to choose.” A genuine communism must be a “communism of producers”, where freedom is defined by humanity consciously transforming the word through production in free associations of labor.

Communitarianism is a common response to the excesses of Liberalism. It stands in stark contrast to modern liberals’ Benthamite conception of Freedom by rightfully rejecting the necessity of such Freedom in favor of the abstract community. Communitarians’ philosophical opposition to liberalism sometimes leads to an opposition to neoliberalism, but there are, of course, major exceptions to this such as third-way politicians Tony Blair and Bill Clinton who were indirectly inspired by communitarian thought.

One particular communitarian (although he himself would reject the label) thinker who had such a critique of capitalism is the famous American social critic Christopher Lasch. Lasch laid out a critique of radical liberalism and social progress that focused on the extent to which hyper-individualism made people neurotic in the psychoanalytic sense, suffering from narcissism and alienated from others. The cause of this neurosis was the bonds between people, such as the family, being violently broken by a combination of know-it-all social reformers (such as feminists) and the forces of market capitalism. While Lasch, in theory, sympathized with the rising neo-conservative movement of his time he could not support them because, in practice, they were no less destructive than their liberal counterparts. Lasch believed that this trend of liberal capitalism destroying America could only be reversed through a rediscovery of America’s populist movements that existed outside the elite ruling classes’ political discourse. Only then could the creation of an America that was truly at peace with itself through family, faith, and folk.

The work of Christopher Lasch influenced paleoconservatives of the ’90s and 2000s, and his name continues to linger on in those circles. But the more recent devotees of Lasch are, surprisingly, hip Brooklyn social-democrats. If Lasch were alive today he would probably be baffled at the sight of these thirty-something cosmopolitans grabbing onto and referencing his work in between drunken coke binges instead of the hard-working Americans that he sought to win over with his books. The New York-based publication, The Baffler, of which Amber Frost is a writer and editor, has continually cited Christopher Lasch’s work as a major point of reference in their articles. Along with this is the cult podcast Red Scare which also constantly references Lasch, with Frost being a regular guest. Even if she does not admit it outright in her article, it would not be shocking if Frost takes influence from Lasch. While still maintaining a good level of distance from glorifying the nuclear family and supporting relatively socially progressive positions such as being pro-choice, Frost suggests that the nuclear family was a form of community that helped people. She reveals her preference for the nuclear family in her article, suggesting that the patriarchal dependence of the housewife on the husband is preferable to dependence on the impersonal welfare state bureaucracy:

….there is something fundamentally different about being “kept” by a husband than being “kept” by the state. Even at first glance, this objection is merely a distinction without a difference. But as someone who has been both a housewife and on the dole, I assure you that housewives have far more political and economic leverage than welfare recipients…A capitalist state that holds the purse strings is far less accountable to its dependents than a husband. If he annoyed me or didn’t give me enough money, I had immediate recourse due to both the value of my labor and my proximity to him. Such is not the case with the distant and opaque bureaucracy of the welfare office

She even goes so far as to end the piece with a coy line about women loving a “working man”, further revealing a nostalgia for the Fordist family wage that if revived by a welfare state will give men employment so they are no longer condemned to being incel failsons. Frost sees her welfare socialism not only as a route to economic prosperity but a solution to sexual alienation. While the quip may seem like a joke, the combination of Lasch’s influence with a desire for “normie socialism” reveals that behind the pseudo-Marxist posturing we often see from Amber’s crowd is a weird form of soft conservatism that seeks to re-establish older social bonds through a revival of social-democracy.

We can also see this sort of Social Democratic conservatism in the most recent attempts at historical revisionism regarding the New Deal. Jacobin has attempted to erase the dominance of Southern Democrats in the New Deal coalition whose influence led to discrimination against African Americans in the implementation of New Deal reforms. There is no reason for actual socialists to be invested in defending FDR’s co-option of socialist demands and the New Deal’s crushing of radical labor. This defense of and nostalgia for the New Deal reveals their latent conservatism.

On its face, it is strange that the people in the vanguard of this micro-movement would be New York socialites, given their own lifestyles are completely at odds with their supposed values. However, it fundamentally makes sense that they would find their lives alienating and unsatisfying given their declining career prospects, as academia has not been able to secure them a comfortable petty-bourgeois existence. Thus, through the combination of social democracy and soft social conservatism, they reject the liberal order that has created such difficulties for them. Since this micro-movement is popular among white women who would be affected things like banning abortion or having their gay friends locked up, this social conservatism is, ultimately, a soft one.

What makes this pseudo-Marxist communitarianism fundamentally undesirable is that it allows for the domination of people by traditional relations of dependence. While liberal capitalist societies are defined by a trend that crushes social bonds, these pseudo-Marxist communitarian societies would be defined by traditions that crush individuals. A new generation of neurotic housewives, closeted queers, and discriminated against minorities will be born under this “socialism” if it were to become reality.

Christopher Lasch, a key influence on communitarian social democracy

The Workers’ Republic

Political philosopher Philip Pettit, drawing on Roman political philosophy, defines the republican conception of liberty as one of non-domination, freedom from arbitrary forms of power. Pettit divides liberty into two categories: freedom from tyranny (from being dominated by the arbitrary rule of a king) and freedom from slavery (from other individuals dominating each other). To achieve this one would have to be involved in the creation of the laws which governs one’s own life while also being protected from being enslaved by others. This understanding of freedom is based on the idea that to be free one has to be a sovereign over oneself, owning their own freedom as property. Freedom is conceptualized as the property of property owners. Of course, this idea was never completely realized in ancient Rome itself as Rome transitioned from a Republic to an Empire, but property owners were generally freer than anyone else in the history of Rome. This is what we call classical republicanism.

The classical republican tradition would be carried on later by the Papal States of the Renaissance to the American Revolution of the Enlightenment. The fundamental conception of non-domination in this tradition says the basis of freedom would be upheld for the property-owning classes of these societies in the face of regressive monarchical forces. A pragmatic shift in the way freedom was conceptualized in the republican tradition happened with the French Revolution. What separated the French Revolution from previous bourgeois revolutions was that there were multiple revolutions within the singular event. The republican rhetoric of the bourgeois class not only mobilized their own class against the monarchy but also mobilized the developing urban proletariat and the peasantry, universalizing the republican conception of liberty.³ François-Noël Babeuf in particular used the republican ideology of the Jacobins to argue that private property was a form of slavery and demanded its abolition alongside the implementation of full democracy. With these demands, the radical republican tradition, encompassing everything from communism to anarchism, was born.

The radical republican tradition continued to develop throughout the 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of utopian socialists like Robert Owen who connected the values of republicanism to the struggles of the growing British proletariat, and the great revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui, whose Neo-Jacobin ideology would inspire the Paris Commune. The greatest theorist of this tradition was Karl Marx, who went well beyond all previous attempts at philosophizing freedom as non-domination, contributing the most substantial innovations in the grander republican tradition.

The contribution of Marx was a comprehensive critique of capital which went deeper than earlier utopian socialist attempts to moralize about the evils of merchants or even the capitalist class in general, analyzing the domination of workers by the social relations of capital itself. Shedding the remnants of Christian morality, which stood alongside republicanism as an influence on the early growing communist movement, it allowed the communist movement to understand that the domination the worker suffered was impersonal rather than a conspiracy of an elite group. The worker and even the capitalist class itself was being dominated by abstract value which structured capital. These impersonal structures also alienated workers from their labor and forced them to compete against their fellow workers for survival, alienating them from the rest of humanity. These structures reduced men to slaves. Wage-slavery is one of the most brutal forms of slavery that have ever existed, leaving most of the world in chains and slaughtering all those who resist capital’s need for raw resources in the horrific genocides of indigenous peoples. Capital in the abstract was the ultimate slave master. Therefore, to realize republican freedom would require the abolition of capital.

Along with a strong critique of capital, Marx began to formulate the basis for the future Workers’ Republic and communist society by dissecting Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and analyzing the Paris Commune. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx works through the implications of the divide between the state and civil society. Capital divides society into the State, a means of maintaining class rule by force, and Civil Society, composed of private institutions of the bourgeoisie which play the role of socializing people. This divide exists as a form of specialization that keeps the proletariat from governing itself through maintaining the undemocratic structures of the State (the executive and judicial branches which are not in the hands of the people), leaving the role of governance to unelected bureaucrats. Civil Society encourages the atomization of individuals through the abolition of organic communities formed under previous modes of existence and reduces social issues to personal issues. The structure of capitalism corrupts the State, keeping it from ever being democratic. This divide between the State and Civil Society would have to be overcome in order to realize a society in which all men were sovereign. Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune led him to believe that it was necessary for the “Republic of Labor” to abolish the standing army, slowly eliminate bureaucracy, and destroy capital. Only a republic of the laboring class, the proletariat, could carry out such a task, as they were the heart of the system, providing it with its lifeblood of value.

From these innovations, we understand that the Republic of Labor or the Workers’ Republic is a form of governance which is based on a social contract of sorts between society and individual. The individual provides their labor to the maintenance of society and in exchange, the laborer becomes free from state oppression and the exploitation of wage slavery. This is what is meant by the famous line “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.

“An interplanetary bridge; Saturn’s ring is an iron balcony” from Un autre monde (1844)

Dealing with Incels and Housewives

Once we have gotten past the liberal conception of freedom and the domination of capital the horizon for social change becomes vast and overpowering in its glorious light. The collapse of the divide between governments and civil society not only allows for the rational planning of the economy through the abolition of private property, but also the democratic rational planning of social relations. Under these new horizons, we can eliminate the forms of alienation that dominate our lives. This includes the sexual alienation that Frost points to at the beginning of her article.

Many people have struggled to find meaningful romantic and sexual relationships under capitalism due to the destruction of the sexual commons (gay bars, bathhouses, and communal mating rituals) under a brutal dialectic between the prudish remnants of Christian morality that keep us in the dark about the scientific realities of human sexuality and the commodification of sex that is the basis of the sex industry (porn, prostitution, etc). What the Workers’ Republic will offer them is a realization of Reichian-Foucaultian Sex-Pol which is centered on the liberation of libidinal desire from the constraints of capital and reified sexuality.

The basis of this liberation will be a thorough sex education program that will start at a young age to break the remnants of Christian morality that linger on in the treatment of children. Children will be taught that there is nothing wrong to experiment among themselves, although they should remain hostile to adults that seek to sexually exploit them. Along with this education, there will be an overarching theme that human sexuality is not tied to particular identities such as straight or gay, but rather is something fluid, changing through the lives of people along with societal norms. Gender norms will be challenged at an early age.

When these children mature into adults they will be let into the sexual communes of the Workers’ Republic, creating the same sort of vibrant scene gay scenes that existed during the ’70s, though without the state repression, for the whole of humanity. There will be bars, bathhouses, spas, and sex clubs where one can go to fulfill one sexual needs through consensual fucking all created by the Republic. Porn will be replaced with completely consensual erotica liberated from the evils of the profit motive. Prostitution will not exist under the Workers’ Republic as there will be no need for such vile modification of human sexuality given that libidinal desire is freed from traditional patriarchal restraint with the absence of the profit motive that commodifies human sexuality.

There will still, of course, be victims of sexual assault and harassment to protect, and they will be protected to the fullest extent of the law. The Republic will make sure to provide rape kits to investigators and fair trials for the victims of sexual assault along with extensive therapy. Most of all the patriarchal structures that facilitate the mass rape of women and men will be dealt with through the social engineering capabilities of the Republic.

Women who give birth to children will be given every service available for them and their children’s needs. This will include full paid leave, daycares, healthcare, schooling, and the automation of household tasks. Along with these benefits for more traditional families will be experiments in new forms of child-rearing. Communes of 50–500 people will voluntarily engage in forming new kinds of families that are more communal in nature, like a larger extended family. Children will also be given more extensive rights than they have under capitalism, protecting them from corporal punishment, verbal abuse and other egregious violations of their autonomy through social rearing centers which will take care of abused and unwanted children.

While one can dismiss this as pure speculation (which, to a certain extent they would be right to do) there is still value in imagining how the problems of the current day can be dealt with in a rational manner under a Workers’ Republic. We are expanding what we mean by freedom when we talk of communism, moving beyond the narrow discourse that currently defines politics. We must look beyond the family wage of the Fordist welfare state for solutions to the alienation that defines modern life. The discourse between timid social democrats and antisocial neoliberals limits the possibilities of humanity to the soul-crushing confines of capitalism.