October 2021
Aaron Benanav writes frequently for the New Left Review. A member of the
communist publishing group Endnotes, his first book, Automation and the Future of Work, was published by Verso in 2020. In this penetrating study, Benanav describes the principles and assumptions held by exponents of the ‘automation discourse’, which includes the likes of Nick Srnicek, Aaron Bastani, and Erik Brynjolfsson. Although sympathetic to the political goals these authors advocate, Benanav dispels the rationale for some of their most fundamental beliefs and challenges their worldview with a theory of the present that is premised on global deindustrialization and economic stagnation. In spite of this, his vision for the future is hopeful – but we cannot rely on robots to get us there.
3:AM: What is your background?
Aaron Benanav: I’m from upstate New York, but I moved around the US a lot. I did my undergraduate degree in Chicago, my graduate degree in LA, and then returned to Chicago for postdoctoral work. Now I’m in Berlin, a researcher at Humboldt University. My academic work has been about the causes of unemployment around the world. At first, I approached the problem as an economic historian, looking at the history of developmental states, especially in the aftermath of WWII. I studied the problems of economic development in a global context. Then I moved into institutional and policy history. I studied the history of economic statistics, how nations measure unemployment and the problems that governments have in trying to measure it. As the discourse about automation emerged, I realized how similar the topics that preoccupied that discourse were to my own areas of expertise and interest — I had been researching why there were so many people who didn’t have jobs, and automation theory presents itself as an explanation for this phenomenon. I felt it was a good opportunity for me to intervene and put my fund of knowledge to good use.
3:AM: Was that the only reason you wanted to engage with the automation theorists?
AB: As I mention in the preface to the book, I appreciate the utopianism of the authors. I was particularly excited by their vision of a future that isn’t centered on working for wages all of one’s life, that they were thinking expansively about a more positive sense of human possibilities. As things grow darker and our social fabric wears ever thinner, it’s clear that their efforts in this direction are absolutely necessary.
3:AM: That balance is one of the successes of your book. You provide a clear analysis of the failings of the automation discourse but manage to frame your critique within an otherwise robust endorsement of the ultimate goals of their writing.
AB: I read Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s book Inventing the Future on an airplane. I don’t remember where I was going. All I remember was how impressed I was with how they were so willing to say something clear and positive about the world that they wanted to live in and the values that they felt were necessary to establish, as a pathway to the world that they wanted to see.
I was very inspired by that book despite disagreeing with it. I have always conceived of my own book on automation as a love letter to the automation theorists. I didn’t want it to be read by them as a take-down. What I wanted to say was here’s what you would need to say in order to make your ideas and vision cohere.
3:AM: What is the nub of that criticism?
AB: The premise that I and the automation theorists share is that there aren’t enough jobs to go around. That could be for one of two reasons: either it’s because jobs are being destroyed much more quickly than they were before, or because jobs are not being created as quickly. The automation theorists put their money on the former, but I disagree. I say that jobs aren’t being created as quickly as they were in the past. That’s why, in many countries, the crisis has hit younger people, who are just entering the labor market, harder than older workers who already have secure forms of work.
Of course, many jobs have disappeared over the past few decades. Deindustrialization, especially in the U.S., is rampant. But contrary to popular belief, the pace at which people are being turned out of jobs is slowing down today, not speeding up – think of all the farmers who lost their livelihoods in the 20th century and had to look for work. When jobs aren’t created in large enough numbers to replace those jobs that have been lost, the effect on labor-market entrance has a specific character: people get stuck in the bad jobs they do find, as opposed to constantly churning in and out of work.
But even when workers don’t change jobs very often, working life can still become more insecure. People reasonably fear that if they do lose their jobs, they will have trouble finding work that is at least as good as what they have right now. Workers’ bargaining power correspondingly declines, and as a result, workers end up with lower wages, fewer hours of work, and/or worse working conditions.
That the automation theorists tend to give the wrong explanation for this under-employment is understandable. After all, we do live in a world of advanced technology: think of smartphones, the internet, and so on. But the capacity of technology to improve workers’ labor productivity is much weaker and more complicated than what the automation theorists imagine.
3:AM: You mention deindustrialization, which is a concept that plays a large role in your work. You write that the standard textbook definition of deindustrialization is “a decline in the share of manufacturing jobs in total employment.” What is the automation theorist’s take on this concept, and where do they go wrong?
AB: Automation theorists take deindustrialization as evidence for their argument that automation is speeding up. In essence, they believe that automation is responsible for increasing productivity growth and that productivity growth is eliminating jobs in the manufacturing sector. Put differently, they imagine that the international industrial complex is doing more with less, thanks to advances in mechanization and digital administration. Knowing that most jobs are now in services, the automation theorists then attempt to outline ways that automated processes are leaking from manufacturing into services. If what has happened to manufacturing happens to services, they claim, then vast swathes of the population will be put out of work. That’s why artificial intelligence and robotics are so important to their story.
But first of all, theirs is simply not a good account of what’s happened to manufacturing. When you look at the data, it’s very clear that productivity growth rates aren’t rising, in fact, in most countries, productivity growth in manufacturing is falling. In the US it’s a little bit more complicated, although Paul Krugman, who’s no radical heterodox economist, recently pointed out that the productivity growth of manufacturing in America was flat for the entire decade of the 2010s. But the clear trend is that manufacturing growth rates across the OECD have slowed and slowed since the 1970s. Secondly, there’s very little evidence that computerization and digitalization is affecting services.
3:AM: And that fact disproves the automation theorists’ point of view because it’s precisely in the period when automation emerges that we have a huge slowdown in productivity growth.
AB: Yes. They might think that the numbers are wrong or the books are cooked, but there’s just no evidence to support their main contention. Clearly, technologies are improving labor productivity in some occupations, but whatever real, implementable breakthroughs have taken place, those advances are completely overwhelmed by this long-term, downward tendency in productivity growth rates. However efficient they make manufacturing, computers have not halted this trend.
3:AM: And so you point to what you call international overcapacity as the cause as opposed to explosive automation. Can you tell me a bit more about what overcapacity is?
AB: In the book, I deal with two historical trends, which follow one another chronologically. The first is that, in the 19th century and for most of the 20th century, industrial expansion was the main way that economies grew very quickly. Industry acted as a growth engine for the wider economy. A company that produced thousands of automobiles annually was, within a relatively short period of time, able to produce millions. As incomes grew, people spent money on a range of other goods and services, resulting in rapid, economic expansion. However, only a small cohort of countries was able to position themselves at the forefront of research and development, like the United States or Japan, or, subsequently, at the forefront of catch-up growth, like South Korea. Whether you led the world or whether you’re one of the first to catch up, your efforts resulted in very dynamic growth.
The second trend describes our current predicament, which is that the industrial growth engine is breaking down. My preferred explanation for this predicament is global overcapacity. After WWII, the US invested heavily in the free-trade world order, helping its former imperial competitors, namely Germany and Japan, as well as US protectorate-states like South Kore and Taiwan, to revamp their manufacturing sectors. In contrast to the assumptions of textbook economic-trade theory, these countries did not specialize in different goods in order to benefit from international trade.
Instead, companies largely produced the same sorts of goods. Over time, that resulted in redundant capacity: Ford was competing with Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes, who were, in turn, competing with Toyota, Honda, and so on. Each of these companies tried to sell more cars, but collectively, they discovered their capacity to produce cars was rising faster than the demand for cars. Competition across many different lines of production intensified and rates of return on investment fell, so companies started to invest less in expanding production. As they did so, growth in the industrial sector slowed down and fewer jobs were created. This slowdown was not caused by the entrance of less advanced countries into global markets, though that entrance did make overcapacity worse.
Some economists describe this situation in terms of a fallacy of composition: there may be some room for expansion in a market, let’s say for cars, but if many businesses try to occupy the same space at the same time, the potential for growth of each business vastly diminishes. In this way, international overcapacity killed the manufacturing growth engine. What’s worse, there wasn’t really any alternative. The poorer countries couldn’t have chosen a different path. Even today, it’s not like there’s a massive market for service exports or agricultural exports that remain untapped. In fact, though the services sector outweighs the industrial sector in most countries, services are characterized by endemically low growth and represent only a tiny fraction of global trade.
3:AM: Why is that? What is unique about services that make them so resistant to growth?
AB: It’s not as though the output of services and industry are completely separate. If you think about it, most industrial goods are instruments we use to perform services for ourselves: if you own a car, you don’t need public transport or taxis; instead of paying a launderette, you buy a washing machine. Turning a service into a self-service good, which can be produced with an ever more complex and efficient industrial process, is what generates incredible gains in productivity over time. Mechanization leads to mass production. Activities that see exponential productivity growth tend to look more industrial – think about animal farming and delivery services, or even fast food.
If something doesn’t look industrial, say teaching kindergarten or nursing, it is because no one has been able to figure out how to break down the activity into its component parts and then mechanize or computerize each one in turn. The result is that labor productivity grows at a slow pace. In a sense, the remaining services in the economy are those that have proven difficult to industrialize. The labor that constitutes services like education or healthcare isn’t amenable to industrial streamlining. And without high productivity growth, services don’t become cheaper to render over time. One major consequence is that, as workers shift out of industry and into services, the economy grows more slowly, since productivity growth is one of the main sources of economic growth.
Meanwhile, if the service does switch tracks and makes the leap to industrialization, then that service typically enters the same oversaturated game of global competition in industrial production.
3:AM: So even when a new technological good is produced, like highly efficient solar panels, for instance, the argument is still the same: manufacturing supply chains are saturated, and while one region may lead the field for a time, all of the industrial sectors around the world will shortly follow suit, meaning that growth will slow dramatically.
AB: To be clear, the most impacted industries are the high-tech industries. LCD TVs and personal computers are good examples. That’s not to say that there are no shortages – right now there’s a global shortage of microprocessor chips. But in general, the newest products suffer worst of all.
3:AM: What role does financialization play in your account?
AB: The way finance is supposed to work is that it facilitates the transfer of profits from maturing economic sectors to emerging ones, so for example, from farming to factories, or from factories to hospitals. Think about it this way: if a sector of the economy, let’s say brick-and-mortar retail like Walmart, was no longer yielding a high rate of return, there would be no reason to keep investing in expanding those businesses. Financial firms would then help move money from retail into more profitable areas of the economy, like solar-panel production, which in turn allows companies in those other sectors to grow rapidly. But this sort of financial intermediation is not so easy to do anymore, because there are very few profitable sectors of the economy for money to enter.
As evidence, we need only look at the downward trend in long-term interest rates. I’m not speaking here of the short-term interest rates set by the Fed. Long-term interest rates correspond more directly to the returns on fixed investment, by which I mean investment in the buildings and equipment that determine the size and shape of the economy. Now that there aren’t as many opportunities for fixed investment, long-term interest rates have hit rock bottom. A lot of people are trying to lend money long-term but very few companies want to borrow.
That’s what explains the apparent financialization of the economy. It is a symptom, rather than a cause, of declining opportunities for economic growth in the present-day economy. Instead of lending money to purchase buildings and equipment to expand production, more and more money is being held in the form of stocks, bonds, and real estate – or is lent out for households to purchase homes, educations, or cars. The latter induces some investment of course – if it is easier for people to buy cars on credit, then people will buy more cars than they would have otherwise – but the effect of financial incentives on actual purchases has become less and less pronounced over time.
Meanwhile, as the difference between long-term and short-term interest rates compresses – due to the absence of investment opportunities – financial firms are influenced to make riskier investments, which have higher rates of return when they succeed, but sometimes result in catastrophic failure. That makes the financial system very unstable, which is why we have seismic disruptions like the 2008 financial crisis and why the system is on permanent life support from the central bank today.
3:AM: Since it was released in November, the book has garnered widespread attention and praise. What aspects of its reception have struck you? Have you been surprised by anyone’s interpretation? Are there elements you would revise now or expand on further?
AB: There was one strong challenge to the book’s thesis that I will take on board in the future. The basis of the challenge is the standard economic theory that, once countries reach a certain level of income, the population begins to spend proportionally less of its income on manufactured goods and more of its income on services. Some argue that this domestic trend, rather than changes in international markets, explains why industrial production capacity has outrun the demand for industrial goods. I was skeptical of this argument because it doesn’t explain why countries like South Africa, Brazil, or China are deindustrializing even though their populations remain poor. Meanwhile, in most countries (the United States is an exception), industrial expansion has been export-led – it doesn’t take the form of production to meet domestic needs – so it seemed highly unlikely to me that a theory that made no reference to international markets could be correct.
However, that doesn’t mean that the demand-shift explanation of deindustrialization is completely false. It is even compatible with my account. Maybe populations in the richest countries in the world, countries like the United States, did start to spend less of their incomes on goods rather than services. That would have compounded the problem that more and more firms across the world were investing in the capacity to produce goods to sell on international markets. Even poorer countries would have been affected by this trend since firms in those countries depended on the demand of comparatively wealthy consumers for their expansion. In this way, demand shifts in the richest countries may have made global overcapacity worse than it would have been otherwise.
If I could make one change to the book, I would examine the tech sector more thoroughly. Even if technology isn’t going to cause a wholesale elimination of work, in the way that automation theorists suggest, it is transforming jobs. I talk about that briefly in the book, but the research on this topic has expanded rapidly. For example, there’s a fascinating new literature on digital Taylorism. New technologies allow firms to take decisions out of the hands of workers, to reduce the skills required to perform a given job. Think of the way that taxi drivers use their detailed knowledge of city streets to get their customers from point A to point B. The Uber app gives drivers turn-by-turn directions, and then carefully watches how well they follow these instructions. Uber then pays its drivers lower wages. This is Taylorism in the sense that digital technologies allow firms to exert new forms of control over workers, taking knowledge out of their hands, but it represents a radicalization of Taylorism too or even its partial overcoming. In the past, Taylorism was about putting control over work in the hands of middle managers. The tech sector reduces the need for middle management by using algorithms to oversee and manage workers from afar.
3:AM: What you are saying about the spread of digital Taylorism reminds me of Fisher’s diatribe against bureaucratic procedures in education. His idea was that, in stark contrast to the claims of “neoliberal ideologues,” workplace bureaucracy had proliferated under late capitalism, as the drive to assess the performance of workers became ever more acute.
Aaron Benanav: There’s no question that late capitalism and late Soviet socialism are proving to be more similar than anyone imagined. You only need to look at education and healthcare in the US to get a sense of the scale of the problem. New management was brought to control costs, in order to make non-profit firms and governments function more like profit-making businesses. But, as I have already explained, it is extremely difficult to raise productivity growth rates in service-sector occupations. Instead of making school- and hospital- work more and more efficient, this new style of management mainly reduced quality.
Like centrally planned economies, our institutions are increasingly marked by out-of-touch bureaucracies chasing production targets, such as alumni donations or patients seen per doctor-hour, that either have nothing to do with the quality of the services they provide or else prove easy to game, in ways that make quality worse. These efforts inevitably create a huge amount of paperwork, to supply the information on which out-of-touch managers make decisions, while having few positive effects on productivity. Insofar as hospitals and schools have controlled costs, they have done so mostly by resisting workers’ demands for higher wages, or by hiring workers on limited contracts with lower pay. These are same strategies firms in the private sector deploy.
3:AM: You praise the automation theorists for thinking creatively about the economic and political architecture of society under the conditions of post-labor. But do you have any intuitions or thoughts about what such a society looks like from a cultural or libidinal perspective? What will occupy us?
AB: One of my principal disagreements with the automation discourse is that I don’t believe work is going away. That said, work doesn’t have to be the center of our lives in the way that it is for most people today. We have to re-invent work. People feel a deep sense of psychological insecurity, today, which is, I think, in large part the result of their abiding material insecurity. We spend a lot of time worrying about how we are going to keep our jobs, or get out of debt, or pay our bills. Those concerns suffuse the world of work and are directly connected to the slowdown in rates of economic growth and job creation that I have already described.
There’s a new literature in psychology about so-called ‘scarcity mentality’, which is the world-shrinking effect of material insecurity. The state of technology today may not allow for full automation, but it certainly makes it possible to produce a lot of wealth and, with some big changes in the direction of sustainability, I believe we could all work less and be more secure. I don’t think we’ll ever get to a point, especially given climate constraints, of limitless abundance. However, we can reasonably expect to achieve a post-scarcity world in which everyone’s needs are met—not only material needs like healthcare and housing, but also psychosocial needs like having autonomy in one’s work, feeling like one is good at something, and finding a purpose in one’s life.
Once we figure out how to reorganize and redistribute work, and to secure people’s access to the goods and services they need to live, the scarcity mentality will largely evaporate. Our worlds will open up. People will be able to seek meaning in their lives in a variety of different ways. For some, having a job that concretely helps other people, even if it were only 25 hours a week, would be deeply meaningful; others find meaning in love and community; still others in their faith or in following through on their passions for art or music. With access to resources and education, people would have time to develop and expand what they are passionate about. We would all experience the benefits of living in such a world, which would offer richer social and cultural experiences.
One of the things I liked most about Srnicek and Williams’ book was the Promethean dimension to their thought. I think that when people are free from material insecurity, in a deep and abiding way, they don’t only spend more time resting and relaxing. They dream big. They emerge from their communities and, by some inner magnetism, are drawn towards other individuals who share their same interests. In other words, people associate freely with one another. That’s the fascinating, sometimes dangerous dimension of human beings. It’s in the power of free association that true genius lies, the genius of the collective. Much of human creativity and inventiveness emerges from our relationships and networks. In a world free of material insecurity, we could build associations freely, for any purpose we can think of, to flourish individually and together.
3:AM: I’m very taken by your vision for a post-scarcity world, which you also discuss in the last chapter of the book. But re-reading that final chapter before our interview, I felt a touch of a pessimism when I thought about the state of popular culture today. Our aesthetic commons is dominated by digital platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok etc. Do you think it is possible that the civilization to come, the civilization of post-scarcity, might actually be more vulnerable to algorithmic capture, if the populace is no longer be required to fit into a workplace community and has more time to waste with sterile and fragmenting social media?
AB: Unfortunately, people who experience material insecurity and engage in mind-numbing work are drawn to passive forms of entertainment – today it’s watching YouTube videos or scrolling through social media feeds rather than watching television, but the relation to passive, pacifying media is the same. I think the opposite is likely to be true as well: when people are materially secure and enjoy their work, they don’t necessarily spend their free time mindlessly consuming media online. They look to other forms of enjoyment and cultural enrichment that involve more activity and more depth of focus.
It’s worth pointing out that we live in an era of explosive social movements that are larger still than those of the nineteen-sixties or -seventies. I’m sure there are many reasons to be a pessimist, but look: young people with smartphones are showing up to protests. They clearly understand that their conditions are untenable. Or take the latest Bo Burnham comedy special on Netflix. Here we have a very popular, mainstream cultural product that is essentially about all the things we’re talking about in this interview. It’s a straightforward argument about the limits of the capitalist economy to meet our needs. That must be meaningful, in the sense that it is indicative of the cultural promise at large.
3:AM: One idea that I felt was simmering beneath the surface of your book is the historical relationship between wealth and imperialism. You strongly emphasize the role that industry played in the 20th century as an engine of national growth and development; it generated vast profits for its investors, created new jobs, necessitated widescale education, stimulated infrastructural development etc. It was the runaway success of manufacturing, especially after WWII, that gave shape to our current economic global hierarchy. The option to take advantage of the strength of manufacturing was, however, only exercised by those countries that were already rich. Colonies like Ireland (independent in 1922) and India (independent in 1947) were not in this position, due to the devastation of centuries of violent imperialism (African nations were decolonized from the 1950s through to the 1970s). At several points, your book points to the relationship between manufacturing – the source of today’s wealth, albeit in decline – and colonial imbalance. How do you understand this relationship?
AB: China and India were the world’s major manufacturing centers before the 19th century, so much so that the infant English textile industry depended, at least for a while, on protections against competition from imported Indian fabrics. Industrializing states in the global North used their growing economic power both to colonize the world and to inhibit their colonies from acquiring or maintaining industrial capacity. Many economists argued that poorer countries should specialize in agriculture or mineral production, and hence should remain condemned to the margins of the global economy. In defiance of this discourse, which was often also white supremacist in character, post-colonial states were uniformly in favor of adopting industrial policies, as a way to gain independence in a highly unequal world, both economically and geopolitically.
It’s important to remember that the breakneck speed of industrialization in the 20th century – whether in the western imperial countries, the Soviet Union, or the global South – exacted a terrible toll on the populations that actually built, worked in, and lived around factories. In the postwar period, most developmental states prioritized the development of heavy industry—steel, electricity, and chemicals—rather than providing food, shelter, education, healthcare and basic goods for their populations. Economic growth was not an unqualified good; the most rapidly growing countries in the global south after WWII, like South Korea, were mostly military dictatorships.
By the time the 21st century rolls around, more and more countries worldwide had some industrial capacity, but as we discussed earlier, their achievement came only at the twilight of the industrial age. It’s gotten harder for firms to find space in the global economy, and workers in the global south bear the brunt of this hyper-competition. Incomes have grown, especially in China, but in sum, the poorest 50 percent of the world’s workers captured only a small fraction of total economic growth.
Meanwhile, workers in export processing zones around the world are laboring under terrible conditions, and typically face persistent employment and income insecurity. And as industry has absorbed only a small percentage of the urban populations in poor countries, there are many more people who are even worse off than the factory workers. China’s re-emergence as an economic and industrial superpower comes at the cost of weakened social bonds and severe environmental impact. Moreover, due to the unprecedented level of market competition, China’s industrial success comes directly at the expense of Brazil and Mexico, which have long-since ceased industrializing.
All of this is to say we need to clearly distinguish between economic growth and economic development. There are much better ways to achieve developmental outcomes for the global population than by trying to get the overall economy growing again. The latter may reduce poverty to some extent, but will prove an extremely inefficient and roundabout way to meet people’s needs. Obviously, development will always have a growth component, but focusing on meeting people’s needs would generate a very different pattern of growth than the one that has prevailed until now.
The legacies of colonialism are absolutely present. The US is still just coming to terms with the legacies of slavery. The shadow of colonial rule is long. Questions about redress and reparations have often been posed, but have not been resolved.
3:AM: The EU’s New Gen programme and Biden’s American Rescue Plan and American Job’s Plan were announced in February and March. The New Gen programme offers €750 billion to help member states, and that sum can be multiplied by borrowing on the markets. Biden’s American Rescue Plan will inject $1.9 trillion dollars into the economy, giving $1400 to every American earning under $75,000 a year, as well as extending the reach of child allowance, health insurance, and unemployment benefit. His American Job’s Plan guarantees a further $1.7 trillion for the purpose of infrastructural investment and additional spending to tackle climate-change has already been promised. A question on many people’s minds is whether these interventions signal the shift to a post-neoliberal era – what do you think?
AB: The claim of my book is that neoliberalism was a response to a problem, and not the problem itself. The problem was that growth prospects were dimming and companies stopped investing as much. States tried all kinds of ways to respond to the threat of disinvestment. At first, in the mid-1970s, they committed to a lot of Keynesian spending to try to stimulate investment, but boardrooms didn’t really buy into that because it was clear that growth prospects were tracking downward in the long-term, despite governmental interventions. Eventually governments turned to neoliberalism, with its emphasis on fiscal austerity and deregulation. The neoliberal creed said let’s wipe out excess capital, let’s remove all regulations, let’s reduce access to welfare benefits and push everyone to take jobs – just let the free market do its thing. But as we know, those policies also didn’t revive growth. Neoliberalism made the conditions for workers substantially worse, because now the average worker is not only experiencing insecurity due to a stagnating, low-growth economy, but they are also suffering from the removal of state supports that previous generations enjoyed.
One of the clearest indicators that neoliberalism has never worked is debt. Almost universally, state debt levels have continued to rise over the neoliberal period, along with the levels of household debt, corporate debt, and so on. And as I keep coming back to, interest rates are uncommonly low, which is one of the main supports for the economy, because it means that borrowing has been very cheap, but it hasn’t mattered – nothing has been able to halt the long-term downward growth trend.
Given the scale of the failure, the abhorrence for neoliberalism makes sense. The neoliberal claim was that if you free market forces you automatically revive growth, and it hasn’t worked. Levels of unemployment may have gone down, but even that minor gain has come at the great expense of social cohesion: more people are employed but experiences of insecurity have proliferated. Everyone has the sense that the world has gone wrong, which creates widespread instability. So it makes sense to me that as more economists and policymakers are recognizing that we’re still stagnating, they’re now looking for alternatives.
My intuition is that this moment is not what many are promising it is, but I’m interested to see what happens. Opportunities for growth may have been missed due to the absence of public investment, so that now real public investment will recharge the system and create the conditions for meaningful growth. But I don’t think that there’s any possibility that there will be a long-term recovery. The reasons for the slowdown are deep and structural and global, they’re not because of the wrongness of neoliberal policies. The wrong policies aren’t what brought us into this mess, it’s the structural economic tendencies that are at fault, and these will not be fixed by pumping the economy with stimulus, which has been tried and has failed in the past. I think that these programs might work in the short term but will prove less effective than their proponents are saying in the medium term.
Nonetheless the positive aspect of this public spending is that, because interest rates are bottomed out, now is the best time to borrow money to improve people’s lives. Across these programs in the US and EU, there are glimpses, or small indications, that there’s finally an understanding that we should invest, not in order to secure the future profitability of private firms, but simply to make people’s lives better, whether it’s by building housing or by transitioning into green energy.
Those kinds of things involve using public investment to improve people’s lives. And I think that, once the paradigm shifts and the political mentality switches from profitability to communal good, we will begin to build a pathway to a different world, a world in which the capacities we have to alter our environment and our economy are properly exercised. This might sound idealistic, but again, the point I am making is that we can live in a world where investment is not guided by profitability concerns because there’s going to be very little profit available for the making.
That said, I think we need to be skeptical of the form of politics that is delivering this change. I can’t stress this enough: we need an alternative to technocratic politics. Given widespread distrust in experts, the idea that some policy wonk is going to turn things around is laughable. This new moment of technocratic enthusiasm is likely going to misfire like all of the previous attempts to deploy neo-Keynesian strategies, which begin with such promise, and end in misery, because they never tackle structural issues. This failure is predominantly a failure of method: none of these plans involve anything like democratic or community control over resources. There’s little interest in that.
3:AM: Finally, what book are you working on next?
AB: I’ve been working on a sequel to my automation book that develops the ideas of the last chapter. Some of the material I’ve discussed in the course of this interview is going to form the substance of the new book, like the research about scarcity mentalities and what it means to be beyond scarcity from a psychological perspective. The core of the new work is built around what you might call a moral intuition that our aim must be to create conditions in which no one is materially insecure. I strongly believe that emancipation from material insecurity is the principal necessary condition for humanity to advance to the next stage in our evolution, whatever that might mean.
In the new book, I will trace the history of what I call the post-scarcity tradition and explain how I think this tradition can be revived today. The authors I am interested in are the ones who seek to reorganize work in such a way as to meet people’s needs. But I am very critical of the turn, in the 20th century, to central planning as a way to bring about a post-scarcity society.
Some exponents of the automation discourse today look to AI as a way to revive central planning, by arguing that algorithmic infrastructure will overcome the problems that riddled central planning in the past. I think that this misguided perspective is informed by a specific failure of the intellectual tradition I’m studying: in the past many believed that, once we got out of capitalism, the human community would heal its divisions and become harmonious. Administrating the economy would be a simple task, which would proceed without conflict. Belief in the non-conflictual rationality of the community was the Achilles heel of this tradition. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, our productive capacities, and even humanity itself, simply became too complex to sustain this ideal.
There’s a famous debate among intellectuals in Vienna, involving the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, that turned precisely on this problem, namely the possibility of socialism in a complex world. To my mind, the ‘socialist calculation’ debate is useful for bringing to light a different vision of the post-scarcity social framework; not the return of the totalizing and uniform community, but a vibrant and diverse civil society with many different organizations and associations freely interplaying. This is important because the obligation to meet our basic needs requires the use of a range of specialized knowledges that will never be integrated into a central plan. The only realistic way to fulfil this obligation is to supports a dynamic and politically conflictual society.
3:AM: Do you think we will ever see that society?
AB: Yes, I do. That is why I want to communicate the importance of this idea, because I absolutely think it’s achievable. Still, it is important to recognize that history is littered with attempts to think this kind of society, and we have to understand their limits in order to learn why those post-scarcity visions became utopian in the bad sense, the sense of impossibility, before we can act to recover their aims.
We live in an age of explosive social movements. It’s clear that people are trying to find the right way to demand a better future. That is why you see so much in the mainstream press about the four-day working week, universal basic income, basic services, the Green New Deal etc. To my mind, what’s missing is the confrontation with an older idea of democratizing institutions in such a way as to give average people authority over the things that matter in their lives.
Cultural Criticism | Tom Lordan 
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