How to Use Left Populism to Win a Post-Work Economy
It is widely agreed that today’s Left has, to varying degrees, lost confidence in its longstanding vision of a new social system to replace capitalism (socialism) and in both the reformist and revolutionary versions of the strategic path for getting to post-capitalism (building the power of a working class political party and mass working class organizations).
Over thirty-five years ago, Gavin Kitching responded to this problem by suggesting, in Rethinking Socialism, that the Left recognize that it would likely require a very long period of perhaps centuries to prepare the grounds for achieving socialism. The Left should orient around building two preconditions, world-wide prosperity and an active citizenry with republican virtues that had grown out of democratic control struggles. More recently Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have published a must-read book, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015, 2nd ed 2016) that addresses the same issues with new proposals for a long-haul strategy of building the preconditions for a postcapitalist social system. A bright spot: Srnicek and Williams (henceforth referred to as the plural S+W) talk about decades instead of centuries as the time span, albeit the time span to achieve a post-work society that is still capitalist.
The Left Cannot Agree on an Alternative to Capitalism — But We Can Unite People Across All Circumstances around the Common Demand for a Post-Work Economy with a Left-Wing UBI
S+W put forward two big ideas. First, the broad Left should be united around a common vision and strategic goal for an alternate future, the achievement of a Post-Work Economy. Instead of seeking worker control of the means of production (socialism), the immediate struggle should be to free all wage or salary earners from the imperative to engage in wage labour for a capitalist boss, although a wage labour capitalist economy would still exist, and most people would opt to earn extra income in it. This would be achieved by massive automation of as many current jobs as possible and by a left-wing version of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), available unconditionally to everyone whether they do wage labour work or not. Second, they propose a two-part strategy, one part related to developing and promoting an alternative ideology (emulating what neoliberal thinkers did), and one part related to uniting the broad left to challenge for power (practicing a left-wing populism that draws on the theorizing of Ernesto Laclau).
These proposals are grounded respectively in two concrete analyses. The idea of aiming for a Post-Work Economy is based in an analysis of where world capitalism is headed if the Left remains unable to challenge and redirect it. S+W argue that capitalism is creating a different kind of post-work economy, one in which a very large proportion of the population is either permanently expelled from wage labour, or excluded from access to more than temporary and part-time wage labour in the first place. The left should counterpose proposals for a progressive post-work economy.
The 2011 Occupy Movement Raised Consciousness About Economic Inequality — But Its Dogmatic Insistence on Structurelessness and Its Refusal to Make Concrete Political Demands Greatly Reduced Its Influence
The two-part strategy idea grows out of a critique of the limitations of the predominant common sense of today’s extraparliamentary protest Left . S+W critique the “politics of immediacy”, a set of ideas that have become more or less unchallengeable dogmas – for example, leaderless horizontalism, priority given to creating autonomous prefigurative ‘change the self’ liberated spaces, and an obsession with purifying the means deployed by the left internally that preempts developing effective strategy-tactics to actually win some ends. However, they recognize that these principles that have become unquestioned principles for some very good reasons, and that alternatives would have to address those reasons. They point out some of the downsides and argue for ways to improve on what is being done now. Their critique is excellent, and it alone makes it worth your while to buy the book. It would require too much space to do their critique justice here, so it will be taken up soon in another post. Meanwhile this post will describe S+W’s argument for a different approach aimed at twin goals, challenging dominant ideologies and winning and exercizing power.
SEEKING A POST-WORK ECONOMY TO UNITE ALL WORKING PEOPLE
The Left cannot agree on any statement about the kind of society that it is fighting for long-term that might replace capitalism. It cannot even agree on enduring short or medium term goals (as opposed to very narrow ones agreed to for a particular campaign engaged in by a coalition) that transcend the goals specified by the autonomous movements that make up the overall left-leaning Movement. S+W sidestep the issue of articulating the nature of a post-capitalist society as a shared long-term goal. They propose that the broad Left unite around a clearly articulated short to medium term goal, seeking a left version of a post-work economy.
Introducing new labour-saving technology into a particular workplace generally results in at least some workers losing their jobs, while typically increasing profits for employers because their wage labour costs are reduced. Employers argue that automation is an unqualified good, because it eventually leads to new jobs being created somewhere else in the same company, or more often somewhere else in the economy. The laid off workers need only retrain and find that new job elsewhere. Any opposition to automation is a misguided opposition to scientific progress. Trade unions reply that new jobs are not necessarily created elsewhere, and the worker often ends up working at a worse job for lower pay, if they get a new full-time job at all. And while the new technology may eliminate a dirty or hard labour or boring white collar job, it may also make the jobs of at least some of the workers who remain employed at that company worse by enabling greater surveillance, control and work intensity. Automation is a difficult issue for trade unions and for the left in general.
Four Core Post-Work Society Demands — Full and Rapid Automation in Exchange for Left-Wing UBI and a Shorter Work Week and Rethinking What Work is For
Nevertheless, S+W propose that the overall left should unite around “building a post-work society on the basis of [four demands, specifically] fully automating the economy, reducing the work week, implementing a universal basic income, and achieving a cultural shift in the understanding of work” (p108). They see these demands as “non-reformist” because they are what Trotskyists term ‘transitional demands’. They are demands that “have a utopian edge that strains at the limits of what capitalism can concede”, yet they are also “grounded in real tendencies in the world today, giving them a viability that revolutionary dreams lack [i.e. they are not overtly incompatible with the continued existence of capitalism, they are “minimal” (p127), not maximal, demands]. They are demands that will weaken the power of capitalists over their workers, because workers can survive without doing wage labour for a particular employer or even any employer. They are demands that “will not break us out of capitalism, but they do promise to break us out of neoliberalism, and to establish a new equilibrium of political, economic and social forces” (p108).
S+W recognize that proposals for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) have been promoted by neoliberals like Milton Friedman, who see a single cash grant replacing almost all government-provided welfare state services and forcing both employed and unemployed workers to purchase those services from private profit-making companies. The neoliberal version of UBI is also a public subsidy to private profit in a second way. The cash payment is nowhere near enough to live on, so the worker must still take whatever job is on offer, while employers get to lower wages to the point where ‘UBI plus the wage’ equals the base level needed to live. S+W spell out the three features that a left-wing version of UBI must have. “[I]t must provide a sufficient amount of income to live on; it must be universal, provided to everyone unconditionally; it must be a supplement to the welfare state rather than a replacement for it” (p119).
Given the many negative effects of automation for workers, why do S+W propose that the left make support for “fully automating the economy”, in exchange for a left-wing version of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), the centerpiece of the politics of the overall Movement? The short answer is that they believe that, while nothing is inevitable, it is overwhelmingly likely that a long list of current trends will converge in massively increasing the proportion of the working population in both rich and poor countries who end up in the “surplus population” (or what Marx calls the ‘reserve army of labour’ of unemployed and underemployed) (p86). The left should get out ahead of these trends and orient its struggles to achieving a left-wing post-work society, where a privately-owned wage labour economy continues, but workers are more able to choose when and if to do wage labour for a capitalist employer.
Left-Wing UBI is One of the Few Demands that is In the Interest of Employed and Un(der)employed and Grey Economy Workers Alike
Another reason is that the working class (which S+W define as people who do not live from ownership of capital but rely on a wage or salary) is already highly differentiated into different occupations with differing immediate interests (not increasingly homogeneous, as Marx thought might happen). As more and more workers become long-term unemployed or underemployed in precarious jobs, the heterogeneity gets even greater. It becomes increasingly difficult to base a workers movement on struggles in a particular workplace, demanding that any automation be beneficial to workers in that workplace, or be rejected altogether. In contrast, demanding a left-wing UBI in exchange for automation of as many jobs as possible is something that serves the common interests of all workers across all the differences in their circumstances.
S+W argue that the ‘support automation in exchange for left-wing UBI’ strategy will also unite workers in both rich and poor countries, because automation is being introduced very quickly in poor countries too. In China, there is already “premature deindustrialization” (p97). The Chinese government has declared that introduction of robotics and AI and other new technology is the fundamental axis of their overall strategy for beating out competitors in the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. AI is likely to eliminate even more routine white collar jobs than manual ones, because AI devices are still weakest at duplicating human perceptual coordination skills. Hence in poor countries like India, where providing cheaper service industry products like sales and marketing call centres is more central to their overall strategy, we may also see ‘premature’ net job loss automation in service industries.
FIRST STRATEGY: CHANGE THE COMMON SENSE
S+W propose a two-part strategy for the left, first changing the common sense about what kind of society is both desirable and practicable, and second waging continual left populist battles aimed at winning and exercizing power of, by and for the people. The first is somewhat misleadingly called a strategy for hegemony or a counter-hegemony strategy. It is misleading because the strategy they propose does not just mean waging a Gramscian ‘war of position’ to replace dominant ideologies, to change the cultural common sense. They also propose encouraging the creation of new social structures and practices that eventually will add up to the structures that ground a post-capitalist economy.
Capitalism Could Only Replace Feudalism Because a Host of Capitalism-Friendly Structures and Policies Had Been Created Over a Long Period Before the Revolutions Clinched the Decisive Changes — It May Well Be the Same for Post-Capitalism Replacing Capitalism
S+W contend that the post-capitalist left should learn from the history of how capitalism replaced feudalism over a very long period: “Capitalism did not emerge all at once… A large number of components had to be put in place: landless labourers, widespread commodity production, private property, technical sophistication, centralization of wealth, a bourgeois class, a work ethic, and so on. These historical conditions are the components that enabled the logic of capitalism eventually to gain traction in the world… [Just like capitalism, postcapitalism] will neither emerge all at once nor in the wake of some revolutionary moment. The task of the left must be to work out the conditions for postcapitalism and to struggle to build them on a continually expanding scale” (p130).
Having made this crucial point about how the accumulation of capitalism-friendly social structures was necessary for “the logic of capitalism eventually to gain traction” in people’s minds (and vice-versa), S+W devote a full chapter to an example of how neoliberal intellectuals carried out a successful decades long campaign to install neoliberalism as the new common sense, first among key governmental and private sector capitalist elites and then in the general population.
Neoliberalism is the theoretical invention of a relative handful of highly politically conscious anti-socialist intellectuals, most famously Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Their movement began in the 1920s and 1930s and took organizational form as the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) after two international meetings in 1938 and 1945. Classical liberals preached laissez-faire, non-intervention by governments in the economy, because markets were natural, the only possible rational way to organize an economy that would assert itself if left alone. But then came world-level major depressions in the 1880s and then 1930s. Then came socialist parties and the communist revolution in Russia that showed how economies could be organized differently and more fairly. Then came Keynesian economics, from a liberal intellectual who proposed ways for governments and banks to intervene in capitalist economies to smooth out the boom-bust cycles. Then came post-war social democracy that deployed Keynesian economics to manage a sustained period of expanding affluence from 1945 to 1975.
Neoliberalism Was the Invention of Anti-Socialist Academics — They Recognized that Markets were Not Natural but had to be Legislated and Imposed by Strong States
Neoliberals retain the dogma that only capitalist markets are rational. They differ from laissez faire liberals in recognizing that markets are far from natural. It requires extensive and sustained intervention by governments to legislate markets into existence . This must be accompanied by policies that further codify and embed those markets, e.g. structural adjustment policies in poor countries, austerity policies that slash taxes on corporations and cut welfare state spending and privatize in rich countries (p53). The MPS neoliberals were highly strategic from the beginning. Their ultimate goal was to capture the state and use it to implement a radical restructuring of both government and economy that would root out socialist logics and institutions. To do that they would first have to capture the minds of those members of the elite who had become sold on the idea that Keynesian economics and an expansive welfare state were the best way to defend capitalism.
The neoliberals understood that it would take a period of decades to change the fundamental thinking of elites about economics. It would not be enough to just malign Keynesianism. They would have to defeat it as a paradigmatic theory by doing serious academic research and theorizing. And the discredited utopia of laissez faire liberalism was no longer capable of competing with the utopias of socialism. Neoliberalism would thus have to be not just an academic rival to Keynesian theory, but also a utopia. It had to champion a noble ideal of (negative) freedom and choice for autonomous private individuals. It would have to present itself as a liberal and liberating modernistic future, not a traditionalist restoration of elite wealth and power.
The key tactic was to create think tanks, eventually over 400 around the world, which specialized in one of the three major tactics for influencing elite opinion about economics. Some specialized in long-term thinking and the publishing of books and manifestoes about a neoliberal utopia. Others published pamphlets and held seminars to teach elites about the evils of Keynesianism and the alternative neoliberal theory in more accessible forms. And others generated policy ideas and draft legislation for governments to implement short and medium and long term policy changes. From their think tank bases, they then got elites who were responsive to their ideology to use their positions of power and influence in universities and schools, the mass media, political parties, private corporations and government agencies to spread the ideas to more of a mass audience. Key academic theorists like Milton Friedman operated as public intellectuals, writing frequent op eds and newspaper columns and appearing on the news and interview programs and doing lecture tours of colleges and universities.
Neoliberalism was a Profoundly Elitist Movement But a Real Movement Nevertheless — The Key was to Capture the Ideology and Policy Wonks in Major Institutions
S+W stress that neoliberalism was a real social movement, albeit one oriented to infiltrating its ideas and its people into elite positions of power everywhere. When Reagan and Thatcher came to power in the USA and Britain in 1979-80 many of its key people in cabinet departments had been trained in the new thinking by the neoliberal think tanks and linked university departments. But it was not the seizure of power by a movement led by a centralized vanguard party. Rather the many different organizations around the world and within countries were loosely linked up through “key nodes”. Over time the neoliberals “established networks between think tanks, politicians, journalists, the media and teachers – building a consistency between these disparate groups that did not require a unity of purpose or organizational form”. They showed a willingness to be very flexible about how their utopian principles and elaborated theory and policies could be adapted to different circumstances in different countries and short-term political situations (p67).
S+W describe the example of the Mont Pelerin Society neoliberal hegemony strategy in some detail because they think it provides lessons for the left. The neoliberals first changed elite opinion, then infiltrated elites that they had converted into key mainstream institutions and then used those organizations to change the popular common sense. But the left is seeking to mobilize the people against the wealthy and powerful elites. It is largely excluded from positions of power in governments, media and other key institutions that could be used to change public opinion. How can the left nevertheless learn from the success of the Mont Pelerin Society neoliberals?
S+W invoke Gramsci’s definition of waging a counter-hegemony strategy. “[C]apitalist power was dependent on what he termed hegemony – the engineering of consent according to the dictates of one particular group. A hegemonic project builds a ‘common sense’ that installs the particular worldview of one group [e.g. private owner capitalists] as the universal horizon of an entire society” (p132). Getting most people to accept the particular worldview of one group as universal is not just something that all ruling social groups always do, it is also what all progressive social and political movements necessarily do.
For example, the way that ethnic white Europeans see the world was established as ‘normal’ and ‘universal’ for centuries. The people in colonized and neo-colonized countries continue to challenge this, and aim to get the way they see the history of colonialism prevail instead. It is a particular view. It is not the entire truth. Hopefully though, when the particular view of (neo)colonized people eventually prevails and becomes the new universal, we will find ways to acknowledge and incorporate other perspectives, including that of ethnic white Europeans from colonizing countries, within the new universal. The current universal, the ‘progressive colonizer’ logic and framework, also incorporates at least some of the perspectives of the colonized.
Another example of how a particular becomes a universal, through a struggle to change the starting assumptions about what is true and normal, is the way we do science and social science. At any given time in any field, there is a paradigm, a master framework of assumptions and theories and empirical findings that is accepted as our best approximation to objective truths that we have for the moment. The paradigm (e.g. pre-Galileo cosmology, Newtonian physics, old views on climate change) is a particular slant on reality but it is accepted as a universal until another paradigm comes along that appears to better explain the same facts (e.g. post Galileo cosmology, Einsteinian physics, the new view on climate change). The new universal is a particular that becomes accepted as the new universal after extensive theoretical debate and empirical testing, and more than a little bit of politicking by both scientists and non-scientists with stakes in the outcome of the intellectual struggle. Again, the new universal changes the frame, but it also incorporates many of the elements of the previous paradigm.
A Counter-Hegemony Strategy is a Power Struggle to Engineer Consent to a New Paradigm — One that Inevitably Hides the Serving of Particular Interests Within Claims of Universality
The acceptance of a new common sense is not the simple result of a peaceful debate between intellectuals. that the mass of people then voluntarily consent to as being a universal truth, not even in the examples just cited from the natural sciences. Hegemony is “the engineering of consent according to the dictates of a particular group”. Gramsci refers to it as a ‘war of position’ that is fought within both state and non-state mainstream institutions in ‘normal times’, i.e. in a non-revolutionary situation when a direct mobilization to take state power is not feasible (as opposed to an open conflict between two rival political formations seeking to take control of the state power in a revolutionary situation through, ultimately, dual power and civil war). Hegemony is the outcome of a power struggle for dominance of a particular ideological framing of reality. That framing is actively maintained in part by the deployment of power and mobilization.
Note also that the overwhelming majority of the values and beliefs that any of us comes to hold are not things we go through an active scientific process to establish. Mostly we buy in to the culture we were brought up in, and accept the views of authorities and of others around us, unless we have reason not to do so. Popular consent is more passive than active, more acquiescence to the perceived common sense than people spending hours every day second guessing everything they hear or see or read. For this reason, the left has simply no chance of actually changing fundamental ways of thinking in the general public unless it manages to secure places for its representatives on a multitude of mainstream platforms -- mass media, entertainment industry, universities and research institutes and think tanks, governmental bodies of all kinds, NGOS, unions, non-left community-based groups etc.
A Left Counter-Hegemony Strategy has to Use Alternative Spaces to Develop Alternative Ideas — But Reaching a Mass Audience to Challenge and Change the Prevailing Common Sense Requires Getting as Many Left Thinkers and Communicators into Mainstream Spaces
Alternative institutions outside state or private elite control are the essential seeding grounds for genuinely left ideas that can be drawn upon in the counter hegemony work done within mainstream institutions, but those alternative institutions are themselves inevitably marginal and marginalizable. Alternative institutions may (or may not) be enough to change the common sense among the minority who are persuaded to adopt leftist views and support active struggle against the system. But they are not enough to achieve “the engineering of consent” of the majority which, like it or not, is mostly a matter of acquiescing to still-minority but shifting public opinion and/or accepting that the majority common sense has now changed (often as the result of elite endorsement as specified by new laws or court decisions, as was the case with gay marriage and African American civil rights). In addition, without leftists speaking on mainstream platforms, most people will never hear left ideas or the names of left alternative institutions to seek out. We must develop and propagate critical and left ideas within both alternative and mainstream structures, but working within the mainstream ones is necessary to reach the vast majority.
SECOND STRATEGY: BUILD PEOPLE POWER WITH LEFT POPULIST TACTICS
S+W appear to have been activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. Their book can be seen as an attempt by insiders to do a sympathetic critique of the common sense in Occupy type movements then and since. The Occupy movement aimed to popularize the idea that Wall Street banks and billionaires controlled governments with their money and that this resulted in (neoliberal) government policies that increased economic inequalities. Their slogan declared that it was the 1% against the interests of the 99 percent. The Occupiers also wanted to set up a contrast between corrupted institutions of representative democracy and their own practice of direct democracy in the public squares that they occupied. They rejected the idea of making political demands for solutions. Instead they would propagate a new cultural meme about a problem (increasing inequality), while making visible a key feature of the left’s alternative to the representative democracy state, direct democracy.
The Occupy strategy is clearly different from S+W’s first strategy of developing an ongoing counterhegemony ‘war of position’. First, S+W are talking about generating and propagating a coherent vision of an alternative society, and waging a constant campaign of critique and expose that educates the public about the systemic processes that institutionalize various forms of oppression. Occupiers talked about problems with capitalism (and especially problems with ‘conservative’ neoliberal policies) but they did not explicitly oppose capitalism as a social system, let alone call for its replacement with a post-capitalist system. Second, S+W follow Gramsci in seeing the struggle to change the common sense as having to take place in the state as much as in ‘civil society’, and to take place within mainstream institutions as well as in movement-created alternative spaces. Occupiers wanted to wage a cultural battle outside the state and saw their action as a demonstration of the alternative to the status quo, implying with their refusal to pose political demands that real change would bypass the state.
Changing Ways of Thinking that Mask and Justify Inequalities is Great — But to Actually Make Some Changes in People’s Lives We Need a Strategy for Power
So much for changing hearts and minds. What about winning ‘power to the people’? S+W’s second strategy is about how the left can build popular power inside and outside of the state. They use a Weberian concept of power, namely the ability to realize one’s will even against the resistance of others. Hence, achieving political power is only one of the forms of power that a strategy must seek to maximize. Nevertheless, S+W’s approach to power differs from that of Occupy in multiple ways, including giving importance to achieving political power in the state and making political demands on it.
S+W argue that “to install a new hegemonic order, at least three things will be required: a mass populist movement, a healthy ecosystem of organizations and an analysis of points of leverage” (p155). S+W have already argued that, in the absence of agreement on socialism as the long-term alternative to capitalism, the left should unite conceptually around a vision of an alternative to neoliberalism in the form of a post-work economy, based on a left-wing Universal Basic Income. They now argue that uniting people across different interests and collective identities requires a tactical approach of left-wing populism. The left no longer agrees that unity can be achieved by uniting all people on the basis of the objectively identifiable shared class interests of an increasingly homogeneous working class. Nor can unity be achieved by building an organized socialist-led workers movement, that allies with, and fights for, other anti-oppression movements.
S+W preface their chapter on building power with a quote from Ernesto Laclau: “Constructing a people is the main task of radical politics” (p155). If the goal of almost every social or political struggle is to win more Weberian power, so that the people can ‘realize their will even against the resistance of others’, then the first task for organizers is twofold: to identify who ‘the people’ are in that specific struggle and to name the ‘others’ that are hurting the people in this instance. Constructing both a ‘people’ and a notion of the ‘others’ is the basis of alliances on both sides of the battle. For left populists, unity is always specific and temporary, not general and long-term.
Left Populism Invents and Sells a Different Framing of Who ‘The People’ are and Who ‘The Other’ Is and What ‘The Antagonism Between Them’ Is Each Time
Further, unity is mainly subjective to the point of being a social construction, almost a useful fiction. Populism is “a type of political logic by which a collection of different identities is knitted together against a common opponent and in search of a new world” (p159). Struggles always start out with fighting for particularistic interests of a particular social group seeking satisfaction of particular grievances, as “requests within institutions”. When the demands are unmet “at some stage they became claims against the institutional order. When this process has overflown the institutional apparatuses… we start having the people of populism” (quote from Laclau, p159). “Particular interests become increasingly general in this process… The ‘people’, unlike traditional class groupings, are held together by a nominal unity even in the absence of any conceptual unity. The people… name themselves as a coherent group, rather than having any necessary unity of material interests” (p159).
This quasi-fictive naming applies not only to constructing a temporary ‘people’ it also applies to the framing of the temporary ‘others’ (usually individuals, elites, more than classes and other collectivities or social structures), and of the nature of the “antagonism” that pits these elites against this people. “Occupy, for example, named the 1 per cent, Podemos named ‘the caste’, and Syriza named the Troika. As with the naming of the people, the naming of the antagonism has some attachment to empirical facts, but need not be bound by them. The division that Occupy posited between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent, for instance, is an antagonism that mobilized people despite its lack of empirical accuracy” (p160).
S+W concede that “in a populist movement, the absence of an immediate unity based on material interests means its coherence is perpetually plagued by a tension between the struggle that has come to stand in for the rest and those other struggles” (p160). They argue though that there is a basic difference between the populism of Occupy and the Laclau-style populism that they favour. In both, there needs be “a continual negotiation of differences and particularisms”. But while the Occupy style populists prefer “differences to express themselves as differences and to avoid any universalizing”, the Laclau style populists orient the continual negotiation of differences “to build[ing] a common language and programme” (p160).
Occupy Consciously Stressed Maintaining Different Identities — Lacalu-style Left Populism Universalizes What Began as Particularistic Concerns and Articulates a Vision of the Future by Raising Concrete Demands
Unity is thereby actually based on the ability of many very different people, each of whom has a primary identity and commitment to a different autonomous movement and organization, to develop their own reasons for supporting the specific struggle and particularistic demands. “Demands form a key medium for building unity, and must therefore connect in multiple ways with different people… Particular demands are inscribed into a coherent [semi-fictive] narrative articulating how various demands share a common antagonist. This is why a vision of the future is essential to a proper populism, and it is what many recent populist movements have lacked”. S+W believe that an explicit agreement in the overall left to seek a left-wing UBI post-work economy is an example of just such a ‘vision of the future’. Anticipating objection from critics that this involves going back to a class politics based on shared objective interests, they state that “while the post-work project demands that centrality be given to class, it is not sufficient to mobilize only on the basis of class interests” (p161). In other words, while post-work demands may provide a necessary vision beyond the temporary and specific struggles, all of the actual struggles are necessarily left populist ones, where a new ‘people’ and new ‘others’ pitted against one another in a new ‘antagonism’ are constructed every time.
The second essential of a left strategy for power is to build an ecosystem of organizations, each of which will carry out different tasks for the overall left, just as the neoliberals did. These organizations will share a commitment to a broad set of values and beliefs that are different from those upheld in practice by the rulers in today’s society. However, there will be plenty of pluralism, plenty of disagreements and debates, as there would be between scientists or social scientists aiming at defining certain truths. “There are a variety of essential tasks to be carried out in a successful political movement: awareness raising, legal support, media hegemony, power analysis [see below], policy proposals, the consolidation of class memory, and leadership, to name just a few.” (pp161-162). There will be no single political party or other organization providing a consistent leadership to this process over time. “[L]eaders will arise, but there is no vanguard party – only mobile vanguard functions” (p163).
In other words, one organization, often one created specifically for a given struggle, may be a center of leadership and coordination at any given time but it will not be a permanent leadership. And in any struggle there may be multiple organizations providing leadership in performing different functions in loose coordination with one another, a second sense of ‘mobile vanguard functions’. “[T}he overarching architecture of such an ecology [of organizations with different functions] is a relatively decentralized and networked form”, but the Laclau type populism rejects the notion that there is any “privileged organizational form”. Hence, while some organizations and some collective actions and campaigns may practice a strict leaderless and structureless horizontalism, “this ecology should also include hierarchical and closed groups” (p163).
Occupations of Public Squares Can Be Effective in Gaining Attention for a Cause — But Actually Disrupting Economic Production and Distribution and Profit-Making is a Far Stronger Tactic
The third essential feature of a strategy to understand and deploy power, one that replaces the old strategy of building up a ‘working class and allies’ movement that wages class struggles against capital, is the identification of “leverage points”. S+W briefly make the point that uniting a ‘people’ in every campaign with Laclau-style populist tactics, and generating an ecosystem of left-leaning organizations carrying out diverse tasks, are not enough to build popular power. There must also be a “capacity to disrupt” (pp169-170). They also imply that ‘disruption of business as usual’ through collective actions deploying non-violent civil disobedience, seen by today’s left as the gold standard in disruption, is not enough. Such tactics can be effective in drawing public attention to an issue. They may alert the public to the fact that there is a large minority (maybe even a silent majority) who are sufficiently unhappy with some institution or policy to risk arrest. But they normally only disrupt the use of a street or other localized space. They do not disrupt on the level of the local or national or global (capitalist) system.
Indeed, while extraparliamentary street protests can sometimes be effective in showing the public that ‘the emperor has no clothes’, and even that the public itself no longer supports a particular ruler or regime, those tactics do not actually disrupt the functioning of institutional power anywhere, at any level. Most of the time even massive protests can be, and are, safely ignored by powerholders. This is a lesson of Occupy, the Arab Spring, the women’s march against Trump of early 2017, Extinction Rebellion and any number of massive and heroic and absolutely crucial recent protests. Voice is not enough. You have to be able to impose real costs on the powerholders by disrupting their institutions. You need to identify “leverage points”.
S+W define leverage points as “points of political or economic power that can be used to compel others to adapt to the interests of a particular group”. They cite the “classic tactic of the strike” as an example, and note that “[w]ithout such leverage points, change can only come about when it is in the interests of the powerful” (p156). They also note that every time workers develop a particular way to disrupt production that is effective, employers and governments make changes to the organization of workplaces, and deploy counter tactics to neutralize that kind of disruptive action. Hence dockworker strikes are defeated by containerization. Go slow actions by workers in offices, schools and hospitals are defeated by close monitoring and control of employee work behaviour, and the capacity to intimidate individual workers who have only subcontractor or non-permanent status. Factory worker strikes in rich countries are defeated by globalized logistics and supply chains, that facilitate moving of factories to regions or countries where strikes are rare. Not to mention anti-labour laws, that make strikes that actually disrupt illegal, and make unionization difficult and decertification easy. The same is true of non workplace actions. Opponents always learn and adapt. Activists must therefore continually learn and innovate.
To Impose Real Costs on ‘The Other’ in a Political Conflict We Must be Continually Looking for ‘Leverage Points’ Where Some Strategically-Placed People Can Disrupt Their Profit-Making
Having said this, S+W make the strong statement that what ultimately matters in finding ways to disrupt that impose costs on the powerful (if they fail to make concessions) is strategic location at any pivotal stage in the long profit-making cycle of raising finances, investment, production, marketing and distribution. “Regardless of whether they had widespread solidarity, high levels of class consciousness or an optimal organizational form, [workers have mostly won when] they achieved success by being able to insert themselves into and against the flow of capitalist accumulation” (170). The problem activists face is that employers and governments have made so many adaptations that “the classic points of leverage” centered in workplaces “have largely disappeared” (p171). Still, while driverless trucks and trains (and, who knows, also boats and planes) may make classic disruption of transport moot, the system “may be open to strikes by programmers and IT technicians as well as being more susceptible to blockades [because driverless vehicles cannot maneuver]”. Another new obstacle to classic workplace actions is the extent to which automation and globalization put an increasingly large proportion of the potential workforce outside long-term employment in full-time jobs. The expansion of that ‘surplus population’ makes full-time workers more fearful of being laid off or fired if they engage in job action. Attempts to directly organize the unemployed and underemployed are undercut by the simple fact that “there is no workplace to disrupt” – they are outside the cycle of capitalist profit-making (p173).
S+W remain optimistic about the ability of activists to innovate in finding ‘strategic locations’ in the profit-making cycle to disrupt. However, they repeatedly make the point that this will require extensive abstract theorizing to update our understandings of how contemporary capitalism actually works, combined with scholarly-level empirical investigation and analysis. This will not be figured out spontaneously at a structureless, leaderless, everyone-gets-to-speak-equally Occupy assembly. S+W also favour “existing practices like the ‘power structure analysis’ undertaken by unions and community organizers, which maps local social networks and key actors, [thereby] determining their weaknesses, strengths, allies and enemies” in any campaign or action. But this is no substitute for serious social science. “[O]n-the-ground knowledge must be linked up with more abstract knowledge” (p174).
COMMENTS AND CRITICISMS
Srnicek and Williams have written an insightful book that is brimming with critiques of our present activism, and with ideas for how to improve on it. They put forward three big ideas. First, unite the overall left around the ‘project’ of seeking a post-work economy with a left-wing UBI. The slogans on the book’s front cover sum this up: Demand Full Automation; Demand Universal Basic Income; Demand the Future. The second idea is to learn from the success of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society, and develop an ecosystem of organizations that can wage a Gramscian ‘war of position’ inside and outside the State and other mainstream institutions, to change the dominant common sense. The third idea is to have a three-part strategy for popular power: Laclau-style left-wing populism; leadership exerted by a pluralist ecosystem of organizations specializing in different tasks, that take turns performing ‘mobile vanguard functions’; doing serious social science to identify ‘leverage points’ for effective disruption.
(1) Fighting for a post-work economy based on a left-wing UBI: Andre Gorz proposed a very early version of this idea in his 1980 book Adieu au Proletariat. His key point was that no pattern of deskilling and proletarianization of middle class and working class occupations, and no future economic crisis of capitalism, would move us any closer to postcapitalism. It would take social movements (he stressed the importance of the environmental movement and feminism) operating largely outside the workplace, and a workers movement whose core demand was to reduce the amount of time spent in wage labour. S+W’s updating of this idea to propose embracing full automation of as many jobs as possible in exchange for left-wing UBI is very much worth serious consideration.
Left-Wing UBI Can Unite Us — But It is a Proto-Revolutionary Demand That is Incompatible with Profit Maximization Which is the Primary Driver in Capitalist Markets
Besides the obvious objection that no group of workers is likely to volunteer having their jobs automated out of existence until and unless left-wing UBI already exists, the main drawback to the idea is that it is a classic ‘transitional demand’. A transitional demand is made in order to ‘expose the true nature of capitalism’, when the demand is not met. This might be justifiable if we were in a ‘revolutionary situation’ where a large enough part of the population was ready to fight for a transition to postcapitalism. Left-wing UBI puts workers in a position to refuse any wage labour job for one with better pay and conditions. It is a reform that is incompatible with maximizing profit. It is very unlikely to be conceded, until and unless the left and popular movements are so strong, that they are almost strong enough to defeat capitalism as a system. One should not lead people into unwinnable struggles, just to supposedly ‘raise their consciousness’ by ‘exposing the limits of capitalism’. Having said that, fighting for left-wing UBI, and for incremental changes that move us closer to it, can perhaps be a good idea, as long as the left makes clear that the demand will never be fully met until we are transitioning to a post-capitalist society.
(2) Carrying out a Gramscian counter-hegemony strategy: Reviving Gramsci’s idea of waging a ‘war of position,’ inside existing institutions as much as outside them, to challenge dominant ideologies and counterpose progressive ones, is an excellent one. So is learning from the example of the neoliberals in the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS). It was similarly argued in an earlier post that the left could learn from the example of American evangelicals seeking to reChristianize America. The main problem with these two examples is that both the MPS and American evangelicals were right-wing movements, that wanted to preserve the existing social system and to keep the elites who rule it in power. They only sought to change the ideology of those ruling elites, and then get those elites to use the mainstream institutions that they already controlled to change mass opinion.
The left should do whatever it can to get as many as possible of those people who mostly benefit from the existing social system to ‘defect’ – many of us highly educated intellectuals who predominate in today’s left are just such people. (But not quite -- those who defect to the left are not very often from the upper class of actual rulers, the elites that the neoliberals and evangelicals targeted and converted.) But a Gramscian strategy by the left will necessarily mobilize the minority of people within economic and cultural and social and state institutions of all kinds who are ready to challenge the power and the pro-domination ideas of those who rule within those institutions. It will do so in the name of the vast majority of people, and the counter-ideas will be directed mainly at the majority, not at the rulers and those actively aligned with their power and their thinking.
Left-Wing Counter-Hegemony Work in Mainstream Institutions Requires Building Structures Like Unions or Caucuses That Can Mobilize to Protect the Highly-Placed Individuals Who Speak Out from Reprisals
A further difference and difficulty follows from this. Challenging the powerful in your university or media outlet, or private company or government agency where you work, or voluntary association or neighbourhood group, is not always a great career move, or one that will make you immediately popular. After all, you are challenging the common sense that enables us all to feel secure that we understand any given social order, and how we can successfully navigate it to our benefit. Discovering that the superego Daddy introjected into our psyches is a fraud, that the emperor has no clothes, is not an easy or immediately liberating experience, until we begin to feel confident that a workable new order is available to replace it. Even those open to uncomfortable truths will tend initially to prefer that whistleblowers and ‘troublemakers’ not come forward and create a backlash from the top. Isolated individuals can only do so much without the prospect of a large enough set of supporters ready to defend them from reprisals. Hence, left-wing counter-hegemony work necessarily depends on the building of structures engaging a potentially progressive majority within mainstream institutions (such as unions) as well as formal projects and caucuses and informal supportive groupings. It will require organization and organizing, not just speaking out by individual critical thinkers. Communist parties used to know how to do this, with the organization of secret cells of activists who initiated and led wider networks and associations. Today’s left wants to reject this vanguard party approach as leading to Stalinism. So what will we put in its place?
(3) Left populism, mobile vanguard functions and leverage points: The Laclau style left populism that S+W see as pioneered by Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece is clearly an advance on the ‘keep out of politics’ libertarian ethos of Occupy. It foregrounds the goal of seeking power, including power in the state. These movements, and others like them that are more social democratic than populist but still aligned with them in spirit, like the Sanders-supporting Political Revolution in the US, and Corbyn-supporting Momentum in the UK, are arguably the most advanced part of the current left. Hence, genuinely sympathetic participation in, and support for, such initiatives has to be the starting point. Those of us who have difficulty with any form of populism (and I am one) have yet to come up with any better approaches. We should have the humility and respect to learn the lessons they are teaching us all, about how to fight for power, and how to win some battles. Also, populist politics is maximally tactical and pragmatic politics. In this respect, a lot of what Laclau and S+W put forward as populist strategies and tactics is really just a description of what politicians and left activist ‘anti-politicians’ actually do when they are making the sausage. The left needs to build a politics that is as transparent and ethical as possible, but it also needs to be realistic and practical about what it will take to make sausages. There is much to learn from left populism, from its theorists and its practitioners.
Left-wing Populism is the Approach of the Most Advanced Parts of Today’s Left — But We will Need to Go Beyond That Strategy to a Better One Soon
A critique of left populism is for a future post but here is a quick list of some drawbacks. Populism always pits a ‘people’ (defined as everyone, all ‘people like us’) against a small minority of elite individuals (all ‘people not like us’). It thereby lends itself readily to, and is typically accompanied by, essentialisms of all kinds, including an incipient ethnic nationalism. The focus on the other as individuals and elites fosters conspiracy theory type thinking (the ‘other’ is the 1 percent of bankers and billionaires like the Bilderberg group or attendees at the Davos world forum; or it is The Troika, or The Caste). Populist campaigns also pretend to be spontaneous and leaderless and structureless. The vacuum is always ultimately filled by the demagogy of those who are adept at incarnating the idea of the undifferentiated and postpartisan people, and by (a) charismatic leader(s).
As S+W acknowledge, populism consciously falsifies the actual social antagonisms and the alignment of social forces on each side. It reduces the forces to be challenged to just a tiny super-elite of individuals, so that there is woefully insufficient critical analysis exposing the collectivities and social structures-- classes and dominant social groups, corporations, public and private institutions etc -- that they rule for and/or through. By expanding ‘the people’ to practically everyone, a populist politics ignores the ‘contradictions among the people’ of all kinds. The consequence of that is to fail to do enough social analysis of ‘the people’ themselves and their contradictions and non-progressive thinking (false consciousness!) and behaviour. We already do some self-analysis of the ‘people like us’ in our left-leaning counterculture. But we don’t do enough analysis of people not like us (based partly on lots of contact with them), the ones we need to win over, the ones whose current consciousness we have to partly challenge and partly draw out. All of this is indispensable to any counter hegemony work. As noted, those campaigns are not aimed at changing elite opinion, but mass opinion.
Having said all this, much of what S+W describe as left populism makes sense, once all the ideas about fooling people into thinking that every campaign unites practically everybody against a tiny elite of powerful individuals, are set aside. The classic socialist and communist left agreed with Marx that the many different movements against oppression (women’s, racial and national minority, colonized people etc) could unite in an overall socialist movement led by the working class. This was possible because the trends in capitalism were leading workers to a situation where, in the words of the Internationale, ‘We were naught, we shall be all’, a situation where they would see the need to abolish capitalism and establish worker control of everything. The socialist postcapitalist society was not in the particularistic interests of workers alone, it was in the interests of all humanity, even the capitalist exploiters. It was a universal and even transcendent (of all existing social interests) goal.
S+W start from the reality that the left no longer thinks that workers can represent the universal interest of all humanity in the process of liberating themselves from their particular oppression. So how do we unite people when all we have is movements based on subjective identity defined, particularistic interests and no agreement on a transcendent postcapitalist society that is in everyone’s interest? We do ‘left populist’ politics, where we persuade people in each specific campaign to treat the hot issue at hand ‘as if’ it were in the interest of everyone. It seems that S+W recognize that this is unsatisfactory as any kind of solution, but it is a step forward towards one, because it aims at finding common ground in order to fight for power in pursuit of universal goals. No one else has solutions to this dilemma. S+W’s suggestions help take us further towards one.
The second idea was to address the issue of leadership. S+W propose that organizations specializing in the carrying out of various tasks and functions can provide leadership in their area on campaign A, and another organization performing the same function can lead in that area in Campaign B. So in any specific campaign there might be a temporary coordinating organization, plus several specialized organizations also exerting leadership in their specialized areas. Hence leadership is never centralized, in the sense of a single center of leadership leading from the top down (as with a single vanguard party practicing democratic centralism). Leadership (“vanguard”) functions are always shared between several specialized organizations, and the center is just a coordinating body made up of a temporary set of leader-coordinators. (Note that S+W also propose an ecosystem of specialized organizations to be the basis of the counter-hegemony organizing, emulating the Mont Pelerin Society and its thinktank-based ecosystem. It is not clear how this ecosystem relates to the ecosystem for organizing activist campaigns.)
To Act in Unison as a Decentralized Network of Autonomous Groups That Decide to Temporarily Exercize This or That ‘Vanguard (Leadership) Function’ Coordination is Not Enough — We Have to Know What Our Baseline Beliefs and Ultimate Goals Are
Not only is there no long-term central leadership, the ecosystem of organizations is made up of decentralized groups, each of which is spontaneously created and maintained by a particular set of people on their own initiative, for their own reasons, based on their own social and political thinking. What happens if several specialized organizations performing the same function compete to be the ‘mobile vanguard’ for a given campaign? Who gets chosen as the vanguard for that function for that particular time? What happens to those denied the opportunity to lead? What is the process for deciding this? For the Mont Pelerin Society neoliberals, as for the American evangelicals, the answer was that they shared a highly defined baseline ideology. There was room for each thinktank or church to have a different interpretation and application of the basic beliefs, but the highly defined base ideology allowed them to work towards common ends in a decentralized way. S+W seem to recognize that the same applies for the left ecosystem of activist organizations (and similarly counter-hegemony organizations): “It requires mobilisation under a common vision of an alternative world, rather than loose and pragmatic alliances” (p163). But there’s the rub. There is no agreement in today’s left on a baseline ideology, let alone ‘a common vision of an alternative world’.
The final element of the S+W strategy for power is the need for activists to identify ‘leverage points’ when figuring out strategy and tactics for a given campaign. Ideally, action by activists can break into the cycle of capitalist profit-making at some point and impose real material costs when the authorities refuse to meet activist demands. In some cases, this involves identifying which group of workers are best placed to impose costs, while being so difficult to replace (or in some cases to have their disruptive actions traced) that they are relatively safe from reprisals. In others, it is a matter of activists disrupting business as usual, first with civil disobedience to give the issue high visibility, and then in a more decentered way, for example by persuading consumers to boycott or citizens to express their support for the activists to authorities (e.g. the 2019 Hong Kong activists got non-activist citizens to vote for ‘pro democracy’ candidates for local councils).
This is not reducible to figuring out how to get (sustained) media attention through a series of escalating collective actions. The authorities need to be paying real material costs for their refusal to respond favourably. It is not just doing a ‘power analysis’ “that maps local social networks and key actors” who can be reached out to as allies, versus those who will likely be opponents, versus various others who will be somewhere in the middle. That kind of back of the envelope analysis can help build out a few of the tactics of a campaign, given a prior analysis that grounds a strategy based partly on identification of leverage points. As S+W say, “on the ground knowledge must be linked up with mooe abstract knowledge” about what the structured power relations are and where the system is most vulnerable to disruptive pressure. Identifying leverage points is one way of saying that every activist campaign needs to have a unit of serious researchers doing serious social science analysis. They need to draw on the ecosystem of ongoing research and analysis organizations that S+W propose the left develop, emulating the likes of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society. Complete agreement on this last point. Srnicek and Williams have written an excellent book. It is worth buying to read and discuss with others.