Futures of Work

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/futures-of-work
Bristol University Press
Forthcoming September 2018

Work, Utopia and the reproduction of life

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

We are here to live. Obvious as it sounds, this simple fact is becoming

progressively problematic. This is particularly so if you are a child forced to
work for the São Paolo’s mafia, or an asylum seeker travelling on a
hazardous boat to Australia, or an immigrant worker living in London’s rotten
accommodation, or a young woman trapped in the American net of domestic
sex trafficking, or a teenager having an illegal abortion in a dubious place in
Greater Buenos Aires, or an indigenous Peruvian selling your communal
products for pennies, or a rural tenant forced to buy Monsanto’s seeds and
chemical products, or a modern-day slave working in a nail bar in the
sophisticated city of Bath, or a 13 year old sex worker in Malaysia, or a father
of five working for a transnational company in which trade unions are
forbidden. These examples are not the exception but becoming the norm.
They share in a common struggle to work or to find work in order to produce
the means for their individual or collective survival under diverse and adverse
circumstances. In global capitalism, such means are synonymous with
money. And, so far, the futures of work on which we depend to earn that
money seem gloomy.
The financial crisis of 2008 was a breakpoint in the way capitalist
society reproduces itself through money as a form of wealth. The hyper-
abstraction of capital and the bursting of the bubble reduced the room for
recovery from the long-lasting capitalist crisis sparked in the late 1970s, and
the neoliberal transformation that followed it as an attempted solution. We are
now facing what some scholars call a ‘crisis of social reproduction’,
manifested in a situation in which employment is (and will be) unable to
support subsistence across wide sections of the developed and developing
world.
The financial character of the capitalist crisis cannot hide that capitalist
crisis is always much more than this. As Holloway and Piccioto suggest, it is
‘a crisis of an historically specific form of class domination, a crisis of
accumulation which involves the totality of capitalist social relations and
therefore a struggle waged on every front and through every mechanism,
economic, political, ideological etc.’ In 2008, crisis of the wage relation and of
the institutional forms of regulating class struggles deepened. The result of
this has been that the possibility to control class struggles and societies in
movement shrank. States had little recourse to respond except through direct
repression, which today is becoming the norm.
The struggles around the reproduction of life are the most important
challenge world political leaders and the capitalist class face, not to mention
individuals, families, communities, business, society, the local and national
state, the economy, and the planet as a whole. In a world where the
reproduction of life is mediated by money and where the social production of
wealth is privately appropriated, human needs and the reproduction of life
cannot be seen other than a political ‘problem’. The struggles for the
reproduction of life address what Ferguson and McNally call the ‘conditions of
possibility of labour-power’– in other words, its reproduction, or, to put it
simply, the reproduction of life in capitalist society, individually and
collectively.
What are the policy solutions to this crisis on a global scale? Can this
crisis of the (re)production of life be resolved via the implementation of World

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Bank’s Development Policy? No. As Silvia Federici rightly suggests, the
World Bank has actually contributed to ‘the destruction of communal
solidarity’. Debt is playing new roles, distinct ‘from previous forms of
proletarian debts’. Federici argues that today ‘“reproduction” is presented as
“self-investment”’, with millions of micro-entrepreneurs ‘“investing in their
reproduction, even if in possession of only a few hundred dollars, presumably
“free” to prosper or fail as their laboriosity and sagacity allows’.
Can this generalised crisis of (re)production of life be solved by the
implementation of the Universal Basic Income? Again, no. Among the many
reasons for this, there is one that stands out: cash transfers by the
increasingly repressive nation state cannot solve the problem of social
reproduction because the problem of social reproduction centres on money
itself. What started as a citizens’ campaign is now a clear strategy for capital
to maintain consumption at the necessary level.
The key to the futures of work/life is hidden in ‘the politics of social
reproduction’. It is in the class struggles around issues related to social
reproduction where we can navigate the contradictions of capitalist,
patriarchal and colonial life. There is a contradiction between needing money
to reproduce human life, and needing to destroy its command over life in
order to reproduce dignified forms of living. A politics of social reproduction
poses questions about the possibility of producing an uncontainable ‘excess’
at the point where this contradiction can no longer be reconciled. As argued
elsewhere, UBI will only serve to ‘falsely resolve’ this contradiction, and
deprive it of its ‘transformative dynamism’.. Rather than abstract money-led
‘solutions’ to the problem, the practical experience of this contradiction in
different circumstances provides a concrete and historically situated starting
point, from where to articulate alternative forms of social reproduction,
against, despite and beyond money.

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 In my recent work I have suggested that there is an affinity between the
politics of social reproduction and the category of hope that permits an
understanding of the struggles for the social reproduction of life as
‘prefigurative’- i.e. foreshadowing alternative futures in the here and now.
Already today the ‘politics of social reproduction’ are reinventing work and
forms of reproducing life in common, and not waiting for the correct state
policy or technological advance to come along first. These interventions are
transforming the political too, challenging existing matrices of power,
coloniality, patriarchy and their socio-political horizons. They arefilling spaces
with alternative autonomous forms of cooperative and dignified work,
democracy, land, care for human and non-human life and the environment,
indigenous autonomy, pedagogies and education.
In his critique of the pre-war German left, Ernst Bloch contended that
‘the terrain of hope, yearning and desire must not be abandoned to the
enemy’. To avoid this outcome, we must engage politically with what Bloch
calls the not yet. The not yet is not ‘something expected’. This would be a
‘backward interpretation of Not-Yet’, Bloch says in his masterpiece, The
Principle of Hope, that ‘would suppress or fail to understand precisely the
dialectical leap into the New’. As Frances Daly asserts, Bloch argues that
‘humanity is conceived as a possibility, as a challenge to become, not as a
given, and this means that no actual assumption concerning the content of
being can be made’. The concept of the not yet is truly compelling at a time
when we are failing to survive as humans in a world we have created. It
harbours hope not in far-off promised lands, but what already exists in our
own life and materiality of existence, that we can engage with through
collective dreams.
In this light, we can see that neither the World Bank’s insidious
‘alternative’ development policy nor the state-centred UBI will solve the
problem. As argued elsewhere,

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 to intervene in the politics of work, whilst keeping these contradictions
open, one must first intervene in the politics of the social relations that
support it. Struggles over social reproduction are ‘labour’ struggles.
Concurrently, ‘labour’ struggles are mainly struggles over social
reproduction. We struggle to live, not to work. Works mediates life ...
The struggle for money takes place in, against and beyond capital.

The politics of social reproduction prefigure alternatives by creating

‘concrete utopias’. Bloch differentiates between abstract and concrete utopias
and rejects the former because they are promises of a better world with no
correlation with the historical and material developments of their own time.
Instead, concrete utopias are the only form of utopia that can anticipate in
practice multiple possibilities that are ‘not yet’. As Zechner and Hansen write,
‘struggles around sustaining life in common are contexts where alternative
visions for institutions and mutual support structures are built…they also
produce new political imaginaries…all of which put life at their centre’. To
Federici, these struggles constitute ‘a politics weaving together our desires,
our possibilities, our crisis, and then mapping our courses of action…a new
politics that moves between the wage and the common’. Rather than
‘abstract’ visions of an imagined world at which we might arrive at some
future point - for instance, a world where no one should work, and where
robots will do the job for us - concrete utopias address the fundamental
problems that we must confront in practice rather than thought alone.
Concrete utopias provide us with the unique opportunity to discuss
empirically and theoretically the meaning and futures of work.
We are not here to live. We are here to live up to our dreams and
desires, with dignity and in common.

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