<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> This book argues that the paucity of good jobs these days is due not to a rise in automation, but to a massive decrease in manufacturing output. That is, slow growth rates coupled with a system-wide overcapacity are a much better fit for explaining how we got to where we are today: economies in the west with ostensibly very low unemployment, but largely in the service industry with a much different benefits structure than past jobs. Benanav sees a <abbr title="Universal Basic Income">UBI</abbr> as a means to an end, but that end has to be getting beyond the kind of civilization that forced us to invent a UBI in the first place. UBI is a band-aid on a broken system. Yes, it will make things better for the lower classes, but it won't do anything about <i>there even being lower classes at all</i>. Settling for a UBI is aiming too <i>low</i>. If we lived in a world where a UBI was possible, then much more would also be possible. <bq caption="Page 18">For them, UBI serves as a bridge to “fully automated luxury communism,” a term Aaron Bastani coined in 2014 to name a possible goal of socialist politics. This term flourished for five years as a meme before Bastani’s book—outlining an automated future in which artificial intelligence, solar power, gene editing, asteroid mining, and lab-grown meat generate a world of limitless leisure and self-invention—finally appeared. It provided a much-needed counterweight to left-wing rhetorics of collective self-sacrifice and anti-consumerist austerity.</bq> <bq caption="Page 97">While UBI has the laudable goal of separating the income people earn from the amount of work they do, it would do nothing to alter the relation between income and assets, keeping us tethered to a system in which a sizable fraction of total income derives from interest (from extending credit), rent (from leasing land or homes), and profit (from running businesses). In other words, UBI would empower workers without disempowering capital, providing people more autonomy in the fulfillment of their “animal functions” but no greater role in shaping the wider social conditions under which they do so.</bq> Still, I'm not convinced we can afford the luxury of that fantasy. Without it, though, we're doomed to be highly diminished but we're determined to drive right into the brick wall without slowing down. We've passed the point where we can have the nice version. That way is now blocked by past heedlessness and greed. We don't know how to slow down, so the only way forward is crash. <bq caption="Page 26">Our present reality is better described by near-future science fiction dystopias than by standard economic analysis; ours is a hot planet, with micro-drones flying over the heads of the street hawkers and rickshaw pullers, where the rich live in guarded, climate-controlled communities while the rest of us while away our time in dead-end jobs, playing video games on smartphones. We need to slip out of this timeline and into another.</bq> Since we've overall stopped producing new things, we're stuck financializing everything and pushing money upward to a tiny elite. China grew, but it did so by cannibalizing existing markets, by <i>replacing</i> existing capacity. The standard productivity story is muddled by the fact that we're not really manufacturing goods anymore and have instead moved into pure services. The current trend is to reimagine new territory in so-called metaverses. Instead of escaping the planet to travel to Mars, people are now just trying to escape anywhere, even virtual places. The clever ones are capitalizing on this to sell people nothing for something, transforming fairy tales into real assets and actually usable liquidity. <bq caption="Page 37">From the 2008 crisis up to 2014, manufacturing output expanded at just 1.6 percent per year, on a world scale—that is, at less than a quarter of the pace achieved during the post-war “golden age.” <b>It is worth noting that these figures include the dramatic expansion of manufacturing productive capacity in China.</b></bq> <bq caption="Page 43">in spite of system-wide over-capacity and slow growth rates, China has industrialized rapidly because its firms have been able to take market share away from other firms—not only in the United States, but also in countries like Mexico and Brazil. It could not have been otherwise. In an environment where average growth rates are low, <b>firms can only achieve high rates of growth by taking market share from their competitors.</b></bq> <bq caption="Page 44">[...] as rates of manufacturing-output growth stagnated in one country after another from the 1970s onward, <b>no other sector appeared on the scene to replace industry as a major economic-growth engine.</b> Instead, the slowdown in manufacturing-output growth rates was accompanied by a slowdown in overall GDP growth rates.</bq> Benanav posits the interesting theory that many other economists see the glass as half-full---productivity is improving all the time!---whereas the more likely reason is that output growth rates have fallen. <bq caption="Page 55">The demand for labor is determined by the gap between productivity and output growth rates. Reading the shrinkage of this gap the wrong way around—that is, as due to rising productivity rather than falling output rates—is what generates the upside-down world of the automation discourse.</bq> <bq caption="Page 56">In making this leap, the automation theorists miss the true story that explains this phenomenon: overcrowded global markets for manufactures, declining rates of investment in fixed capital, and a corresponding economic slowdown.</bq> This leads to an interesting economy, rife with fairy tales that form the superstructure on which everything else sits. We've known this for a long time: the unemployment rate stays low because of outright manipulation---countries don't like to count all the kinds of people who aren't actually working---but also because a lot of people can be counted as <i>technically employed</i> even though they're underemployed (not enough hours) or underutilized (not using their skills/talents). <bq caption="Page 64">Governments have generally responded to this persistently low demand for labor not by promoting work sharing among the employed, but rather by reducing workers’ access to unemployment benefits—pushing job losers to take whatever work was available, even at the cost of lost wages and degraded skills.</bq> Into this whole mess of service-worker jobs is the whole pivot to an entrepreneur economy, the so-called gig economy. A world of hustlers that give up working for "the man" from 9--5 and "live the dream" as self-employed people who now work 24--7, with much more complicated taxes, no insurance, no pension, no nothing. They just have the freedom to have converted the thing they actually loved doing into a job. Benanav notes that 10% of workers were working like this in 2017, but that number is up to 34%, just four years later. <bq caption="Page 67">Some firms do utilize alternative working arrangements to get around US labor law—witness the small but significant boom in gig-economy jobs, like Uber and Lyft, which offer work through online platforms as a way of disguising their employees as independent contractors. But when all is said and done, just 10 percent of US workers were employed in such arrangements in 2017, including as independent contractors, on-call workers, temp agency workers, and fixed-contract workers.</bq> Throw this outright mess of an economy---built by parasites over the last four, or now five, decades---into a pandemic and see what happens. Central banks all over the world---but most especially the U.S. Fed---poured trillions into the economy, right where it was needed most, of course. We see the result after two years: mega-corporations have become even bigger, growing to insane valuations; consolidation and merging everywhere; a handful of lottery winners with 99.9% losers, for the most part. We spent all of that money and just <i>gave</i> it to the richest people and corporations on the planet, trusting them to do something good with it. They put it in their pockets, for the most part, and neglected to reinvest it in a crumbling infrastructure. A pity that. <bq caption="Page 81">These trends suggest that the apocalyptic crisis of labor market dysfunction anticipated by automation theorists will not take place. Instead, unemployment will continue to spike during downturns—as we are seeing happen once again, and on a truly massive scale, in the present COVID-19 recession. Then, in the course of the tepid boom periods that follow, this unemployment will slowly but surely resolve itself into higher levels of underemployment and rising inequality.</bq> Give that man a cigar. That is exactly what happened/is happening. He wrote this book at the beginning of the pandemic. In over a year since publication, things have unfolded pretty much exactly according to the script outlined above. Although we've heard a lot about the "great resignation" and "Striketober", the needle hasn't really moved very much on union activity---or membership. That's unfortunate. Wildcat strikes have their place and can be roughly effective, but real progress can only be made with <i>organized</i> labor, putting constant and unremitting pressure. Corporations are organized and together. Labor should be too. Of course, a better system would make labor part of the ownership class, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Union numbers are falling every year---what are the odds that worker-owned cooperatives are about to shoot out of the ground? <bq caption="Page 82">To struggle against the labor market forces that are making people so miserable would require a substantial shift in labor’s capacity to press its interests. Yet over time, the organized sector of the labor force has receded. Union density across the OECD declined from 30 percent of the workforce in 1985 to 16 percent in 2016; the share of workers covered by collective bargaining fell from 45 percent to 32 percent over the same period.53 Global union density fell even lower, weighing in at approximately 7 percent in 2014.</bq> The struggle is always the same: once people are forced into desperate circumstances, they narrow their focus to the welfare of only themselves and their closest family and friends. It's only the rare individual that's willing to declare solidarity with others if it means increasing their own suffering. And we aren't even talking about suffering, really. People will sell one another out for a 5% raise, even if they don't really need it. The ruling class has figured out how to create <i>need</i> and use it as a lever to keep people apart, operating autonomously---and against each other. <bq caption="Page 82">In sluggish economies periodically wracked by austerity, it is easier to blame the resulting social deterioration on vulnerable sections of the workforce—immigrants, women, racial and religious minorities—than to unite around a new, emancipatory social project.</bq> We figured this out a century ago or, rather, Keynes figured it out for us. He predicted that productivity would increase so much that we'd only be working about 15 hours per week. This is what economists today say is about what we would need to work if we were to distribute labor and resources justly. But, we don't. I wonder, though, whether everyone working less would lower advancements in technology, medicine, etc. Or maybe we would just work 15 hours per week and then just work more, but in our free time. Or maybe we would read more or write better---instead of churning out junk that's just barely good enough to fool people into buying it---or maybe create music that's unique and actually good. This is the kind of book this is: it gets you thinking about what the real alternatives could be, and maybe dreaming a bit what it would be like were they to come to fruition. <bq caption="Page 87">Under conditions of economic maturity, Keynes said, it would make more sense to intervene to shrink the labor supply rather than to stimulate labor demand, increasing leisure rather than output. Given a long-term decline in returns to private investment, Keynes suggested, the work-week might have to be reduced to fifteen hours—and even that was only to satisfy the “old Adam” in us—that is, the need to feel useful.</bq> Benanav doesn't just list problems; he also proposes interesting solutions. It seems really hard to see how we get there from where we are---can you imagine anyone trying to run a society on "human dignity"?---but we can't get to any goal that we can't imagine and describe. <bq caption="Page 100">Instead of presupposing a fully automated economy and imagining the possibilities for a better and freer world created out of it, we could begin from a world of generalized human dignity, and then consider the technical changes needed to realize that world.</bq> For example, the following proposed system (from 1888!) rewards <iq>skilled work</iq> with a <iq>lesser labor contribution</iq>. However, as I noted above, I wonder how society functions when those who are the most skilled work the least. I know that it would work somehow, but it's so different that it's hard to imagine. Perhaps that's why they say that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. <bq caption="Page 105">Utopian writer Edward Bellamy proposed one way to organize the division of labor in a post-scarcity society in his novel Looking Backward (1888). There, <b>the supply and demand for labor determine how many hours people work, rather than how high a salary they earn. Skilled work is rewarded with a lesser labor contribution rather than higher pay</b>, while the performance of risky or especially difficult labors earn an honorific—a kind of celebrity. As across societies today, which differ in their institutional preferences for general education or vocational training, there need not be a single solution to this problem, as long as the division of labor neither leaves important tasks undone, nor reproduces an elite class of technicians.</bq> No matter what we do, though, we should decide it democratically. Letting "the market decide" is just code for letting "rich people decide". Again, this is not going to be offered to us. As Frederick Douglass said, <iq>Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.</iq> <bq caption="Page 106">In any case, <b>such questions would be settled by human beings’ collective determination</b> of what they want to do, rather than decided for us by supposedly unstoppable technological forces.</bq> <bq caption="Page 107">In such a world, there could still be sanctions to ensure that necessary work is actually undertaken. However, inducements to work would not take the form of threats of starvation, but invitations to cooperate. Economists have long recognized that hunger and homelessness are not the best motivators. Even in Kropotkin’s time, economists admitted that <b>“the best situation for man is when he produces in freedom, has choice in his occupations, has no overseer to impede him, and when he sees his work bring a profit to himself and others like him.”</b></bq> <bq caption="Page 109">Under these conditions, "creative minds and scientific aptitudes" would no longer be "wasted due to accidents of birthplace, the bad luck of challenging circumstances, or the necessity to survive." <b>Funding for research or art would also no longer be determined by the profit motive, or dictated by the interests of the wealthy.</b></bq> <bq caption="Page 111">Recognition of the fundamental dignity of the 7 billion plus who make up humanity requires that we <b>no longer agree to relegate some to a life of drudgery so that others may be free.</b> It means we must share out the work that remains to be done in a technologically advanced society, so that everyone has the right and the power to decide what to do with their time.</bq> <bq caption="Page 117">Unless social struggles organize themselves around this historic task, the conquest of production, they will not break through to a new synthesis of what it means to be a human being---<b>to live in a world devoid of poverty and billionaires, of stateless refugees and detention camps, and of lives spent in drudgery, which hardly offer a moment to rest, let alone dream.</b></bq> <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</ft> <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page 9">Put on the reality-vision glasses of John Carpenter’s <i>They Live</i>, which allowed the protagonist of that film to see the truth in advertising, and it is easy to see a world not of shiny new automated factories and ping-pong-playing consumer robots, but of crumbling infrastructures, deindustrialized cities, harried nurses, and underpaid salespeople, as well as a massive stock of financialized capital with dwindling places to invest itself.</bq> <bq caption="Page 12">As I read book after book by the automation theorists, supplementing that still-growing reading list with forays into the utopian and science fiction literatures of the past, the conviction grew within me that, collectively, these authors had done more than anyone I have yet encountered to think through the logical organization of a post-capitalist society and to imagine the pathways by which we might get there.</bq> <bq caption="Page 18">For them, UBI serves as a bridge to “fully automated luxury communism,” a term Aaron Bastani coined in 2014 to name a possible goal of socialist politics. This term flourished for five years as a meme before Bastani’s book—outlining an automated future in which artificial intelligence, solar power, gene editing, asteroid mining, and lab-grown meat generate a world of limitless leisure and self-invention—finally appeared. It provided a much-needed counterweight to left-wing rhetorics of collective self-sacrifice and anti-consumerist austerity.</bq> I'm honestly not convinced we can afford the luxury of that fantasy. Without it, though, we're doomed to be highly diminished but we're determined to drive right into the brick wall without slowing down. We've passed the point where we can have the nice version. That way is now blocked by past heedlessness and greed. We don't know how to slow down, so the only way forward is crash. <bq caption="Page 24">I will also criticize the critics—both for providing alternative explanations of a persistently low labor demand that apply only in high-income countries, and for failing to produce anything like a radical vision of social change adequate to the scale of the global labor underdemand problem, which has already beset the world economy for a long time and, due to COVID-19, is likely to worsen in years to come. It should be said from the outset that I am more sympathetic to the left wing of the automation discourse than to any of its critics.</bq> <bq caption="Page 25">In a world reeling from a global pandemic, rising inequality, recalcitrant neoliberalism, resurgent ethnonationalism, and the looming threat of climate change, automation theorists have tried to push through the catastrophe with a vision of an emancipated future, one in which humanity advances to the next stage in our history—whatever we might take that to mean—and technology helps to free us all to discover and follow our passions. That is true in spite of the fact that, as with many of the utopias of the past, these visions need to be freed from their authors’ technocratic fantasies as to how constructive social change might take place.</bq> <bq caption="Page 26">Our present reality is better described by near-future science fiction dystopias than by standard economic analysis; ours is a hot planet, with micro-drones flying over the heads of the street hawkers and rickshaw pullers, where the rich live in guarded, climate-controlled communities while the rest of us while away our time in dead-end jobs, playing video games on smartphones. We need to slip out of this timeline and into another.</bq> <bq caption="Page 31">[...] official US manufacturing growth-rate statistics are vastly overinflated, since they log the production of computers with higher processing speeds as equivalent to the production of more computers. For that reason, government statistics suggest that productivity levels in the computers and electronics subsector rose at a galloping average annual rate of over 10 percent per year between 1987 and 2011, even as productivity growth rates outside of that subsector fell to around 2 percent per year over the same period.</bq> <bq caption="Page 34">As industrial output growth rates fell below corresponding productivity growth rates in country after country, quantitative declines in economic indicators became qualitative in their effects: manufacturing employment shares fell progressively. Worsening economic stagnation thus combined with a limited technological dynamism to generate labor’s global deindustrialization</bq> <bq caption="Page 37">From the 2008 crisis up to 2014, manufacturing output expanded at just 1.6 percent per year, on a world scale—that is, at less than a quarter of the pace achieved during the post-war “golden age.” It is worth noting that these figures include the dramatic expansion of manufacturing productive capacity in China.</bq> <bq caption="Page 38">More and more is produced with fewer workers, as the automation theorists claim, but not because technological change has given rise to high rates of productivity growth. Far from it—productivity growth in manufacturing has appeared rapid only because the yardstick of output growth, against which it is measured, has been shrinking. Following economist Robert Brenner, I argue that global waves of deindustrialization find their origins not in runaway technical change, but first and foremost in a worsening overcapacity in world markets for manufactured goods.</bq> <bq caption="Page 40">Deindustrialization was a matter not only of technological advance, but also of global redundancy of productive and technological capacities. In more crowded international markets, rapid rates of industrial expansion became more difficult to achieve.</bq> <bq caption="Page 40">Everywhere, depressed prices for manufactures led to falling income-per-unit capital ratios (falling capital productivity), then to falling rates of profit, then to lower rates of investment, and finally to lower output growth rates. In this environment, firms faced heightened competition for market share: as overall growth rates slowed, the only way for new firms to grow quickly was to steal market shares from established firms.</bq> <bq caption="Page 41">Facing competition on prices, US multinational corporations (MNCs) built international supply chains, shifting the more labor-intensive components of their production processes abroad and playing suppliers against one another to achieve the best prices. In the mid ’60s the first export-processing zones opened in Taiwan and South Korea. Even Silicon Valley, which formerly produced its computer chips locally in the San Jose area, shifted its production to low-wage areas, using lower grades of technology while benefiting from laxer laws around pollution and workers’ safety.</bq> <bq caption="Page 43">in spite of system-wide over-capacity and slow growth rates, China has industrialized rapidly because its firms have been able to take market share away from other firms—not only in the United States, but also in countries like Mexico and Brazil. It could not have been otherwise. In an environment where average growth rates are low, firms can only achieve high rates of growth by taking market share from their competitors.</bq> <bq caption="Page 44">[...] as rates of manufacturing-output growth stagnated in one country after another from the 1970s onward, no other sector appeared on the scene to replace industry as a major economic-growth engine. Instead, the slowdown in manufacturing-output growth rates was accompanied by a slowdown in overall GDP growth rates.</bq> <bq caption="Page 51">Instead of a reallocation of workers from low-productivity jobs to high-productivity ones, the reverse takes place. Workers pool in low-productivity jobs, mostly in the service sector. As countries have deindustrialized, they have also seen a massive buildup of financialized capital, chasing returns to the ownership of relatively liquid assets rather than investing long-term in new fixed capital.12 In spite of the high degree of overcapacity in industry, there is nowhere more profitable in the real economy for capital to invest itself. If there had been, we would have evidence of it in higher rates of capital accumulation and hence higher GDP growth rates. Instead, what we see is ongoing disinvestment—with corporations using idle cash to buy back their own shares or pay out dividends—and falling long-term interest rates, as the supply of loanable funds far outstrips demand.</bq> <bq caption="Page 55">The demand for labor is determined by the gap between productivity and output growth rates. Reading the shrinkage of this gap the wrong way around—that is, as due to rising productivity rather than falling output rates—is what generates the upside-down world of the automation discourse.</bq> <bq caption="Page 56">In making this leap, the automation theorists miss the true story that explains this phenomenon: overcrowded global markets for manufactures, declining rates of investment in fixed capital, and a corresponding economic slowdown.</bq> <bq caption="Page 57">Rather than focus on generating advances in artificial general intelligence, engineers at Facebook spend their time studying slot machines to figure out how to get people addicted to their website, so that they keep coming back to check for notifications, post content, and view advertisements. The result is that, like all modern technologies, these digital offerings are far from “socially neutral.” The internet, as developed by the US government and shaped by capitalist enterprises, is not the only internet that could exist.</bq> <bq caption="Page 58">in the 1980s, the majority of the world’s workers were still in agriculture; by 2018 that figure had fallen to 28 percent. Thus, the major destroyer of livelihoods in the twentieth century was not “silicon capitalism” but nitrogen capitalism.</bq> <bq caption="Page 63">Under the pressure of decelerating economic growth, the mode in which labor underdemand expresses itself has shifted: from unemployment to a variety of forms of chronic underemployment, which are more difficult to measure.</bq> <bq caption="Page 64">Governments have generally responded to this persistently low demand for labor not by promoting work sharing among the employed, but rather by reducing workers’ access to unemployment benefits—pushing job losers to take whatever work was available, even at the cost of lost wages and degraded skills.</bq> <bq caption="Page 65">Written over 150 years ago, Marx’s analysis has become contemporary once again. In the slow-growing economies of the past few decades, job losers have been obliged to join new labor market entrants in low-quality jobs—earning less-than-normal wages in worse-than-average working conditions.</bq> <bq caption="Page 67">Some firms do utilize alternative working arrangements to get around US labor law—witness the small but significant boom in gig-economy jobs, like Uber and Lyft, which offer work through online platforms as a way of disguising their employees as independent contractors. But when all is said and done, just 10 percent of US workers were employed in such arrangements in 2017, including as independent contractors, on-call workers, temp agency workers, and fixed-contract workers.</bq> That is up to 34%, just four years later. <bq caption="Page 67">[...] postwar labor market institutions were mostly designed not by left-wing governments but by right-wing politicians who emphasized the importance of national-imperial identities, the formation of male-breadwinner households, and the maintenance of relatively fixed workplace hierarchies.</bq> Kinda like the U.S., no? <bq caption="Page 72">Worldwide, barely one-fifth of unemployed workers received unemployment benefits in 2012. Therefore, workers had to find new sources of income as quickly as possible when they lost their jobs, with the result that the global unemployment rate was just 4.9 percent in 2019, despite a widely recognized dearth of job opportunities. Most workers who’ve lost their jobs have had to work informally. In fact, according to the International Labour Organization, only 26 percent of the global workforce had permanent employment of any kind in 2015, whether full or part time, leaving 74 percent to work either for employers on temporary contracts or else informally, without a contract but for an employer, or on their own account.</bq> <bq caption="Page 73">Facing job insecurity, these workers are forced to accept relatively stagnant wages and poor working conditions. This condition is not primarily the result of recent developments in computer technologies. Instead, it follows from decades of overcapacity and under-investment, which ran down the economic growth engine of the world economy (and did so at a time when global labor forces were still expanding). Unless there is a drastic shift in state policy, the COVID-19 recession will only intensify these trends in the years to come.</bq> <bq caption="Page 73">Life in stagnant economies has come to be defined by intense employment insecurity—all the worse in recession years, like 2020—which has been artfully represented in recent science fiction dystopias, populated by a redundant humanity. Most people are scraping by, earning additional minutes of life one at a time, while the richest asset-owners have amassed such large quantities of capital that they are endowed with the monetary equivalent of immortality.</bq> <bq caption="Page 74">[...] only about 17 percent of the global labor force works in manufacturing, with an additional 5 percent in mining, transportation, and utilities. The vast majority of the world’s underemployed workers therefore end up employed in the heterogeneous service sector, which accounts for between 70 and 80 percent of total employment in high-income countries, and the majority of workers in Iran, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa.</bq> <bq caption="Page 74">[...] instead of an economy of researchers, tennis instructors, and Michelin-rated chefs, ours is predominantly one of side-street barbers, domestic servants, fruit-cart vendors, and Walmart shelf stackers.</bq> <bq caption="Page 81">These trends suggest that the apocalyptic crisis of labor market dysfunction anticipated by automation theorists will not take place. Instead, unemployment will continue to spike during downturns—as we are seeing happen once again, and on a truly massive scale, in the present COVID-19 recession. Then, in the course of the tepid boom periods that follow, this unemployment will slowly but surely resolve itself into higher levels of underemployment and rising inequality.</bq> Give that man a cigar. <bq caption="Page 81">As Mike Davis put it, the “late-capitalist triage of humanity” has “already taken place.” Unless halted by concerted political action, the coming decades are likely to see more of the same: overcapacity in international markets for agricultural and industrial products will continue to push workers out of those sectors and into services, which will see their share of global employment climb from 50 percent today to 70 or 80 percent by mid century. Since overall rates of economic growth are set to remain low, the service sector will absorb job losers and new labor market entrants only by increasing income inequality, leading us further and further into the postindustrial doldrums.</bq> <bq caption="Page 82">To struggle against the labor market forces that are making people so miserable would require a substantial shift in labor’s capacity to press its interests. Yet over time, the organized sector of the labor force has receded. Union density across the OECD declined from 30 percent of the workforce in 1985 to 16 percent in 2016; the share of workers covered by collective bargaining fell from 45 percent to 32 percent over the same period.53 Global union density fell even lower, weighing in at approximately 7 percent in 2014.</bq> <bq caption="Page 82">In sluggish economies periodically wracked by austerity, it is easier to blame the resulting social deterioration on vulnerable sections of the workforce—immigrants, women, racial and religious minorities—than to unite around a new, emancipatory social project.</bq> <bq caption="Page 83">Growing numbers have found themselves excluded from meaningful participation in the economy and from the sense of agency and purpose that it affords, as limited as that may be under the adverse conditions of capitalist societies.</bq> <bq caption="Page 84">Between 1946 and 1974, the UK reduced its public debt-to-GDP ratio from 270 percent to just 52 percent, all while investing in education, healthcare, housing, transportation, and communication infrastructures. Across the G20 countries, government debt-to-GDP ratios fell from 107 percent to 23 percent over the same period. This evidence hardly supports the view that full employment, when and where it was achieved in the postwar era, was the result of Keynesian demand stimulus.</bq> <bq caption="Page 87">Companies turned to debt financing not to invest in new fixed capital, but rather to engage in mergers and acquisitions, or to buy back their own stocks.8 In the absence of any viable alternative to the industrial growth engine, the stimulation of demand has induced less and less new private investment. That bodes poorly for COVID-19 stimulus packages: like their predecessors, they too will fail to encourage a new wave of capital accumulation. In the absence of a revival of economic growth, states are likely to reimpose austerity once the pandemic ends.</bq> Correct. <bq caption="Page 87">Under conditions of economic maturity, Keynes said, it would make more sense to intervene to shrink the labor supply rather than to stimulate labor demand, increasing leisure rather than output. Given a long-term decline in returns to private investment, Keynes suggested, the work-week might have to be reduced to fifteen hours—and even that was only to satisfy the “old Adam” in us—that is, the need to feel useful.</bq> <bq caption="Page 90">Like the radical Keynesians, the automation theorists want to wind down the economy. However, they propose a different way to get there: not by raising levels of public investment and legislating a progressive reduction in the work-week, but rather by distributing no-strings-attached incomes to every citizen, without exception.</bq> <bq caption="Page 91">For Paine, coming-of-age grants could serve as the cash equivalent of each person’s share in the common stock of the earth—and thus enable everyone to participate in the world of private property. In his proposal, which anticipates the concept of basic income, payments are not a way to create a post-scarcity world, but rather to secure the moral foundations of a private-ownership society.</bq> <bq caption="Page 93">Murray’s proposal for UBI is a disturbing vision of how an ever more unequal society, marked by a persistently low demand for labor, might render this situation palatable to the poorer among its members, while at the same time freeing well-heeled market participants to enrich themselves without limit. A clear danger is that, in its implementation, UBI will come to look more like this right-wing version than it does left-wing alternatives. And indeed, Murray’s version of UBI is the one most discussed in Silicon Valley; correspondingly, it is also the one that inspires most of the automation theorists discussed in this book.</bq> <bq caption="Page 95">Combined with a global carbon tax, UBI could play a role in mitigating climate change, freeing us to cleave toward a carbon-neutral economy without worrying about the balance of jobs gained and lost in the course of a harrowing energy transition.</bq> <bq caption="Page 96">But if, as I have argued, contemporary underdemand for labor is the result of global overcapacity and depressed investment—driving down rates of economic growth—then such a distributional struggle would quickly become a zero-sum conflict between labor and capital, blocking, or at least dramatically slowing, progress toward a freer future. As such, we would need a plan for wresting control of the economy away from asset owners. Yet UBI proposals say little about how to reduce capital’s sway over production.</bq> <bq caption="Page 97">While UBI has the laudable goal of separating the income people earn from the amount of work they do, it would do nothing to alter the relation between income and assets, keeping us tethered to a system in which a sizable fraction of total income derives from interest (from extending credit), rent (from leasing land or homes), and profit (from running businesses). In other words, UBI would empower workers without disempowering capital, providing people more autonomy in the fulfillment of their “animal functions” but no greater role in shaping the wider social conditions under which they do so.</bq> <bq caption="Page 98">Only a conquest of production, which finally succeeds in wresting the power to control investment decisions away from capitalists, hence rendering the capital strike inoperative, can clear the way for us to advance toward a post-scarcity future.</bq> <bq caption="Page 100">Instead of presupposing a fully automated economy and imagining the possibilities for a better and freer world created out of it, we could begin from a world of generalized human dignity, and then consider the technical changes needed to realize that world.</bq> <bq caption="Page 101">In a fully capacitated world, everyone’s passions would be equally worthy of pursuit. Particular individuals would not be assigned to collect garbage, wash dishes, mind children, till the soil, or assemble electronics for their entire lives, just so others could be free to do as they please.</bq> <bq caption="Page 102">More had the inhabitants of his imagined island, Utopia, abolish money and private property. “Wherever there is private property” and “everything is measured in terms of money,” he explained, “it is hardly possible for the common good to be served with justice and prosperity, unless you think justice is served when all the best things go to the worst people or that happiness is possible when everything is shared among very few, who themselves are not entirely happy, while the rest are plunged in misery.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 104">Theorists of post-scarcity generally estimate that these common labors would take anywhere from three to five hours a day—about one-third to one-half of a standard workweek—although this work could be concentrated in certain portions of each week or in specific years of life. Besides labor hours, other measures could also be used for social accounting. We would divide up responsibilities while taking into account individual aptitudes and proclivities. Some tasks would need to be performed locally, but many could be planned on a regional or global scale, using advanced computer technologies.</bq> <bq caption="Page 105">Utopian writer Edward Bellamy proposed one way to organize the division of labor in a post-scarcity society in his novel Looking Backward (1888). There, the supply and demand for labor determine how many hours people work, rather than how high a salary they earn. Skilled work is rewarded with a lesser labor contribution rather than higher pay, while the performance of risky or especially difficult labors earn an honorific—a kind of celebrity. As across societies today, which differ in their institutional preferences for general education or vocational training, there need not be a single solution to this problem, as long as the division of labor neither leaves important tasks undone, nor reproduces an elite class of technicians.</bq> <bq caption="Page 106">In any case, such questions would be settled by human beings’ collective determination of what they want to do, rather than decided for us by supposedly unstoppable technological forces.</bq> <bq caption="Page 107">In such a world, there could still be sanctions to ensure that necessary work is actually undertaken. However, inducements to work would not take the form of threats of starvation, but invitations to cooperate. Economists have long recognized that hunger and homelessness are not the best motivators. Even in Kropotkin’s time, economists admitted that “the best situation for man is when he produces in freedom, has choice in his occupations, has no overseer to impede him, and when he sees his work bring a profit to himself and others like him.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 108">Efficiency would no longer be an overriding goal of production, but producers would still have to be able to make reasonable choices among production techniques, based on the ease with which they can access different sorts of supplies. It would have to be possible, as well, to hold producers accountable were they to fail to meet democratically determined social standards. Again, there is likely to be no single best way to deal with these crucial problems.</bq> <bq caption="Page 109">After a period of rest and recovery, even the most work-weary people become restless and look for something to do. The reorganization of social life to reduce the role of necessary labor is not, therefore, about overcoming work as such; it is about freeing people to pursue activities that cannot be described simply as either work or leisure. That might include painting murals, learning languages, building waterslides—or discovering new ways to do common tasks to make them less time-consuming. It could mean writing novels, or self-reinvention through education or exploration.</bq> <bq caption="Page 109">Under these conditions, "creative minds and scientific aptitudes" would no longer be "wasted due to accidents of birthplace, the bad luck of challenging circumstances, or the necessity to survive." Funding for research or art would also no longer be determined by the profit motive, or dictated by the interests of the wealthy.</bq> <bq caption="Page 110">[...] the rush to implement changes in process would no longer be enforced by market competition, but instead would need to be decided through coordination among various committees---some of which might be more concerned with simply getting their work done than with doing it better. There would be no built-in growth trajectory, no need to grow for growth's sake, especially given that most labors of necessity would be services whose productivity is difficult to raise without sacrificing quality.</bq> <bq caption="Page 111">Recognition of the fundamental dignity of the 7 billion plus who make up humanity requires that we no longer agree to relegate some to a life of drudgery so that others may be free. It means we must share out the work that remains to be done in a technologically advanced society, so that everyone has the right and the power to decide what to do with their time.</bq> <bq caption="Page 117">Unless social struggles organize themselves around this historic task, the conquest of production, they will not break through to a new synthesis of what it means to be a human being---to live in a world devoid of poverty and billionaires, of stateless refugees and detention camps, and of lives spent in drudgery, which hardly offer a moment to rest, let alone dream.</bq>