Jon Cruddas - The Dignity of Labour

Before the pandemic took grip, the future world of work was attracting widespread attention. It was regularly discussed within popular culture, modern literature, journalism and social, economic and political commentary; it had become part of the everyday conversation. Two poles emerged in the general debate. One signposts a post-work nightmare of escalating inequality amongst a threatened humanity subservient to technology, the other a future utopia of abundance, numerous routes to self-actualization and even enhanced transhuman possibilities, with lots in between.

This renewed interest in work futures, existing before a global health crisis derailed the economy, reflects a widespread belief that ‘the robots are coming’. A few key texts have been highly significant in shaping this narrative of epic transformation, indeed revolution. MIT’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson have suggested automation and AI are powering a new ‘second machine age’, equivalent to the first Industrial Revolution, one that will further exacerbate inequality. 12Another popular contribution, by Martin Ford, 13has confirmed these technological shifts yet imagines a more optimistic future if humanity can leverage these changes to save a burning planet and resolve structural unemployment. Such books shape a narrative depicting a world on the edge of epochal technological change. It is also often described as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, one which will redraw how we live, in ways we cannot even imagine. The first revolution refers to the way steam and water powered and mechanized production. The second highlights the effects of electrification while the third signals transformations by information technology. The fourth identifies the upheaval brought on by digital technologies – among them AI, augmented reality, 3-D printing – transforming all sections of society, politics, communities, our relations and who we are as humans.

The discussion triggers numerous tabloid headlines when this general change story translates into a concrete numbers game of displaced jobs through automation. Many of the most threatening estimates of technological unemployment can be traced to a single source, a 2013 article by Carl Frey and Mike Osborne, which suggested nearly half of the types of jobs used by the US Bureau of Labor remain vulnerable to automation. 14This has been regularly used to suggest the demise of many millions of traditional blue-collar jobs. Almost as a companion piece, in The Future of the Professions Richard and Daniel Susskind suggest technological forces will dramatically rework white-collar professional jobs such as lawyers, consultants, accountants and health professionals. 15The cumulative effect implies no one is safe from technological upheaval and the inevitable end of work. This also has major geopolitical implications, a ‘great displacement’, with unemployment unevenly distributed within and between countries. 16

Against this backdrop of uncharted technological disruption and the destruction of work, infinite space is created for all sorts of writers to insert themselves into the story and interpret our future. In some versions people appear as victims in foreseen dystopias; in others human values shape the forces of production to benefit humanity and the planet. Writers pick and mix from the available data to validate a personal or political worldview. Assorted novelists, commentators and politicians selectively mould the material into a speculative literature prone to overassertion. Yet it has established a noise of rupture, one that allows writers to dramatize the human dilemmas posed by AI and our liberation from routine, dehumanized work. In Ian McEwan’s recent book, for instance, technological breakthroughs allow the writer to contemplate love and humanity and the ethical challenges posed by cyborg augmentation. 17

The depiction of alternative worlds through epochal technological change is a site where fiction and politics have met regularly. Critically, however, modern utopian thinking on the left tends to invert the political usage of science fiction in the hands of writers such as Wells and Orwell. Throughout the early twentieth century, science fiction allowed parts of the left to reassert the need for human solidarity and political agency to contest the malign consequences of our intellectual development. Science fiction retained an ethical, humanist character. Left unchallenged, technological change could usher in tyranny; the human imperative was to ensure this was not left unchallenged. Even those texts that appear dystopian – such as Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – were political interventions; warning shots to choke off dystopian trends in modern society. 18Huxley’s target was the dominant left utilitarianism, Orwell the totalitarian, scientific left. Sadly, it is a different story today. In the last century, writers used science fiction to warn humanity, now commentators such as Aaron Bastani and Ash Sakar use technological disruption to foresee ‘communist utopia’. 19

Tech-utopianism has become a defining characteristic on the modern left, possibly as a safe space to inoculate against the daily grind of electoral defeat – a political Hail Mary against loss and decay. In a tragic rerun it echoes the technological determinism of generations of Marxists. History repeats and is captured in influential articles and books discussing ‘accelerationism’ and ‘fully automated luxury communism’ and is perhaps best represented in Paul Mason’s innovative and hugely popular book PostCapitalism . 20

The political embrace of automation also corresponds with renewed interest in the idea of UBI, to rid us from what the late anthropologist David Graeber considered the modern indignity of degraded, meaningless work and ‘bullshit jobs’. 21UBI has become the signature policy for automated new times. The idea of a minimum income first appeared at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and of an unconditional one-off grant at the end of the eighteenth century. The two combined to form an unconditional basic income near the middle of the nineteenth century. Fashionable debate concerning technological change, structural unemployment and the rise of the robots has brought UBI to a bigger audience.

The idea has widespread political support. The traditional right-wing case stretches back centuries and predates our modern safety nets. More recent advocates, such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Charles Murray and Richard Nixon have embraced it as a vehicle to roll back the welfare state and replace it with an individualized transaction between the state and the consumer. The traditional left-wing case has tended to focus on the basic human right to a level of subsistence, not just to survive but to guarantee freedom. An unconditional, universal safety net is said to be essential to shield against work poverty or job loss and build the power of labour relative to capital. A ‘proto-UBI’ was advocated by Tom Paine, and more recent supporters include Bertrand Russell, J.K. Galbraith and Lyndon Johnson. It is a policy embraced by many Silicon Valley titans, possibly to offset their personal responsibilities for structural unemployment, as well as technology writers such as Martin Ford and presidential nominee Andrew Yang.

Support for UBI in anticipation of rampant technological unemployment has led to an upsurge of interest in recent basic income initiatives. These include the late 1970s Manitoba Mincome annual income project and the Alaskan oil dividend as well as modern UBI pilots in Finland, Scotland, Canada, Oakland, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Debate about the merits of UBI compared to job generation programmes is underway. In the United States, progressive democrats such as Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders are part of a growing movement to embrace the idea of a federal job guarantee. The government would guarantee a well-paying job, with benefits and salary to establish a new subsistence threshold to cover housing, food, childcare, health insurance and pension arrangements like New Deal employment programmes. Yet both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appear more attracted to the idea of UBI. Here in the UK, John McDonnell has argued the case for UBI, as has the centre left organization Compass and the writer Guy Standing. 22