The coming end of work?
There was a time, not that long ago, when technology advanced so quickly that millions of employees were put out of work, never to return to the workforce. I speak, of course, of horses, put (literally) to pasture at the turn of the 20th century as the mechanisation of agriculture and the rise of the automobile irreversibly changed the economy.
So far, despite the massive technological advances of the last 100 years, the same hasn’t yet happened to humans. Both through retraining, generational change and the stimulation of demand by advertising, the proportion of the population needed in the workforce not only maintained previous levels, but increased as women left the home.
This may not always be the case, and I would argue that this is what we’re beginning to see in developed economies as manufacturing moves to low-cost labour countries where workers can be exploited far more cheaply. Even further, three massive social and economic forces stand arrayed to reduce the need for workers even further:
1. The improved productivity attributed to technological advances;
2. The lack of additional material needs of people beyond what is already provided by a first-world economy.
3. The ecological and energy challenges posed by climate change and declining resources (peak oil, for example)
Almost all economic and social thought (bar, perhaps, the Monetarist freak-show with their inflation obsession) to date has seen full employment as a necessary and useful social goal. What happens when the socio-economic system reaches a point where a large portion of the population is surplus to requirements? Even after the low-paying, mindless McJobs are full?
I agree with Jaron Lanier, who posits that there seem to be two paths forward. One, of Marxist hue, which assumes a productive surplus that can be spread evenly around:
One option is the one that Marx advocated. That option is: The society is saving a lot of money, it’s getting more efficient, so we’ll apply that to taking care of the unneeded people. In that case, well it’s a tricky one… Because in every example in which there have been very large numbers of people who were just taken care of by a society, it eventually breaks.
His second path, of a decidedly more capitalist hue, paints an even less rosy picture:
Another possibility is that the extraneous people just suffer, and are maybe given inexpensive amusements. […] I’m astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.
Neither of these seems to be the utopian future I was promised. I’d also agree with Lanier, that the second option seems to be the one we’re taking, though more by default than conscious mass choice. It recalls the concept of “tittytainment”, a word coined by none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski to describe a mixture of titillation and entertainment, designed to “tranquilize the frustrated minds of the globe’s population.”
To my mind, this is one of the great issues facing Western society. In a future society where work (let alone wage slavery) may not be necessary, what does each of us, and all of us, actually do?
