Post-work theory as both generational politics & class politics
Tedd Siegel
9th October 2024
Introduction
A good deal of what goes by the name of “post-work theory” today begins in a reaction to the deepening economic and social contradictions associated with post-Fordist, neoliberal capitalism in the digital age. These contradictions are being played out at the level of wage-based society as a whole, but also at the level of individual workers, via their experiences in the workplace and in the labor market.
In the wake of digital age technological advances (including data/network/cloud communications, robotics, and big data/AI applications) capital is attempting to realize its centuries-old goal of reducing necessary labor to an absolute minimum. At the same time, its economic and social logic continues to insist that labor power remain the principal measure of value and wealth. We continue to rely on jobs to access most social goods, despite broad social consensus that the future will comprise fewer and fewer jobs, with even soft-skilled service-industry work to now be performed by technological “dead labor.”
For post-work theorists, we are therefore bearing witness to a societal contradiction between the increasing commodification of labor (along with everything belonging to the commons) and a growing, but still unrealized, potential for de-commodification in all of these domains (Fleming, 2024). With respect to labor, this de-commodification potential comprises unprecedented opportunities for a less work-centered society, where the realization of use values can be foregrounded over exchange values, and leisure-time can be equitably distributed.
This same contradiction, however, is also experienced at the level of the individual worker in ways specific to neoliberal capitalism in the digital age. So along with job losses and universal precarity, new scenes of biopolitical struggle have also begun to emerge. From 24/7 communications, agile self-management techniques, and enhanced performance metrics and surveillance at work, more surplus is being extracted from workers at a time when it could just as readily be repurposed towards a reduction in working time.
Organizations become caught up in intensified external relations of competitiveness, and market logic pervades all aspects of social life. These external pressures become manifest at work via a distinctive form of internal mobilization of employees, or what Frédéric Lordon (2014) pointedly calls “new managerial forms of enlistment” in the service of perfect “co-linearization,” to refer to how the metrics-driven policing of the neoliberal self intensifies the instrumentalization of employees by demanding their total alignment with management objectives.
As companies watch over their employees today, Lordon writes, they generally conclude that they are not doing enough, or not well enough, or not fast enough, because the enterprise has reached the conclusion that any misalignment of the angle of the vector of the C-suite’s “master-desire” (i.e., the overarching goal or object of the enterprise) and the vector of the “co-linearized employee” must now equal zero (i.e., total mobilization).
Needless to say, the exploding rates of burnout, PTSD/anxiety and depression that we see today among urban, educated workers in the US are becoming a match for the “deaths of despair” found among the under-employed in de-industrialized and rural populations.
Imagining a post-work society
Post-work theory therefore recognizes the increasing contradictions within capitalist, wage-based society, but stops short of foreseeing any imminent final ‘collapse’. As a result, it eschews traditional Marxist crisis theory – where capitalism eventually “produces its own gravediggers” – but it also tends to forego the laborist, social-democratic struggle for incremental gains to lessen the impacts of what conservative economists refer to as the “creative destruction” of the “business cycle.”
In response to the changing experience of work under neoliberal conditions, post-work theory instead often begins with a call for the de-privatization of the employment relation, i.e., to enjoin a public, political contestation of the experience of work, the labor market, the work ethic, and the social division of labor.
It argues that “work is not working,” because late capitalism, having re-organized global production through financialization and competitive deregulation in the interest of unfettered flows of capital, has developed a variety of strategies to capitalize upon even the collapse of its own type of society, i.e., by manipulating things like precarity, inequality, and class fragmentation to maintain hegemony.
Finally, and most consequentially, post-work theory focuses on the development of so-called post-work imaginaries. In the face of neoliberalism’s unwillingness to support welfare state programs and other safety nets, post-work theory meets this effective exodus by instead envisioning a worker exodus into a society that is less work-centered, less rooted in exchange and dependent on economic growth, and more oriented around use values.
In practice, this often encompasses everything from guaranteed basic income as part of the redistribution of work and the liberation of free time, to employee stock option plans (ESOPs), to alternative food networks (AFNs), to the myriad ways in which we might encourage new modes of socialization beyond the wage relation.
From post-work theory to post-work politics
By envisioning a post-work society, post-work theory also generally offers an implicit version of what I like to call “the post-work political imaginary” (Siegel, 2023). By this I mean a set of assumptions about what sort of politics we need in order to bring about such a society. At the highest level, we might identify at least three main types of post-work politics, which need not be considered mutually exclusive.
The first variety is centered around what one might call “generative policies,” borrowing a term from the sociologist André Gorz (Gorz, 1999). This type relies on articulating post-work politics as a rational political response to ongoing social challenges, and thus tends to assume a functioning liberal-democratic public sphere. A recent article by Peter Fleming, “Labour in a Post-Work Society: How Should It Be Organized?” is a good example of this type.
Fleming says that whether the impending future of minimal work can be a “happy ever after” depends on managing the transition, i.e., by setting up the right institutions and policies, and he goes on to highlight the characteristics of what he calls post work organizations (PWOs) which he says can be rationally “deduced” from certain technological, economic, and political antecedents.
The second type is what I call pre-figurative/utopian political imaginaries. Examples of this would be Aaron Bastani’s ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ (2019), which seeks to pre-figure the society to come, and Federico Campagna’s ‘The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure’ (2013) which enacts a literary provocation designed to encourage the unruly subjects of such a politics.
Campagna’s book enacts a Dante-esque spiritual journey for the neoliberal age that is at once highly personal and yet still (in some sense) universal. In lyrical fashion, Campagna calls forth the project of a “radical atheism” in the face of what he refers to as the new religion, which he identifies as the submission to work as an end in itself, and charts a kind of a course to what he calls “a life of adventure,” where subjects spend their time engaging in the production of different expressions of radical autonomy.
The last kind I call “political” in the strict sense. This sort of post-work theory explicitly identifies post-work politics as an arena of struggle, and usually elaborate a cross-class politics of the refusal of work, drawing upon a range of sources (Marxist, anarchist, Spinozistic, avant-gardist). As an example, I have in mind works like Nick Snernicek and Alex Williams’, ‘Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work’ (2015), which opposes what they call “folk-political practice” (localist, prefigurative, consensus-based, direct action-oriented) in favor of an alternative politics that would instead be broadly counter-hegemonic, and oriented toward “building a platform for a post-work society” (2015, 175-6).
The case for a generational politics today
As a theoretical development responsive to what Marx called the “changing technical composition of capital,” post-work theory grapples with the way that technological innovation continually restructures modes of production and society. As a result, across its different articulations, there is often a distinctly “generational aspect,” insofar as younger workers in some sectors often tend to experience the evolving “techno-economic paradigm” and dominant business models more immediately and decisively than older generations of workers whose experience of work culture can tend to be more reflective of previous paradigms (Milburn, 2019, 28). To get a sense of this, one only needs to consider the situation of today’s tech sector thirty-year olds, who have to contemplate their future as an endless series of 90-day “team sprints.”
Is there a case to be made for a generational politics of the refusal of work, one that might have an important role to play in a new popular front, along with labor unions, various kinds of community politics, and street activism? There are certainly some good reasons for skepticism about generational politics. The traditional Left, with its focus on the industrial proletariat, has historically viewed generational politics as something divisive – a distraction from the effort to build class consciousness.
Also, generations are fleeting. Their sense of themselves as somehow ‘special’ rests upon proclamations made before the socio-economic forces that shaped previous generations have had a chance to leave their mark. In the end, the work of generations is to strut and fret their hour upon the stage, and then, mercifully, to be heard no more. A politics of generations is not needed, so the story goes, because, in point of fact, each generation must replace the prior one. Anyway, hope is something that always gets reborn in cycles of death, rebirth, and renewal.
Unless of course, there is a case to be made that something has changed, something which actually disarms prior notions of generational change as a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that binds together the generations. Here I have in mind the loss of what Bifo Berardi refers to as a stable and hopeful “horizon of futurability” (Berardi, 2019). For generations living with the reality of hyper-competitive and commodified employment, global pandemics, impending climate catastrophe, disintegrating social solidarity, and political impotence, the work of imagining any form of ‘viable’ future becomes increasingly difficult.
Some philosophers and futurists refer to this as a “singularity,” such that an event threshold has been crossed in which the future of human civilization becomes something quite unforeseeable. Under such conditions, the pursuit of what John Rawls referred to as “rational life plans,” back in the heyday of liberalism, ceases to be compelling (Rawls, 1999), and conventional notions of justice between generations lose potency.
In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze, 1990) makes the remark that “singularities are turning points, and points of inflection…” Can the suspension of expectations about the future in this generational event of “historical singularization” lead to something more than Bifo Berardi’s “solidarity of despair?”
Generational politics as class politics
A first clue to how we might begin to answer this question is given by Keir Milburn in ‘Generation Left’ (2019), when he writes that generational distinctions “become important when they coalesce around events, and periods of sudden accelerated change.”
Existing definitions of political generations and how they are formed, he says, tend to reflect the generation gaps of the 1960s and 70s, where “the size of the baby boomer cohort allowed a distinctive youth culture to emerge and demand attention.” Even though the boundaries of the baby boomer cohort are clearly marked by two events (end of WWII and the introduction of the birth control pill) the sudden and significant increase in birth rates are often taken as the prime mover of generational change, obscuring wider socio-economic and technological causes. “Our present period has a generation gap of a very different kind,” he says, “and it needs a different concept of generations to account for it.”
To find inspiration for a conception of generations that relies on discontinuities or ruptures rather than the sequential or the cyclical, Milburn turns to Karl Mannheim (‘The Problem of Generations’, 1923). An acceleration in the tempo of social and cultural transformation, Mannheim says, can lead to changes in basic attitudes so quickly that “the latent, continuous adaptation and modification of traditional patterns of experience, thought, and expression is no longer possible.”
The emergence of a generation thus involves the exploration of “the problem space” produced by “the formative event,” understood as a moment of sudden and unpredictable change that ruptures society’s sense making. Milburn says that this way of conceiving generations helps us grasp the role of the 2008 crash, which served to crystalize long term trends of intergenerational injustice into a “generation forming period of rapid change.”
He goes on to say that the current generation gap was produced by different age cohorts’ living standards, life chances, income, and wealth, such that age becomes one of the key modalities by which class is lived, and by which young people become aware of their class position. The point here is that while it is generally recognized that age cohorts are fractured by class divisions, we should also recognize that class composition is also something that is fractured by age.
When younger generations of workers seek to ask, for themselves, “how should we understand work today, in the post-Fordist digital age?” they begin to comprehend their own position in the world, relative to capital. In the language of Italian Workerism (Operaismo/Autonomia) they study their own “class composition,” as well as its decomposition via de-skilling.
To the extent that younger generations comprehend the new class composition, then, by asking formally or informally — who are we at work, what is happening to us, what does it all mean? — they actually also begin the work of “class re-composition” or self-valorization.
At the level of theory, this understanding simply requires a more expansive understanding of class, one in which class, in the first instance, is constituted in and through opposition or resistance. It is to recognize that “the proletariat” is not an empirical category, but rather a category that captures the negation of the totality of the set of existing conditions.
The work of understanding the new class composition in practice can mean things like using digital age tools like social media for sharing and interpreting common experiences. In doing so, younger generations also explore new potentials for inter-group solidarity. You can catch a glimpse of this, for example, when someone takes a stand on a social media platform, and says, “I’m only going to do up to 20 hours of interviews for a particular job opening without being compensated,” and others then begin to follow suit.
Where younger generations assert their collective autonomy by means of various acts of the refusal of work-as-we-know-it (in the context of trade union or wildcat actions, party politics, and/or the establishment of counter-public spaces) we can begin to see how a generational politics can be made to dovetail with the politics of class.
Tedd Siegel is a writer/researcher living on the central coast of California. He is the author of Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society (punctum books, 2023). Siegel worked in Silicon Valley for 20 years in various business and technical management roles related to enterprise software, semiconductor, and optical telecom. He also served as Asst. Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, where he managed major R&D contracts, initiatives, and partnerships among academia, government agencies, and private companies. Tedd holds an M.A. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research, where he attended the Ph.D. program.