INTERVIEW: Technology, capitalism, and the future of the left.
| Author | Srnicek, Nick |
Your work with Alex Williams, Inventing the Future, came out in 2015. What effect do you think it has had on the political landscape?
The book was timed well, in that it caught a wave of interest in this stuff, particularly basic income. Basic income was already being thought about by a number of different governments and being discussed by a number of different people. But what was missing was a proper left or Marxist take - there were liberal takes on the idea that emphasised work, there were right-wing takes which emphasised basic income as a replacement for the welfare state, but there wasn't a Marxist take saying here's why basic income can be quite a powerful tool for the working class. So, I think our book is unique in that way, tying together ideas about 'surplus population', ideas about technological change in capitalism, and a response that could nicely solve some of these issues.
The other thing I think we contributed to was not just basic income, but the broader post-work idea - things like the reduced working week, for example, which is now gaining a lot more interest. Some major unions in Germany are now pushing for a 28-hour work week, and there's a number of think tanks here in the UK that have started to think about the impact of a shorter working week on wages and productivity.
The last thing I think the book has contributed to, is maybe the arguments around organisation. The book helped some people to articulate what had gone wrong with the left in terms of the way it has organised from the late nineties to up to 2010 or so, and why it was unable to generate any significant change. I like to think the book has had some impact in pushing people towards the hybrids--between party and movements--that are being developed now. Momentum is a good example of this, with its explicit commitment to the Labour Party, but also with its interest in carrying out activities that we'd typically associate with social movements or more activist groups. I think the future of effective political organisation is something much messier than just the horizontal/vertical binary that's dominated left thinking for some time now.
Discussions about the current state and future of work have become increasingly mainstream over the last few years. On the left, there are multiple initiatives grappling with automation and the gig economy, such as Tom Watson's Future of Work Commission, and projects by the IPPR and the Fabian Society. Do you think that these initiatives have correctly diagnosed the problems we're facing, and have begun to propose workable solutions? If not, why not?
I think there's a necessary limitation to these recent proposals, which is that they're nationally focused, and self-consciously so. But we're now trying to solve a global problem, and a global issue of surplus populations and automation which affects not just the developed world but also developing countries. Actually, automation will more significantly affect developing countries, because a lot of the jobs that have been outsourced to these countries are jobs that are quite easy to automate: low-wage manufacturing, low-wage service jobs, repetitive jobs that don't require a lot of creativity. Most estimates say that the impact of automation is going to be much worse in a country like Nigeria than it is in the UK.
This challenges a traditional pathway of development for these countries - the idea that you go from an agricultural based society to an industrialised manufacturing based economy, eventually moving to a de-industrialised service-based economy. What happens when you can't industrialise because the robots are doing all those jobs? That's a really big question for a lot of developing countries, and a really big question for development economics that not a lot of people are thinking about right now (with some exceptions like Dani Rodrik, who has been talking about premature de-industrialisation). I think that problem has not been grappled with at all by think tanks in rich countries, who are worried about their own citizens.
Do you have any interest in the proposals and ideas emerging from the Future of Work Commission?
Anything that's based upon the centrality of work and getting more people into jobs is not an adequate answer. I think the changing nature of capitalism means that it is increasingly unable to generate sufficient good jobs. The UK economy, for instance, can produce a lot of jobs but most of them are terrible. We've got lots of self-employment, lots of precarious work, lots of low-wage jobs, lots of in-work poverty. We don't have a lot of good jobs. And if we get any automation or any productivity increases in the British economy, then you'd have all these people unemployed because robots would be taking their jobs.
So, I think that's the choice today. Either you have higher unemployment and a higher productivity economy, or you have a low productivity, low wage, high employment economy like the UK has. Neither of them are particularly desirable. Neither are solved by trying to get people more jobs, because global capitalism is heading into a low-growth trajectory. We need to be thinking instead about how we can eliminate our reliance upon jobs.
How will Brexit interact with automation? Are we going to see a re-nationalisation of industrial production enabled by new technology?
There are two different tendencies at play here. One is that Brexit leads to less immigration, which leads to fewer workers, and therefore leads to a demand for more automation. You have an insufficient supply of workers, so you need robots to do your jobs. The other tendency, though, which is opposed to that, is uncertainty about the economy: the lack of growth in the economy and the lack of profits for companies means they just don't want to invest in anything. So, they don't end up putting any money into automation, and they end up firing workers as the economy falls behind and possibly heads into recession. I think that second tendency is likely to be more dominant. Which means that the end result is, again, a low productivity, low wage, increasingly low-employment economy, as people suddenly get laid off. I think that's the most likely medium-term outcome of Brexit.
What do you think of proposals made for example by the IPPR for using worker ownership and sovereign wealth funds to create universal basic income based on capital dividends from firms rather than redistribution through the state? Is this a superior alternative, is it merely complimentary, or is it the wrong approach?
One thing that Alex and I never talked about when writing Inventing the Future, and we haven't talked...
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