Abstract
Three provocative volumes explore the future of work and social justice from dizzyingly different perspectives. John Danaher, law professor at NUI-Galway and the author of Automation and Utopia, is a techno-optimist, happy to abandon the world of work and live instead in virtual games. In his Just Work, Joshua Preiss, a philosopher at Minnesota State University, enlists Adam Smith to support a robust progressive agenda to enhance the dignity of work. In World beyond Work, Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (University at Bath) and Frederick Harry Pitts (University of Bristol) seek to employ a renovated Marxism to guide social movements in a moment of heightened capitalist exploitation and peril for workers.
All three books are engaging reading and frame important debates. Mixing insights from Preiss, Dinerstein, and Pitts, one can derive a critique and agenda for social change, but no one book is sufficient. Virtual technologies, Smith, or Marx alone will only get us so far. Considering the three books, Preiss, Dinerstein, and Pitts agree on several issues despite their distinct ideological orientations. They all agree that work is an important source of human fulfillment, that technological change is not automatically positive, and that social movements must intervene in the interest of work humanization.
Danaher strikes a different chord. He predicts that technological development will render most forms of work unnecessary. He is pleased by this prospect. He provocatively applies Elizabeth Anderson’s critique of domination and exploitation in employment, as laid out in Private Government (Anderson, 2019). However, Danaher questions the role of purposeful work in sustaining identity, happiness, and health. Having surveyed multiple alternative futures of unrestrained market-led technological development, Danaher reassures us that games and virtual reality will engage us as a fitting substitute for traditional work. He borrows philosopher Robert Nozick’s (2017) notion of multiple utopias for maximum self-expression (rejecting Nozick’s critique of a “pleasure machine”) and sociologist Richard Sennett’s (2009) defense of craft, misapplying both arguments. He fails to note in his argument for a virtual utopia that the beauty, utility, subjectivity, and value of craft depend on engagement in the actual world. This is an exciting but ultimately misguided book, especially if it reinforces libertarian fantasies of games over welfare.
Danaher’s optimism about technology as it permits virtual experience represents a curious contrast with his critique of work. Authority and power contaminate work and also distort technological development. Danaher chooses not to imagine an alternative future of reduced hours and more autonomous work in “real life.” Perhaps he would have done well to read William Morris’s 19th century writings on art and labor, well known to Sennett.
On the other hand, those incapacitated by disease or other infirmity would benefit from opportunities to enter virtual worlds. Given an inability to travel in real life, virtual immersion is a valuable second best. Danaher may not have had this option top of mind. Even in this case, virtual travelers are likely to search for ways to serve a purpose. As Dinerstein and Pitts write, “Work is what makes us human and what makes us social.” (p. 60)
Joshua Preiss’s Just Work is a provocative brief for a robust agenda for pro-labor reforms, informed by a progressive interpretation of Adam Smith. Preiss contrasts the “Winner Take All” scenario he sees unfolding and the “Well-Ordered Market Society” he derives from Smith’s works. Preiss’s multilayered argument for progressive reform is carefully matched to the popular consensus he perceives in the United States, the “public philosophy of the nation.” It is valuable in its own right to engage with Adam Smith and is potentially politically useful to uncover foundations for sound contemporary policy in Smith’s writings. Recalling Selig Perlman’s attack on intellectuals who would impose their ideology on the working class, Preiss refuses to function as a philosopher-king delivering a preferred program to the masses. (Perlman, 1979)
Preiss’s work is in part an immanent critique in that he begins with presumption of a “free market” consensus and then derives a progressive understanding from within. He is concerned to address the legitimate interests of workers, women, and minority groups with a realistic rather than ideal program.
Preiss has multiple reasons to choose Smith as the inspiration for his social critique. One is that Smith’s oeuvre is a fundamentally humanistic endeavor, too often caricatured. It is not the argument for laissez-faire capitalism conservative scholars have found. Preiss maintains that the moral center of Smith’s defense of markets is actually the advancement of the working poor.
Of course, the owner-proprietorships about which Smith theorized are no longer dominant. Preiss himself is aware of the need to update Smith. The joint stock corporation has grown in importance and now itself has been somewhat eclipsed by venture capital and other forms. The concept of market bears closer scrutiny and a more careful delineation of particular institutions and their consequences.
In asserting that Smith’s interpretation of markets conforms to America’s prevailing values, Preiss makes a common error – homogenizing the varied philosophies that animate US politics. Preiss’s synthesis of “fair race” and “just work” themes competes with robust egalitarianism and libertarian attitudes among the public. American views are internally inconsistent and varied.
A more social democratic politics has frequently emerged in political practice across the states, including experiments in public and cooperative enterprise. The agrarian Populist agenda, beaten back by elites but popular nonetheless, emphasized much cooperation along with competition. The New Deal and Great Society also advanced public and cooperative enterprises. The “cooperative commonwealth” has been a powerful motivating vision for many in the U.S. and Canada, not to mention globally. A major obstacle to a “cooperative commonwealth” agenda in the US (pursued incrementally) is the multiplicity of minority vetoes in the federal structure. This agenda is still relevant to the politics of particular states and cities.
In spite of Preiss’s careful interpretation of Smith’s works, the very phrase “free market” potentially confuses disparate institutional frameworks and choice architectures. Smith may not be the best guide to assessing the implications of these institutional nuances in the contemporary context. Preiss recognizes that he must go beyond Smith and turns to Martin Luther King, an avowed democratic socialist, to develop his argument. There are unavoidable limitations to relying upon a single historic authority. No single thinker is definitive or indispensable.
What is remarkable about Preiss’s Just Work is its breadth of vision and program. He details a broad practical agenda and also engages in careful dialog with John Rawls, Gerald A. Cohen, and others. His argument unfolds and illuminates. Preiss marshals sociological and economic evidence to assess philosophical claims and does so with a sense of humor throughout.
“Just work” is an apt formulation. I have a certain trepidation though that the Smith scaffolding will fail at a critical moment to support progressive policy.
Dinerstein and Pitts are exponents of “Open Marxism,” which is a radical perspective that applies class analysis to contemporary institutions. While they do not identify the industrial working class as the primary agent of change, they are concerned broadly with exploitation of the many by capitalist institutions. They write of “abstract labor,” by which they mean the process by which the vast majority experience domination and oppression. They are quite right to renovate Marxism with attention to the character of exploitation and “social reproduction.”
World beyond Work provides a sensible critique of technological enthusiasts who imagine (like Danaher) that automation will be broadly positive. They reserve particular disdain for leftists who regard a universal basic income as a blow against capitalism. This latter discussion is a preoccupation of the book.
The authors repeatedly draw boundaries on the putative left, dismissing proposals and ideas other than their own. They align themselves with radical new social movements but they are still tentative, hesitating to leave the world of abstraction to risk cooptation and deradicalization.
Dinerstein and Pitts provide a corrective to Danaher’s curious embrace of virtual utopia and universal unemployment. They properly challenge the universal basic income as panacea. They are to be commended for their humanistic perspective on work. However, the origins of the book in a one-day conference at the University of Bath in 2016 (p. 15), “Marx in the Key of Hope,” may have limited the scope and ultimate value of the work. Despite endorsing the concept of “concrete utopia,” World beyond Work is vague on program for the activist, much less detailed than Preiss. The last chapter does, however, comment favorably upon an unemployed organization in Argentina, some New Deal reforms, and “commoning” initiatives. These selective endorsements may not amount to a strategy. (The authors’ claim of a recent electoral turn on the left is jarring to this reader, suggesting that they fail to take seriously generations of activists for more robust democracy.)
There are clearly deficits in “Open Marxism” as presented here. It seems surprisingly limited and inert. The authors do not engage with other radical traditions, in particular philosophies and strategies for radical democratization. They dismiss the entire Jeremy Corbyn campaign because of his endorsement of a universal basic income. (Elsewhere Pitts has denounced Corbyn as a populist akin to Trump.) Pitts and Dinerstein remind the reader of Andre Gorz’s important concept of “non-reformist reform,” but they reject Gorz’s view of the “state” as a potential vehicle for social transformation. Here, they appear to cling to a dogmatic, unitary model of the state that obscures democratic openings. Missing is a careful analysis of exploration of where and when governments might act in the popular interest. The authors appear more rigid than Marx and Gramsci. They specifically criticize the invocation of Gramsci without certain Marxist orthodoxies; this is unfair to both Gramsci and Marx. The authors’ ideological orthodoxy is evident in this comment: “. . .this exposes the weakness of contemporary appropriations of Gramsci by non-Marxist Gramscians, in so far as it rests in turn on an analysis of neoliberalism as an elite project reshaping common sense, rather than an imperative driven by the abstract economic compulsions of capitalist reproduction.” (p. 103)
Dinerstein and Pitts also reveal their narrow lens by declaring of cash assistance that it “runs the risk of reproducing the fetishising effect wielded by money by reconnecting it with the state form.” (p. 96) This is almost akin to the conservative fear that the dole promotes dependency.
Dinerstein and Pitts might have learned something from Marx’s coy admission: “Je ne suit pas Marxist” and worried less about distinguishing Marxist from non-Marxist. While Open Marxism anticipates a broad democratic actor, a theory and practice of democracy are absent. Activists in the democratic sphere have an obligation to consider popular sentiment and engage with it. Greater clarity might come from debate with thinkers and activists in alternative orbits as Marx himself did. Remarkably, traditional organized labor gets little attention.
Open Marxism is not open enough and not “marxist” (lower case) enough. The point is not merely to interpret the world but to change it.
In the US context, it is essential to make sense of reform and reaction across the states and cities. The disproportionate power of Southern states is a dilemma that must be addressed. Treating the national state as a unitary structure both conceals perils and obscures opportunities in the US and probably elsewhere.
I do not mean to paint an overoptimistic picture of practical democratic politics. There are many more examples of failed policy reforms than of significant democratic successes. The power of corporate interests leads to significant compromises, sometimes undermining the intended objectives. The compromises embedded in President Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, provided conservatives with several tools to use to destroy it.
Perhaps a contrast with the late anthropologist David Graeber would be revealing. Graeber (2019) observed the unfortunate reality of work: “bullshit” jobs characterized by unnecessary and purposeless elements rooted in obedience to authority. And yet, he argued, people seek to create good for one another. (Graeber, 2004) While Graeber was an anarchist, he engaged in the world as it was. He favored a universal basic income not as a panacea but as one vector of liberation. His spirit of imaginative exploration is missing in A World beyond Work.
A World beyond Work is elegantly written and yet dense. It will fail to persuade those who are not already in the authors’ camp. Preiss, on the other hand, may reach beyond his immediate constituency. In the final analysis, however, Dinerstein, Pitts, and Preiss must step outside their ideological realms to maximize their contribution to struggles around work. Danaher needs to get out more.