Review of the book “Inventing the future. Postcapitalism and a World Without Work“, by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
I don’t remember where I got the recommendation, if it was from someone or I read it somewhere, but the truth is that any book or article that deals with “a world without work” already interests me for this fact alone.
It is not an entertaining book for everyone, but it is focused on people who have an interest in politics, and in particular those on the left (if you feel conservative and repressive, and you like people like Le Pen, Milei, Trump, Bolsonaro or Alvise, to mention just a few, I can tell you that you can skip the rest of the article and, of course, the reading of the book). I would say that the main objective of the book is to propose a direction to left-wing politics, so battered in recent times, especially since the “success” of neoliberalism since the early 80s of the last century (I put “success” in quotation marks because I use it from the point of view of the triumph of neoliberal ideology, but what is a success for them has been and continues to be a great failure for humanity). The book has 3 main parts: first it analyzes what happened for the left to give up so much ground in recent decades or, in the words of the authors, “Why aren’t we winning? A critique of the contemporary left”; then he analyzes the reason for the “success” of neoliberalism in the chapter “Why are they winning? The construction of neoliberal hegemony”; And the rest of the book, which is the most voluminous, deals with how to work from the left to change that hegemony, how to make neoliberalism stop being seen as “common sense”.
I like several things about this book, and for this reason I clearly recommend it for anyone interested in these topics:
it makes a description of the current situation of neoliberal domination without anesthesia, assuming what we see every day;
it has a global focus;
it studies the causes of neoliberal “success” in order to take them, to a certain extent, as a model;
it has a vision towards the future, far from nostalgia and returns to lost paradises;
it proposes work on several fronts, coordinated with each other but without the leadership of any one;
Finally, and perhaps what I like the most, he speaks openly of a future without work as something desirable.
I dwell briefly on the last point. Instead of seeing automation as a threat to people’s work, which is what results when it is in neoliberal hands, he sees it as the certain possibility for human beings to free themselves from the yoke of work as a necessary means of subsistence. As part of this plan, it includes the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), which will complement the rest of the benefits that should be assumed by society, such as education, health, housing, etc.
In short, the book proposes that the left think about how it wants to build the future, not focusing so much on the immediate and on the defense of what has been achieved, but rather on breaking the hegemony of neoliberal thought and becoming the new “common sense”. This last look, as well as the firm commitment to the liberation of the human being from the yoke of alienating work, thanks to the UBI and other measures, remind me of Silo’s humanist proposals in his book “Letter to my friends”.