A review at the London Review of Books caught my eye because the two books discussed both have the word “Postcapitalism” in their titles. Who doesn’t want to know what’s coming next?

The review didn’t convince me that anyone knows. Two possibilities are mentioned: Full Automation and Universal Basic Income. Presumably, “Full Automation” refers to automating as much as possible. More robots and smarter software should lead to fewer people having jobs. That might lead to everyone being guaranteed a basic income. Or it could lead to mass sterilization, with only lottery winners and good-looking people being allowed to reproduce.

What I found more interesting were some remarks about “austerity”, the recently popular attempt to stimulate world economies by reducing government spending:

In both books, the critical fronts are a total opposition to austerity and neoliberalism, and a focus on the possible consequences of increased automation, including the creation of a ‘surplus population’. The ‘real austerity project’, Mason argues, is ‘to drive down wages and living standards in the West for decades, until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up’. As a result, ‘the next generation will be poorer than this one; the old economic model is broken and cannot revive growth.’ Those places which, in their different ways, have managed to insulate themselves – authoritarian China, Russia or Iran, residually social democratic northern Europe – will not be exempt: ‘By 2060, countries such as Sweden will have the levels of inequality currently seen in the USA.’

Further down in the article, there’s some practical discussion:

What the historical labour movement did, in Srnicek and Williams’s eyes, was set itself goals and demands – for pensions, social security, fewer working hours – and fight for them inside and outside the workplace. What they are really proposing … is that a new set of demands be agreed and doggedly insisted on, in the manner of the old left.

But how could enough of us agree and doggedly insist on a new set of demands? Maybe the authors of the books being reviewed have an answer, but the only way I can see that happening is through the creation of a mass movement like the labor movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. 

In his very good book The Age of Acquisition: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, Steve Fraser describes how organized labor contributed to the general welfare after the New Deal and World War 2:

…the labor movement of those years of uproar created – more than any other institution, public or private – a standard of living envied everywhere. In 1945, 40 percent of American families lived below the poverty line… By 1970, only 10 percent lived in poverty… Not only did the economy grow at an annual average of 4 percent during the postwar era, but that growth favored the poor more than the wealthy…it was the organized labor movement that compelled broad sectors of American industry still unwilling to engage in the new mechanisms of collective bargaining to nonetheless match the standards of living (wages, hours, vacations, holidays, pensions, health care and more) that unions were winning for their members….

An “American standard of living” and the forms of industrial democracy that made it possible … shattered the old order [196].

Perhaps globalization means that a race to the economic middle (or even the bottom) cannot be stopped. But it was organized labor and other progressive organizations that demanded and achieved progress in the past. I think it will have to be organized human beings, whether or not they have traditional jobs, who demand and achieve progress in the future.