Nick Srnicek

Alex Williams

A major new left manifesto for a technological future free from work.

Folk Politics and the Left

Inventing the Future

Bryan Alexander

Inventing the Future offers a vision for a new radical politics. It begins with a critique of current left-wing thought and practice, then launches into a call for new thinking that accounts for likely future developments, especially automation.

I should really begin this review with some throat-clearing. I came to Inventing the Future with an uneven background. In some ways, I'm well prepared; in one, I'm not.

Since 1980 or so I've read widely and, occasionally, deeply in the left wing political tradition. Marx, Marxists, anarchism, Situationism, etc. have all passed before my eyes. I've been in some reading groups, several unions that struck, and also taught a bit of this world. So that's useful for making sense of this book.

Unfortunately, I haven't read much of the accelerationist field. This seems to be a school of thought calling for politics to be based on, well, accelerating social and political change. Some years ago I looked into a little of early Nick Land, who represents the right wing accelerationists; I haven't read The Accelerate Manifesto (2013), which is the leading left document. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek wrote that manifesto, and perhaps one should read that before tackling Inventing the Future. Some friends of mine recommend this, so maybe I'm going about things backward.

All right, on to the book.

The first half criticizes contemporary left-wing politics from a series of angle. A key target is what Williams and Srnicek dub "folk politics" (9), which covers small scale projects and movements, from slow food and eating local to occupations and democratic experiments disconnected from larger initiatives. The left is also cowed by the triumph of neoliberalism. Williams and Srnicek are fascinated by that movement's rise to planetary hegemony, repeatedly referring to the Mont Pelerin Society as the model of a patient, far-seeing, and ambitious project that the left should emulate. There's also a sense that left wing and liberal people fail to look ahead to a possible future.

In its second half Inventing the Future proposes new ideas and movements in a very ambitious way. These chapter propose "to break us out of neoliberalism, and to establish a new equilibrium of political, economic, and social forces... an open-ended escape from the present" (108). 

To begin with, Srnicek and Williams propose to reduce work by automating it. Along with this revolutionary development they call for a form of universal basic income (118). Through these two movements work would be "delinked" from income (178).These developments should free up social space for a more just way of living, along with social experiments in new ways of organizing life. For example, UBI could free women from unpaid household and caring labor (122).

In addition, building social movements required for achieving such goals would lead to a gigantic mega-movement, a counter-hegemonic strategy capable of acting at a global scale and truly building a world beyond capitalism (131). This freedom finds many different modes of expression, including economic and political ones, experiments with sexuality and reproductive structures, and the creation of new desires, expanded aesthetic capabilities, new forms of thought and reasoning, and ultimately entirely new modes of being human. (180-1)To get there a strategy should embrace technology for its liberatory possibilities, while at the same time picking up utopian dreams in order to free up a futuring imaginary. This new form of Gramscian organization would have to grapple with a wide range of social and political areas, from education (142) to state power (168) to media, as well as forming some organizations like think tanks (164-5). There's that Mont Pelerin inspiration.

I'm impressed by the book's vision and enthusiasm for a new future. It ends on a lyrical note:We must expand our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows. Rather than settling for marginal improvements in battery life and computer power, the left should mobilise dreams of decarbonising the economy, space travel, robot economies - all the traditional touchstones of science fiction - on order to prepare for a day beyond capitalism. (183)

Unfortunately, the book misses some key steps. On a small level, I was surprised to not see any evocation of the American anarchist Bob Black, who was notorious/famous for calling for and end to work back in the 1980s. At a more important level I agree with Michael Chance's review when he criticizes Srnicek and Williams for focusing on the developed world (and really just a slice of it), underplaying the global context. Chance also sees the book as largely failing to address environmental issues, notably climate change.

Yet I still admire the book for its willingness to imagine a radical future. In a 2017 saturated with dread and reaction, Inventing the Future recalls us to daring visions, as well as ambitious planning. What a shot in the arm!

(now to read more left Accelerationism)

Inventing the Future Folk Politics and the Left

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