Trumped
Over the last few months I’ve been out promoting my new book on the future of work and talking to people at a range of events about how things may change. The book is partly about the nature of the technology, but it is mainly about the social and political ramifications of a postwork world, and that is what dominates most discussions I’ve had.
The heart of the book is therefore not the whizz-bangery of the tech, but the fact that forty years of neoliberalism has produced deeply unequal distributions of wealth throughout the developed world. The book is about addressing that inequality in a world in which work itself is an increasingly unreliable way of distributing wealth for ordinary people.
At the events I’ve attended, the talk often turns to a key question expressed in different ways: how do you make what amounts to massive social change in order to achieve more equality in a postwork world? How do you get those with the wealth and power to give some of it up in the name of a more equal society? How do you stop the rise of technology from simply further entrenching the equality that already exists?
You see, there a lot of people — mainly what you might call neoliberal economists — who insist that concern about technological unemployment is exaggerated. They insist that the technology always creates as many jobs as it destroys and that we therefore have nothing to worry about. Basically they argue that the market will take care of everything.
That this sort of “explanation” is deaf to politics and social matters almost goes without saying, but let’s say it. It presumes markets are some naturally occurring thing that operate in the general interest and that are best facilitated by the withdrawal of any sort of government “interference”, everything from safety regulations to the setting of a minimum wage.
These technocrats also tend to be silent on the period of transition — however long it may be — from one type of economy to another. They take as axiomatic the creation of new jobs, but are less vocal about the people doing the jobs that have been destroyed. They may say something about retraining or relocating, but that’s about it. As such, they are deaf to the concerns of those who have to live through that transition with their jobs destroyed and their livelihoods undermined and, most likely, their communities destroyed.
They hold up post-World War II era of general prosperity as the ultimate exemplar of what is possible and take great delight in pointing that naysayers were predicting technological unemployment back then too. In so doing, they tend to overlook the War itself. And the one that preceded it.
Sure, the fifties and sixties gave us an almost golden age of wealth and relative equality, but it was only made possible by the destruction and realignment that came after two World Wars. The welfare state was only made possible by the misery of total war and the discrediting of the elites who enabled it. (Even Churchill was voted out of office in 1945.) And even then, the relatively fair distribution of wealth only happened because of the existence of strong labour unions and the empowerment of the working class more generally. It wasn’t the innate goodness of unregulated markets that got the job done but the blood of workers who fought for it and their insistence on interventionist governments.
So one of the things I often point out in these discussions is that, in the past, it has taken a crisis of some sort to reset the sorts of entrenched inequalities we are currently experiencing. Then I say, I hope we don’t have to have another world war or some other major crisis in order to set us up for the next period of relative equality.
And then yesterday, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.
The indications are that his victory was driven as much — maybe more — by misogyny and racism than simple economic disadvantage, but there seems little doubt that forty years of neoliberal inequality played its part. The smug aloofness of an entrenched political class that enacted and championed those neoliberal reforms with little regard for the consequences visited upon, particularly, small-town and rural communities, was as much a target of Trumpism as anything else. As Jason Wilson notes in this article about activists working against militias in rural Oregon:
…Campbell is clear-eyed about the roots of the problem, and her diagnosis cuts through a lot of the armchair debate about where the resentment that underpins rightwing insurgency comes from. “In rural areas the conditions have been ripe for a white nationalist populist movement. Especially in Oregon where we’re facing demographic shifts in a lot of places, and the economy’s hurting so badly, and we’ve had decades of scapegoating of people of colour as the reason why our economies are so bad.”
In some Oregon counties, as in other rural areas, libraries are shutting, and sheriff’s departments can’t provide 911 dispatch after dark. Dwindling services lead to a sense of abandonment. The right can easily step in and provide both a clear political narrative to explain this, and a set of simple-seeming solutions.
“The Patriot movement is attracting people who feel disenfranchised. It’s real out here, where people feel like they have not been listened to at the state level, and particularly by Democrats,” Campbell says.
For most of the last forty years, the left has been pretty good at diagnosing the problem but they have been shit-awful at doing anything about it. And not just in the United States, though there are particular failures amongst the Democratic establishment. This failure means that instead of having a viable leftist or progressive alternative offering a way out for people, the void has been filled by a right wing demagogue, who, in the manner of all such figures, played to the worst in human nature and hit political paydirt.
It needn’t be this way, but we are in for a period of rough adjustment. We have our crisis, and our job is to exploit it while containing it. To learn from it.
A lot of people aren’t going to want to hear this, but let’s begin with work.
The big lie at the heart of Trumpism, and almost every other mainstream political prescription — including Labor and the Coalition in Australia — is that the jobs are coming back and that that will make everything all right. Implicit in the slogan of “Make America Great Again” is making America work again, which largely means finding jobs for the all those displaced by neoliberal globalism over the last forty years.
But the jobs aren’t coming back. The structural changes that have occurred in the economy — largely the shift from an industrial economy to one built on knowledge and information — mean that we will never again need the same number of people working in order to produce the things that we need as we have in the past. Technology is also displacing not just blue collar but white collar jobs and we are kidding ourselves if we think we can turn back the clock.
Taken as a worldwide phenomenon, there are already more than a billion people who, in that vile phrase of economics, are surplus to the needs of the economy. In the West, particularly the US, we have rising prison populations sopping up the unemployed and hiding them not just from physical view but from the statistics that define a working economy.
Throughout the Middle East and the developing world, we have millions on the move, on boats, or in refugee camps of one sort or another. In Asia and South America, we have millions living on the fringes of otherwise prosperous cities in slums, eeking out an existence from the detritus of the wealthy. A recent UN report puts the number of people living in urban slums at around 900 million, meaning a quarter of people of the world’s city dwellers are actually slum dwellers.
The unemployment figures, ostensibly encouraging in places like Britain, the US and Australia, actually hide as much as they reveal. Under- and over-employment rates are high, no matter what the headline unemployment figure says, and the jobs that are being created are increasingly part-time, casual and otherwise contingent. One hundred percent of the job growth in Australia in the last twelve months has been in part-time jobs.
In the short-term more jobs could be created than the political class usually allows. We have incredibly low interest rates and developed countries in screaming need of infrastructure renewal. We could, if we wanted, put a lot of people to work doing this necessary reconstruction and alleviate a lot of hardship. I wish we would. This means dropping the “government-is-the-problem-not-the-solution” Reagan neoliberal bullshit and embracing, at least for a while, neo-Keynesianism or whatever you want to call.
All the indications are that Trump will do exactly this and if it works — which it will (though I sincerely doubt his ability to actually manage such a program)— the chants of four more years will deafening. (And they will drown out every other horrible thing he is likely to do.)
But none of this will address the long-term structural change that I’ve mentioned above. Those forces will continue to realign the nature of work and we are going to have to deal with them. To do that in a way that benefits the many rather than the few and to pull significant sections of the Trump coalition away from him is going to take a long-term, concerted effort of organisation and change. Trump isn’t really the friend of such people, no matter any short-term good he might do them, and the progressive alternative is going to have to capitalise on this.
As I said, Trump mobilised a significant amount of racism and misogyny and I don’t think anyone really knows what to do about that. But we can address the economic and social issues that allow these matters to be exploited effectively in the way that Trump has.
So how do we do that?
Let’s start with a few hard truths. One, neoliberalism is dead, and good riddance. Two, any progressive movement that is built on full-employment is going to crash and burn. That is to say, work is an increasingly unreliable way of ensuring that everyone shares in the wealth of our societies. So three, this means that some form of universal basic income is going to be at the heart of a progressive civic and economic reinvention. (Though, as I keep saying, basic income alone will not be enough.)
I’ve noted before, what is needed is not the “sensible centrism” so favoured by the mainstream media, but a radical and inclusive reinvention around shorter working weeks; government intervention that favours the many rather than the few, including fairer taxation regimes and policies of redistribution; the development of new forms of social organisation that have substance outside of politics itself (a new unionism, if you like); and an embrace of the new technologies of energy, communication and information that at least have the potential to ensure an improving standard of living for those outside the one per cent.
Trumpism won’t be beaten by hand-wringing and finger-pointing, but by offering people a positive, achievable shot at a better life. That movement starts now.
Tim Dunlop is a writer and author who lives in Melbourne. You can read the Introductory chapter of his new book, Why The Future Is Workless, here. You can buy the paperback here and get a 20% discount if you use the code: Workless20
You can buy the Kindle version here.
